8/7/2019 Business Schools - Equilibrists on an Unraveling Rope

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Guest editor Professor Rik Maes discusses how business schools can regain relevance for management practice.

Business

schools:equilibrists on an

unravelling rope

Corporate scandals in the US and in Europe caused

major business schools to redraw on the spur of 

the moment their favourite teaching toys, ie the

case studies in question. This hasn’t prevented even

leading management gurus (Mintzberg, Ghoshal, Bennis

and O’Toole, and many others) to assail the same

business schools more fundamentally and more decisively.

They are not only accused of educating future managers

in an amoral (and even immoral) way, but equally of being 

irrelevant and detrimental for real management

education at large: management practices simply don’t

 work according to the mathematical formulas published

in   Management Science and other so-called top

management journals.My basic concern with business schools as they 

operate today is that they are unable to solve (or even to

address) the very fundamental problems organisations

(and not only companies) all over the world are facing 

today. Societal, organisational and individual dynamics

are confronting organisations with their own identity and

 raison d’être, yet business schools continue to operate

as if the career of their faculty based on esoteric

publication rankings is their main concern. “Instead of 

measuring themselves in terms of the competence of their

graduates, or by how well their faculties understand

important drivers of business performance, they measure

themselves almost solely by the rigour of their scientific

research (…) (They) exist primarily to support the

scholar’s interests.” (Bennis and O’Toole, 2005). There

is as big a difference between teaching customer-

orientation and being customer-orientated as there is

between reading about bulls and being in the ring,

according to an old Spanish proverb.

Forewarned is forearmed: weren’t there any warnings

against the growing separation between management

theory and management practice? Or, still more germane,

 weren’t there any models for a better-balanced and hence

more relevant business school? I bet there were! In 1990,

Ernest Boyer published his landmark vision onscholarship. In this highly acclaimed, yet just as

disregarded manifesto, he stands up for the reassessment

of forgotten values in academic life: “Surely, scholarship

means engaging in original research. But the work of the

scholar also means stepping back from one’s

investigation, looking for connections, building bridges

between theory and practice, and communicating one’s

knowledge effectively to students. Specifically, we

conclude that the work of the professoriate might be

thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping 

functions. These are: the scholarship of discovery; the

 guest editor 

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scholarship of integration; the scholarship of application;

and the scholarship of teaching” (Boyer, 1990: 16)

Elaborating on this model, Boyer asserts that

discovery should not only contribute to humanknowledge, but also to the intellectual climate of a

university and of society. The scholarship of integration,

for its part, is dealing with the interpretation and

meaning of discoveries and their contexts; therefore, it is

inherently inter-disciplinary. The scholarship of 

application deals with the responsible application of the

scholar’s knowledge in the outside world; Boyer explicitly 

notes that application not necessarily follows knowledge,

 yet that “new intellectual understandings can arise out of 

the very act of application (…)Theory and practice vitally 

interact and one renews the other” ( ibid., 23). Through

the scholarship of teaching, professors not only transmit

knowledge, but transform and extend it as well through

the interaction with challenging students.

For a number of years, the Department of Information

Management at the University of Amsterdam has been

engaged in an analogous endeavour, although we were at

the outset not aware of Boyer’s ideas. All of its

educational programmes, ranging from undergraduate

programmes in business studies and business

information systems to a post-graduate executive

programme in information management and an

accompanying continuing education programme, as well

as its research programme, are organised according to

the “learning-by-sharing” approach (Maes, 2003;

 Huizing, Maes and Thijssen, 2005). In this approach,

four roles comparable with the scholarship typology of 

Boyer are discerned: researcher, student, practitionerand teacher.

  What makes learning-by-sharing unique is that

gradually, through the succeeding programmes, these roles

are deliberately spread over the different participants:

  whereas bachelor students are still very much in their

student role and their teachers in the teaching role,

participants in the continuing education programme,

students/practitioners and teachers/researchers alike, are

members of a community of reflective co-learners playing 

interchangeable roles according to the problem under

consideration. Through learning-by-sharing, integral

scholarship becomes a common quality of academics and

non-academics alike.

The advantages of this approach, related to the above-

mentioned lack of relevance of business schools, arestraightforward. Just to mention some with respect to

research, as this materialises to be the sitting target in

the discussion on business schools: (1) academic

researchers are continuously invited to leave their ivory 

tower and to deal with fundamental business problems of 

topical interest; (2) practitioners are stimulated to

engage in research, often in collaboration with academic

researchers, and hence to reflect deeply on their

practical experiences; (3) sterile retrospective,

quantitative research is naturally replaced by 

generative research aimed at giving direction to the

fundamental transitions organisations are faced with;

(4) mixed learning communities are both the breeding 

ground and the test ground for joint action research;

and (5) through learning-by-sharing and integral

scholarship, universities and business start recognising 

each other again as the interesting and interested

partners they always ought to be.

Business schools are invited to leave the unravelling 

rope and to jump in the space of fundamental relevance.

But I doubt they will ever have the guts to prefer

 jumping above falling, paralysed as they are!

References:

Bennis, WG and O’Toole, J (2005). “How Business Schools Lost Their Way”,

 Harvard Business Review, 83(5): 96-104.

Boyer, EL (1990). Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Ghoshal, S (2005). Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good

  Management Practices. Academy of Management Learning and Education,

4(1): 75-91.

Huizing, A, Maes, R and Thijssen, JPT (2005). “Educating Professionals:

Leveraging Diversity in a Globalising Education”, to appear in Educational

 Innovation in Economics and Business XI , Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Maes, R (2003). “On the Alliance of Executive Education and Research in

Information Management at the University of Amsterdam”,  International Journal of Information Management, 23(3): 249-257.

Mintzberg, H (2004). Managers, Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of 

 Managing and Management Development. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Business schools are unable to address the

very fundamental problems organisationsall over the world are facing today

  guest editor 

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