ABSTRACT
Historians of business school education (see Friga et al. 2003; Khurana 2007; Augier and March 2011; O’Connor 2011; Thomas and Wilson 2011) note that although the roots of business education grew from the traditions associated with trades and professional guild associations, when activists and administrators sought to establish business studies as a proper academic discipline in the context of the university (initially, the University of Pennsylvania), they downplayed the practical, normative, and embodied aspects of those traditions. Instead, the subject was constituted with reference to the theoretical, value-neutral, and cognitive aspects of what was widely understood, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the US, to constitute empirical science. As critics reflecting on this history have pointed out (Bartunek and Seo 2002; Pfeffer and Fong 2002; Starkey et al. 2004; Ghoshal 2005; Pfeffer 2005; Starkey and Tempest 2005), the emphasis on “scientific management” in business schools has had the unintended consequence of diminishing the importance of ethical, moral, or otherwise normative value-laden considerations for several generations of graduates (Colby et al. 2011).
