ABSTRACT
Schools of commerce claiming to provide higher education appeared in different parts of the world towards the end of the nineteenth century. By the 1920s, one could speak about emerging fields of commercial education in countries such as the US, Germany, and France. The emergence of these two distinct patterns of founding was associated mainly with the different ways in which the organizational field of higher education. Champions of higher commercial education in the US were varying coalitions of businessmen, trustees, university administrators, and faculty members. Unlike the US, there was much greater state involvement in Europe in funding, shaping, and governing higher education. Differently from the Wharton School, the graduate school at Harvard was an initiative of university administrators and a few faculty members. As the claims to higher-level commercial education emerged and developed in the US and Europe during the nineteenth century there was some degree of international influence and borrowing of models.
