ABSTRACT
After World War I the naming of the field and the purported domain of the constituent schools began to go through a chequered transition from "commerce" to "business" and then to "business administration". The term "business administration", on the other hand, had been introduced by the graduate school at Harvard. The diversity in curricular and administrative structuring that had taken shape during the emergence of the field continued after World War I in much the same way. As the preceding comments indicate, in the 1920s and the 1930s the profession theme was essentially built around the view that business was a profession. With expansion, stratification also began to emerge within the organizational field. The organizational transformation that occurred in Germany in the aftermath of these developments had actually started already earlier. In some other countries, while stand-alone schools continued to exist and to increase, commerce or business economics was also made part of the university.
