The setting of European commercial education has traditionally been addressed with reference to higher schools of commerce and faculties of business. This has not taken into account empirical evidence showing that, historically, higher engineering schools also offered a mixed education in mercantile and technical subjects to students who wanted to devote themselves to business. However, this type of schooling has received little attention. This article investigates how commercial departments from higher engineering schools constituted an initial, yet ephemeral, public attempt to build an engineering model of commercial education that closely combined mercantile and technical instruction well before the twentieth century.
This article explores the emergence of European business education in the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on archival analysis the typological study which this article proposes, attempts to show that business education before 1870 seems to have been a geographically and institutionally broader expression than has been described up to now. It identifies four organisational models of business education and reveals that higher business education was not limited to the Higher Schools of Commerce alone. It concludes that the European states took, directly or not, an interest in business education well before the end of the nineteenth century.
There have been calls in recent literature for researchers to open up the “black box” of business schools to explore their dynamics and behaviors in-depth for a context-sensitive understanding of their evolution. Drawing on the case of ESCP, a leading business school in France, this article shows how European business schools’ curricula have evolved since the late 1960s in response to a combination of powerful actors’ demands and the emergence of new processes in the educational domain. This article finds that while European business schools’ curricula reflect the influence of internal and external forces, they do not converge to a common type, because of the different markets and political and cultural contexts in which they operate. It also finds that business schools in Europe purposefully do not imitate those in United States.
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