Edwin F. Gay, Arch W. Shaw, and the uses of history in early graduate business education

Abstract

IntroductionBusiness executives in the United States practised management long before academics studied it. In contrast with science and engineering faculties, for example, professional business educators contributed very little to the organizational and managerial revolutions which transformed American industry at the turn of the century. Railroads, mass distributors, large-scale industrials -firms in these sectors invented their own administrative practices, devised their own organizational forms, trained their own management cadres. At least that appears a reasonable conclusion to draw from recent work in business history [1][2][3][4]. "So far", Gordon and Howell wrote as late as 1959, "the success of American business has depended very little on either the teaching or research activities of the business schools" [5, p. 17].Universities launched undergraduate programmes for accountants and office staff. Wharton was first in 1881. But graduate programmes designed explicitly to educate students for managerial responsibility developed slowly. Before the First World War there were only two: Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School (1900) and Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration (1908). Given the ubiquitous MBAs of recent decades, graduate school expansion might have seemed assured. But academic entrepreneurs at the time could assume no such outcome. They still wondered what to teach, and how to teach it. By all quantitative measures, accounting overshadowed other business disciplines before 1930. It was the raison d'etre of university business education [6, p. 79].See also [7][8][9][10][11][12].How did pioneers in graduate study for management answer these questions? And what role, if any, did they give historical concerns in the process? Edwin F. Gay, founding dean of the Harvard Business School, and Arch W. Shaw, a Chicago publisher, are two early contributors whose responses warrant attention. Their views helped to shape institutional practice at what became one of the most influential centres of management education in the United States.

Transitioning business school accounting from binary divide to unified national system

“…As observed by Cuff (1996), accounting, particularly before 1930, dominated business education. Accounting education at RMIT has a lengthy history.…”

Customer Orientation: Its Surprising Origins, Tumultuous Development and Place in the Future of Marketing thought and Practice

“…The theory has not been without detractors. Much of the criticism relates not to the message, but to how the theory has been misused and applied to innovation more generally (Danneels, 2004; Markides, 2006).…”

Looking back

“…Although a few early volumes of the JOMH in 1996 continued to focus on important historical individuals, including Weber (DiPadova, 1996;Dudley, 1996;Fry and Nigro, 1996), Barnard (Feldman, 1996a(Feldman, , 1996bMcmahon and Carr, 1997) and Randolph (Kovach, 1996), the years of 1996 and 1997 were characterized by a shift in the focus of the journal to a broader, multi-disciplinary focus, covering a wider range of diverse topics. For example, during this period, the JOMH saw a rise in the number of articles on topics such as public administration (Esquith, 1997;Griffith, 1997), philosophy (Gephart, 1996), business education (Cuff, 1996) and sociology (Feldman, 1996a).…”