Search Results

The Twentieth-Century Business School: Integrating the Vocational and Scientific Traditions

in Creating New Knowledge in Management: Appropriating the Field's Lost Foundations

In the twentieth century, reforms enabled the business school to acquire graduate-professional status and to deliver the research university's requisite synergy between basic science and applied ... More

In the twentieth century, reforms enabled the business school to acquire graduate-professional status and to deliver the research university's requisite synergy between basic science and applied science. The first reform was implemented at Harvard Business School, resulting in the creation of a professional school of business (PSB) following Harvard Law School (HLS). At HLS, law professors and the university, not master-practitioners and the apprenticeship system, were the ones that controlled legal education. The graduate school of business put the business school's foundations in the behavioral and quantitative sciences while fitting the vocational school of business (VSB) into to this logic by interpreting the technical specialties as applications of these sciences. The model devolved to lower-tier institutions and grew readily in any VSB attached to a research university. While law and medical students often entered graduate school straight from college, the business school rewarded work and life experience. The elite business school, part of the elite research university, attracted a new kind of student: the executive-scholar.Less

Ninety Men and Me, 1972–1974

Myra Strober and John Donahoe

in Sharing the Work: What My Family and Career Taught Me about Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others)

Stanford holds a press conference to herald my arrival at the Graduate School of Business (GSB). Now,not only does the GSB have a woman faculty member, but she studies women. The resulting media ... More

Stanford holds a press conference to herald my arrival at the Graduate School of Business (GSB). Now,not only does the GSB have a woman faculty member, but she studies women. The resulting media coverage spurs a Stanford student, Cynthia Davis, to ask me to help her start a center for research on women at Stanford. Initially, I demur, but the alienation I feel from the antagonistic reception I receive when I arrive at the GSB propels me to help found CROW, Stanford’s Center for Research on Women (now the Clayman Institute for Gender Research). I relate some unpleasant particulars of my reception at the GSB (15 white male faculty in the economics group who trash my first faculty seminar on the economics of child care, male faculty who are angry that the faculty retreat now has to be moved to a venue other than an all-male San Francisco club, and male students who say they refuse to pay such high tuition to take macroeconomics from someone “like me” i.e. a woman). I explain my research contrasting the spending patterns of two-earner versus single-earner families and examine the strains my job and feminist activities place on Sam’s and my marriage. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the conference Francine Gordon and I organize at the GSB on women and management, the first such conference ever. Dean Arjay Miller helps to make the conference a huge success. Unfortunately, so little has changed for women and management over the years that the book we published based on the conference, Bringing Women into Management remains cutting edge.Less