A Note on the Development of Management Communication in Graduate Business Schools

Abstract

An overview of the development of management communication in MBA programs. Excerpt A Note on the Development of Management Communication in Graduate Business Schools History The study of communication in graduate business schools has a long history but can also be seen as a fairly recent development. It is, at the same time, interdisciplinary and a separate field of inquiry. Generations of Harvard Business School graduates have memories of the “Written Analysis of Cases” (WAC) requirement. Tuck, at Dartmouth and the oldest MBA program in the United States, has had a communication course since it was founded; so too, one of the first faculty members at the Darden School of the University of Virginia, a business historian, established a course called Analysis and Communication. The study of cases links writing to logical analysis; the practical application of public speaking is coterminous with the advent of management as a pedagogical discourse. As organizations grew large enough to need a profession of management—an idea advocated by Alfred Sloane and Peter Drucker at different times and described by Alfred Chandler—managers needed new levels of communication skills. Originally, management communication found its roots in composition and rhetoric, topics that would become closely associated with the departments of English and Speech Communication in university curricula. Modern universities artificially divided “creative writing,” something that more or less could not be taught without special gifts, and composition, a requirement designed to meet the modest needs of the college essay. Public speaking often became the analogous introductory or across-the-curriculum course in communication departments that also embraced a wide range of topics such as broadcasting and mass media. . . .