Effective Strategies to Promote the Teaching of History in Business Schools

Abstract

The recent historic turn in management has seen scholars debate whether, why, and how history can be useful to managers (Wadhwani, Suddaby, Mordhorst, & Popp, 2018; Argyres, De Massis, Foss, Frattini, Jones, & Silverman, 2019). Many business schools, including elite ones in the United States, now include history in the curriculum at the undergraduate, postgraduate, and MBA levels (Friedman & Jones, 2017). Much of the extant research on the place of history in the management school curriculum is informed by the belief that the acquisition of at least some types of historical knowledge is useful because it improves the ability of managers to make decisions. Unfortunately, the existing literature on the teaching of history in business schools does not give us a clear understanding of precisely how and why teaching history would improve the subsequent job performance of management learners. Moreover, we currently lack an understanding of how business-school students and their prospective employers perceive the inclusion of different types of history in the business-school curriculum. This paper remedies these important gaps in the literature. In this paper, we discuss a major initiative to promote the teaching of history to management students in a number of countries. This project is worthy of an extended and systematic study because it has survived a number of market tests and has attracted students in different national contexts. We used interviews with the teachers and students to learn more about why management learners value the course associated with this project. We also offer an explanation as to why this initiative to teach history to management learners has been successful. We then establish broader lessons for the ongoing debate about whether, why, and how history should be taught to future and current business people. We tentatively conclude that student and external stakeholder support for an increase in the amount of historical instruction in management schools will be maximized if curriculum designers focus on the teaching of domain-specific historical knowledge.