Rethinking the role of business school in creating corporate managers

Abstract

Distinguished from the traditional forms of business, namely proprietorship and partnership, a corporation emerged as a new type of business organization in the middle of the nineteenth century in American society, which accepted it only on the understanding that the corporate managers should be professionally well trained and socially beneficial (Khurana, 2010). In order to prepare these new professionals, the business schools came into being in America and elsewhere (Khurana, 2010). However, corporate scandals and financial crises of the late 20th and early 21st centuries posed a valid question about the originally expected role of corporate managers and, in turn, their educators, the business schools. This paper is an attempt to review the post-scandal notion of a corporation and the role of the managers propounded by Canals (2009) and others like Wilson (2004), Mesure (2008), and Koch (2010). It is a qualitative research that finds inadequacies with the existing scholarships and so re-conceptualizes corporation from a holistic perspective. Within that framework, it proposes that the business schools adopt a number of measures to prepare the corporate managers who would efficiently serve the interests of the shareholders and, at the same time, of other stakeholders equally including the society as a whole.