Teaching History in Business Schools: An Outsider's View

Abstract

I comment on the role of the study of history in the business school curriculum. I first survey an analogous endeavor, the role of the study of history in political decision making, finding a valuable body of literature on the problems inherent in the use of history as a guide to political decision making. I then look at three genres of the use of history in business decision making, each of which has had its successes and each of which has fallen short: the field of business history because of the paucity of the core of ideas it has generated, the use of cases because of the lack of a body of concomitant inductive generalizations, and PIMS because of the triviality of its results.