Elite Business Schools Research Articles

How do location, accreditation, and faculty size affect business schools’ ranking?

This study analyzed the impact of location, accreditation, and faculty size on the ranking of elite business schools. It used descriptive statistics and inferential analysis (analysis of covariance) to establish the effect of location on the business schools’ ranking while also controlling the influence (impact) of the covariates (accreditation and faculty size) on the outcomes. It found that location and accreditation type do not significantly affect the business schools’ ranking. The size of the faculty impacted the rankings of the programs. However, the pairwise comparison of the critical factors shows that faculty size and accreditation are more impactful in European business schools than in China, the United States/Canada, and other regions. Finally, smaller business schools (mainly in Europe) pursue Triple Crown accreditation to compete with more extensive, U.S.-based programs, favoring only the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business accreditation.

The neoliberalization of Indian business schools: how accreditation-linked institutional pressures shape academic subjectivities

PurposeThis study revisits the discourse on the neoliberalization of business schools and explores how accreditation-linked institutional pressures catalyze cultural change that adversely impact academic labor and academic subjectivities in the Global South.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with academics from elite business schools in India.FindingsThis study shows how academics encounter institutional pressures in Indian business schools. Three major themes emerged from the data: (1) the conception of the ideal academic that existed before accreditation, (2) how the conception of the ideal academic was fundamentally transformed during and after accreditation, and (3) the challenges academics experienced in achieving the performance targets introduced by accreditation-linked institutional pressures.Originality/valueThis study offers two contributions to the extant literature on business schools located in the Global South: (1) it illustrates how organizational changes within business schools in India are structured by accreditation-linked institutional pressures coming from the Global North, and (2) it adds to the growing body of work on neoliberal governmentality by highlighting the implications of accreditation-liked institutional pressures on academic subjectivities.

Consecration and meritocracy in elite business schools: The case of a Swedish student union.

Sociologists are paying increasing attention to the business and financial elites that control today's global economy; indeed, there's a great need to understand who these elites are, what they do, and what makes them tick, as individuals, and as a class. But we also need to understand how the economic elites aremade in the current social and economic system, and one significant way of doing this, is by examining elite business schools, that is, the institutions that aim to train and prepare people to assume important leadership and decision-making positions in business, finance and related sectors of critical importance to the management of modern capitalism. Based on the notion of consecration, I empirically examine how the student union of Sweden's premier business school, The Stockholm School of Economics, offers its members a learning environment partly separated from the school, and how this semi-independent organization contributes to making undergraduate students socially, morally and esthetically meritorious for elite jobs in primarily management consulting and finance; a process that is largely shaped by corporate actors that participate formally and informally in the student union activities. The paper contributes to the sociological literature on business schools and higher education and elites, both theoretically through the twin notions of meritocracy and consecration, and empirically through its unique focus on student union activities in an elite business school setting.

Towards Americanisation and the corporate university in an elite business school: A leadership history of the Helsinki School of Economics/Aalto University School of Business, 1974–2022

Leading business schools all over the world increasingly tend to conform to the American-style business school model. During recent years, a global discourse about the emergence of the corporate university has also arisen. The term has been used to refer to universities that have uncritically adopted management concepts and practices from corporations. However, little is known about how elite business schools from different parts of the world are strategically developed towards increased Americanisation and corporatisation, and what are the consequences. Therefore, this paper offers a leadership history of the Helsinki School of Economics/Aalto University School of Business, the leading elite business school in Finland, over the research period of 1974–2022. During the research period, the idea of an American-style top-tier business school gradually gained more and more ground among faculty. Moreover, after the Aalto University was created in a large university merger in 2010, increased corporatisation occurred.

Higher aims fulfilled: The Social Capital Academy as a means for advancing underrepresented students in comprehensive university business schools

Current research underscores how a college education can reflect broader social inequality via the disproportionate flow of resources to elite universities and advantaged students. In contrast, underresourced comprehensive universities disproportionately serve minority, first-generation, and working-class students. This article argues that the comprehensive university is uniquely positioned to reduce social inequality and that the comprehensive university undergraduate business school (CUUBS) should test a new approach to education. The article also advocates a substantive response to social inequality by (1) focusing on undergraduate business education within comprehensive universities rather than MBA programs in well-funded, elite business schools, (2) implementing a strategic emphasis on career-related jobs (CRJs) for underrepresented students, and (3) helping students pursue CRJs via the development of a Social Capital Academy (SCA). This article describes the benefits of an SCA for underrepresented students, its requirements and benefits for universities and business communities, and the possibilities for scaling the program to address social inequality. Future applications of the SCA to STEM-related fields are also explored.

Publication Concentration Trends of Top Business Journals, 1990–2020

We conduct a comprehensive analysis of trends in publication concentration across seven business disciplines from 1990 to 2020. The predominant evidence has so far been limited to a single discipline, sometimes one journal. We construct different measures of publication concentration using over 64,000 articles in 24 top business journals. We find that the concentration of institutional affiliations has steadily declined. However, significant heterogeneities exist across and within disciplines. Additionally, there is an increasing democratization of institutional affiliations as measured by the number of business schools that contribute more than 20% of the top business journal articles. While there is significant churn in the makeup of the top contributors, a few business schools are able to consistently stay as the top contributors throughout the sample period. Textual analysis shows that the elite business schools have research visions very different from those of less successful competitors.

Higher Aims Fulfilled:The Social Capital Academy as A Means for Advancing Underserved Students.

Current research underscores how college education can reflect broader social inequality through the disproportionate flow of resources to elite universities and the advantaged students they serve. In contrast, under-resourced comprehensive universities disproportionately serve under-represented minority, first-generation, and working-class students. This paper argues for the comprehensive university as an institution uniquely positioned to reduce social inequality and the comprehensive university undergraduate business school (CUUBS) as the first test of a new approach to education. This paper advocates a substantive response to social inequality through 1) refocusing the business school on undergraduate education within the comprehensive university, rather than the MBA within well-funded elite business schools; 2) a strategic focus within the CUUBS on underserved students’ attainment of career-related jobs (CRJs) upon graduation; and 3) helping students to pursue CRJs via the development of a Social Capital Academy (SCA), a program offering sustained networks, social skills, and career engagement, alongside the traditional academy’s formal university coursework. The paper describes the benefits of the SCA for underserved students, its requirements and benefits for universities and business communities, and the possibilities for scaling the program to significantly address social inequality. Future applications of the SCA to STEM-related fields are briefly explored.

MBA Internalization at Selected Elite Business Schools: Challenges of Geographic Dispersion and Coordination

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The purpose of this manuscript is to develop a taxonomy for the governance of elite business schools based on two factors: (i) their geographic dispersion and (ii) the coordination between the main campus, international branch campuses, research centers, and other business schools. The research question that drives this manuscript is: Are there different types of governance for elite business schools based on differences in the geographic dispersion and the coordination of other units? The paper contributes to the business school´s internationalization efforts because the research shows a dominant form of governance, the Center of Excellence (CoE). However, the dynamic context of business schools allows three different paths for their internationalization. First, from the CoE to Alliance, schools gradually cooperate with other programs to compete globally. Second, from the CoE to Ecosystem, that occurs when programs grow organically. Third, from the CoE to the Center of Gravity governance; in this case, the CoE moves toward a high level of resources while keeping complexity low because of the lack of interfaces between the business school and other institutions. Finally, some business schools show ambidexterity regarding the governance of their units and subsidiaries.

Are innovation and internationalization intertwined? The impact of country of origin and the types of programs in elite business schools

The research followed a three-step methodology to determine the intertwining between innovation and internationalization in elite business schools. First, linear regression (OLS) to understand the correlation between internationalization and innovation. Second, one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to understand the effect of country of origin. Finally, pairwise comparison and post hoc (Tukey HSD) determine the differences considering the location of the programs. The study found no correlation between innovation and internationalization in MBA programs, but there is a positive correlation in Executive programs. The manuscript also found that the impact of location on internationalization and innovation varies significantly.

Who Avoids Entrepreneurship Scholarship?

Some scholars assert that entrepreneurship has attained “considerable” legitimacy. Others assert that it “is still fighting” for complete acceptance. This study explores the question, extrapolating from studies of an “elite effect” in which the publications of the highest ranked schools differ from other research intensive schools. It finds that the legitimacy deficit is highly specific. Compared with major research business schools, the most elite business schools in the U.S., but not the U.K., are found to allocate significantly more publications to mathematically sophisticated “analytical” fields such as economics and finance, rather than entrepreneurship and other “managerial” fields. The U.S. elites do not look down upon entrepreneurship as such. They look down upon journals that lack high mathematics content. Leading entrepreneurship journals, except Small Business Economics (SBE), are particularly lacking. The conclusion argues that SBE can help the field’s legitimacy, but that other journals should not imitate analytical paradigms.

Economics as symbolic capital: The consecration of elite business schools

AbstractEver since the first elite business schools were founded in Europe and the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s, they have enjoyed an intimate relationship with economics. Despite some notable analyses of economics’ importance for the successful institutionalization of business schools, an understanding of the relation between economics and elite business schools requires further development. As such, this paper focuses on ‘economics as symbolic capital’ for the consecration of business schools as elite settings, with particular emphasis on the symbolic aspects of economics’ cultural and social capital. Consecration can be seen as critical to the institutionalization of elite business schools; in contrast to the primary focus of previous studies on the material significance of economics in business schools, my chief concern is the discipline’s symbolic power and importance for business schools’ status as elite institutions in many countries today. Data from a study on Sweden’s elite business school, The Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), were based on both historical and contemporary sources, including archival material, biographies, statistics, participant observations, and interviews with faculty and students. The SSE is one of the world’s oldest elite business schools where economics has played a critical role ever since its establishment; the SSE’s economics faculty has a unique relation to the ultimate source of capital for contemporary global economics, namely, The Nobel Prize in Economics, which exerts a significant influence on the discipline’s general standing and status today.

Who shuns entrepreneurship journals? Why? And what should we do about it?

Some scholars assert that entrepreneurship has attained “considerable” legitimacy. Others assert that it “is still fighting” for complete acceptance. This study explores the question, extrapolating from studies of an “elite effect” in which the publications of the highest ranked schools differ from other research-intensive schools. The most elite business schools in the USA, but not the UK, are found to allocate significantly more publications to mathematically sophisticated “analytical” fields such as economics and finance, rather than entrepreneurship and other “managerial” fields. The US elites do not look down upon entrepreneurship as such. They look down upon journals that lack high mathematics content. Leading entrepreneurship journals, except Small Business Economics Journal (SBEJ), are particularly lacking. The conclusion argues that SBEJ can help the field’s legitimacy, but that other journals should not imitate analytical paradigms.Plain English Summary Academic snobs shun entrepreneurship journals. A goal for snobs is to exhibit superiority over others. For business professors, one way to do this is with mathematically sophisticated, analytical publications. Entrepreneurship journals, Small Business Economics excepted, do this relatively infrequently. These journals focus on the lives, activities, and challenges of diverse entrepreneurs. In the USA, the most elite business schools, compared with not-quite elite business schools, allocate significantly more of their articles to the journals of analytical fields such as economics, and fewer to entrepreneurship journals. This pattern is not found in the UK, where elites may have other ways to signal superiority. These elites, who accommodate entrepreneurship researchers, could pioneer with outputs of both relevance and scholarly quality, through collaboration between their practice-based and research-based professors.

Mutuality Talk in a Family-Owned Multinational

This article draws on work carried out as part of a collaboration between an elite business school and a family-owned multinational corporation, concerned with promoting ‘mutuality in business’ as a new frontier of responsible capitalism. While the business school partners treated mutuality as a new principle central to an emergent ethical capitalism, the corporation claimed mutuality as a long-established value unique to their company. Both interpretations foreground a central problem in recent writing on the anthropology of business/corporations: the tension between the claim that economic life is always embedded within a moral calculus, and the shift towards increasingly ethical behaviour among many corporations. Further, recent work in the anthropology of business rejects normative evaluations of corporate ethicizing. When corporations lay claim to ethical renewal, but maintain a commitment to competition and growth, then anthropologists must balance a sympathetic engagement with corporate ethicizing, and critical engagement with growth-based strategies.

Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture by Andrew Orta

Reviewed by: Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture by Andrew Orta Eitan Wilf Andrew Orta. Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 256 pp. Andrew Orta. Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 256 pp. Making Global MBAs is an ethnography of the production of the managerial subjects of contemporary capitalism in elite business schools and MBA programs in the United States. The book is a welcome addition to the expanding anthropological literature on capitalism. Although it "draws on interviews and observations conducted between August 2006 and January 2017" (20), the book relies heavily on descriptions of events that took place prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Orta gives a short overview of some of the changes that business schools have instituted after the financial crisis, but it is worth noting for the sake of readers hoping to get an ethnographic sense of those changes that they are not reflected in the ethnography itself. Orta argues that "on the face of it, the timing of these events [i.e. the financial crisis] was not kind to this project" (20), but framed differently, the fact that his ethnography analyzes the culture of business schools prior to the financial crisis can be an advantage because some of the key insights that Orta makes about this culture—e.g., that it socializes students to reduce complexity, make quick decisions based on this reduced complexity, and take risks—can provide the basis for a productive discussion about the reasons for the crisis. The book highlights three key dimensions of the production of managerial subjects in business schools. First, MBA students learn to adapt themselves both to the normative ideals and practices of fast-paced business management, as well as to the demand for reducing complexity as the basis for making decisions under tight time constraints. Second, they are socialized to view international business through the prism of reified cultural differences that represent both challenges and potential rewards [End Page 789] for the cosmopolitan managerial subject who can manage across those differences. Lastly, they learn to make decisions and bear risk under the same conditions of uncertainty that they are likely to encounter outside of school as future managers. The book is divided into seven chapters. Following the introductory chapter, Chapter 2 provides a description of the pedagogical practices by means of which students are socialized into the fast-paced managerial life. MBA programs attempt to provide a boot camp-like intensity and learning environment in the course of which students undertake ritualized performances of quick decision-making based on reduced complexity. They cultivate "a communicative habitus" (32) by learning to prepare executive summaries of complicated situations and to present them as if they were giving a presentation to a board of directors or shareholders. They learn what Orta calls "a basic grammar of compression and commensuration" (35) by means of which diverse national business contexts can be compared along two-dimensional graphs and charts. Chapter 3 provides a historical context for the rise and expansion of business schools in the United States, whereas Chapter 4 provides a historical context for the rise and expansion of the culture concept in business studies. This concept became more prominent following the push toward international business in the 1980s, which created the demand for people who can manage across physical and cultural space. Visions of global standardization gave way to international business defined by local cultural differences that can have an economic impact both as challenges for business and as untapped value. The notion of the ideal manager who can balance "standardization with the nuances and niches of localization" (92) is anchored in this historical context. This act of balancing, however, requires "distillation" or reduction of entire cultures into commensurable and reified dimensions. Chapter 5 analyzes the short-term study abroad program that many business schools offer, which functions as a training ground for cultivating this type of ideal manager. Short-term study abroad programs provide students "an experiential 'executive summary' of frontier spaces of capitalist potential" and the opportunity...

The Mirror and the Window: Making Implicit Perceptions of Leadership Explicit

Images of leadership serve as mirrors reflecting assumptions and as windows revealing possibilities. We take a visual and less common methodological approach and highlight particular images by way of a linguistic and stylistic analysis. The foundation of this study—an archive of 8,283 images and essays—is noteworthy, since it represents nearly the entire population of undergraduates at an elite business school over the past 16 years. Our analysis reveals the salient commonalities and subtle differences in male and female perceptions. On one hand, the most frequently posted male and female images of leadership are assertive and concerned about the welfare of others and combine stereotypical and archetypal masculine and feminine characteristics. The act of leadership is also transformational and empowering rather than transactional and directive. On the other hand, the qualities of leadership are value-centric for both male and female students; but males are more inclined to see hierarchy and agentic qualities, while females are more likely to see communal characteristics. Moreover, the vast majority of images is male, but female students put a greater emphasis on gender nonspecified subjects and are twice as likely as male students to identify the subject of leadership as “ she.”

The discreet charm of the children of the bourgeoisie: economic capital and its symbolic expressions at an elite business school.

We address a largely neglected issue in contemporary research on cultural class divisions: economic capital and its associated lifestyles and symbolic expressions. Using qualitative interviews, we explore how adolescents from wealthy elite backgrounds, namely students at Oslo Commerce School (OCS), traditionally one of the most prestigious upper-secondary schools in Norway, demarcate themselves symbolically from others. They draw symbolic boundaries against students at other elite schools in Oslo, more characterized by backgrounds with high cultural capital, accusing them of mimicking a 'hipster' style. Within the OCS student body, we describe identity work centring on styles of material consumption and bodily distinctions. The most salient dividing line is between those who manage to master a 'natural' style, where expensive clothes and the desired bodily attributes are displayed discreetly, and those who are 'trying too hard' and thus marked by the stigma of effort. We also show some interesting intersections between class and gender: girls aspiring to the economic elite obey the 'rules of the game' by exercising extensive control over their bodies and adhering to demanding bodily norms for their weight and slimness. Such rules are less evident among the boys, where a lack of discipline, unruliness, hard partying and even fighting constitute parts of the lifestyle valued. This article contributes to the field of cultural stratification, highlighting the importance of the 'hows' of material consumption when expressing elite distinction. It also adds new insight to the research field of elite education by showing how a mastery of 'high-end' consumer culture is involved in fostering favourable dispositions at elite schools.

How do you elite business schools configure for ranking success?

Rankings impose a variety of competing pressures on elite business schools. These include the need to produce graduates that command salary premia and high employment prospects, while maintaining l...

Conformist innovation: an institutional logics perspective on how HR executives construct business school reputations

In this paper, we explore whether Legge’s classic 1970s criticism of human resource (HR) executives as ‘conformist innovators’ is still relevant. Drawing on institutional logics, we analyse HR managers’ rationales for choosing particular university business schools to provide senior executive development. Our mixed-methods study demonstrates that senior HR managers socially construct and enact business school reputations by drawing on strategic rationales. These rationales are embedded in societal, field and organizational logics, especially the extant reputational rankings of international business schools and an ‘ideal’ template of elite business schools. We find that these rationales, and the decisions they evince, tend to confirm the traditional picture of conformist innovation among HR executives. We discuss the implications for the reputation of HR as a profession, their employers and business schools.

What Does 'Critical' Mean in a Post-Colony Elite Business School?

Contributing to the literature on decolonization of organization and management knowledges, this paper, through an empirical study of the practices and thinking of students and faculty at an elite ...

La concurrence positionnelle dans l'enseignement supérieur

Situées dans le périmètre de l’enseignement supérieur public, les grandes écoles de commerce françaises ont quatre caractéristiques fortement distinctives : la liberté de sélectionner leurs étudiants ; le prix inhabituellement élevé des études ; la liberté de gérer le corps enseignant hors des règles de la fonction publique ; la faible dépendance à l’égard des financements publics. Ces écoles sont nettement hiérarchisées entre elles. La concurrence qu’elles se livrent au sein de l’oligopole qu’elles forment est positionnelle. Les leaders dominent en innovant dans leur technologie d’enseignement et de recherche, et leurs innovations percolent au long de la hiérarchie. Il y a plus d’inertie que de variabilité dans cette stratification et dans les classements qui en signalent les différentes dimensions. L’article en propose l’explication et permet de vérifier la pertinence du modèle qui analyse l’enseignement supérieur comme une customer-input technology .