American business schools were academically weak until the late 1950s

Evidence

The attempt in the 1950s by Herbert Simon and his colleagues at Carnegie Tech to shift education for business from a vocational to a “science-based” approach was a harbinger of a wider transformation. In 1959, an influential report for the Ford Foundation titled Higher Education for Business noted the pedestrian, descriptive courses, the academic mediocrity, and the absence of a culture of research at many American business schools. Business, the authors of the report commented, “finds itself at the foot of the academic table, uncomfortably nudging those two other stepchildren, Education and Agriculture” (Gordon and Howell 1959, p. 4). — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 321

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of business ‘nudging Education and Agriculture at the foot of the academic table’ is a delightful one-liner for casual conversation about academia’s status hierarchy.
• XREF: connects to: Wall Street lacked prestige in elite business schools during the early 1950s — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 200; In mid-century US academia, the stock market was a low-prestige research topic. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 201; Ford Foundation funding drove business schools’ academicization in the 1960s — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 322 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Ford Foundation funding drove business schools’ academicization in the 1960s #expands (0.78) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 322
• Entrepreneurship entered US business curricula in the late 1960s and proliferated within a decade #exemplifies (0.72) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 276
• US business schools largely exclude moral philosophy from required curricula #expands (0.72) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 364