Page 15 - DMGT402_MANAGEMENT_PRACTICES_AND_ORGANIZATIONAL_BEHAVIOUR

Management Practices and Organisational Behaviour

Notes

Case Study Is Management really a Profession?

– By: Jena McGregor
octors must take the Hippocratic Oath and earn continuing education credits for
years. Lawyers must pass the bar and adhere to strict codes about attorney-client
Dprivileges. But although managers have long been known colloquially as
“professionals,” the graduate schools many of them attended have long drifted away
from their founding charters, which wanted to create a profession of management.
That’s the argument made by Rakesh Khurana, a Harvard Business School professor, in his
book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business
Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Khurana, who made
a name for himself with his 2004 book, Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational
Quest for Charismatic CEOs, is a star at HBS, and builds a fascinating argument for why
business school education is in need of reform. For an interesting discussion between him
and Yale School of Management Dean Joel M. Podolny, click here.

I had the opportunity to hear Khurana speak about his book on Monday at a luncheon at
the Princeton Club. Khurana defines a profession as one in which its practitioners have to
master a certain body of knowledge, in which that knowledge is used to help others, and
in which there’s a governance system that’s both ethical and self-policing in nature. None
of those really describe management: Anyone can become a manager, whether or not they
have an MBA; it’s not really done to aid a client; and there is no self-policing body making
sure ethical standards are met. Khurana argues that while the founders of today’s elite
business schools tried to legitimize business education by calling it a profession (no self-
respecting elite institution at the time wanted to have anything to do with something so
tied to making money), today, it’s become anything but.
Khurana believes we’re at an “inflection point of what the role of business should be,” and
as pressures build to create corporations more attuned to benefiting society, we also need
to educate future managers to do the same. He suggests that business schools could have
some way of proving their students have mastered the curriculum (a board exam for
MBAs?) and that there should be some “evergreen” aspect to the MBA (continuing education
requirements, for instance). He adds that in “Rakesh’s normative world,” there might
even be an equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath for business students. He even has a
suggestion for the first sentence: “First, I will not lie.”
Question
What do you think? Should management be more of a profession?

Source: Business Week

1.7 Management vs. Administration

There has been some controversy over the use of the terms ‘management’, ‘administration’ and
‘organisation’. At the outset, it may be pointed out that organisation is a narrower term as
compared to the management process. The organisation function of management deals with the
division of work among individuals, creation of structure of relationship in terms of authority
and responsibility and laying down the channels of communication.

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