Let's not teach management as if it were a profession

Business Horizons, March-April, 1990 by Joseph A. Raelin

Let's Not Teach Management as if it Were a Profession

There once was a time when managers prepared for their craft by first becoming intimately connected with their industry and organization. Beyond a grounding in liberal education, they learned the tools of the trade on the job and gradually, through supplementary in-house and university-based classroom experiences, made a transition to managerial work. Moving into management entailed a commitment to work with and through others to accomplish the organization's or organizational unit's goals. As new challenges presented themselves, be they new products or processes, technological advances, international trade, competitive pressures, or others, novice managers would learn to cope by plunging into the problem and getting their feet wet as well as by committing themselves to a lifelong learning experience in the problems of management in their industry. Lifelong learning was supported by the companies themselves as well as by our institutions of higher learning.

Oddly enough, many of our Western European partners continue to prepare their managers in this way. In the United States, however, with a society that is now extremely "profession-conscious," academics and educational leaders associated with management education have sought to advance the professionalism of management. Professionalism does not necessarily mean increasing the service ethic of the field or expanding the commitment to one's client. It means gaining respectability, especially in academic circles. In fact, two pivotal studies (Gordon and Howell 1959; and Pierson 1959), commissioned to make recommendations to upgrade management education, essentially advised mimicking the academic process current in the esteemed graduate programs of the social sciences. The reports reasoned that increased managerial professionalism could be obtained by extending the coursework required of students and by more carefully screening their instructors, whose credentials would now require a full-scale research program - one that would hold up under scrutiny by most any accredited, liberal arts academic department.

If a graduate program is designed to professionalize its education, then it should endeavor to enroll students as early as possible into the program. There should be no floor establishing a minimum age or experience. It needs to initiate students in the knowledge, skills, and values attending to the profession before they can practice. One cannot practice a profession first and then return to school to learn what he or she did right!

The need to have education precede practice in the professions does not have to be replicated in nonprofessional, experientially based occupations. Education, especially lifelong learning, may be required but need not be provided as an intensive first experience. There may even be a floor establishing the amount of experience required before any intensive education would be worthwhile. To determine the proper role of graduate education toward the development of managers, we might first need to resolve the age-old question: is management a profession?

IS MANAGEMENT A PROFESSION?

Frankly, little has been written about this question in the last 20 years, although it had received a good deal of attention up to that time. Perhaps the last well-known piece on the subject was Kenneth Andrews' 1969 Harvard Business Review article, "Toward Professionalism in Business Management." In his view, management was fast becoming a profession. Indeed, the reason why the question of managerial professionalism has not been raised since then is probably because most observers believe, like Andrews, that the question has been answered - and answered in the affirmative.

As I have suggested already, we may actually be committing a disservice to management practice by treating it as a profession. The point is that management has never been and, more importantly, should not be a profession. Professionalism, as I shall demonstrate, is bad for management. Presumed "professional managers," trained through our countless full-time MBA programs, are hardly adding value to our national wealth and certainly are not doing much for our national conscience (the investment banking scandals are proof enough). Increasingly, companies are unwilling to hire MBAs. There is no need here to cite chapter and verse on our productivity problems, especially the rather questionable track record of portfolio management approaches. Instead, let's examine why management practice, and management education, has led us astray by conceiving of and teaching management as if it were a profession.

The Power Approach

The conventional approach used to distinguish one profession from another is called the "attribute approach," wherein the occupation in question is reviewed against a list of recognized attributes that presumably are ingredients of professionalism. Recent sociological research has begun to challenge the attribute approach as not sufficiently dynamic or process oriented to describe emerging professionalism; hence an alternative definition has been proposed - the "power approach." Accordingly, professionals purposely differentiate themselves from other occupations by using political and social influence (for example, through professional associations or unions) to advance the status of their occupation (Johnson 1972; Klegon 1978). The net effect of a power process would be that the professional group in question would be able to exercise a monopoly over the provision of its expert services while enjoying relative freedom from external intervention. Accruing from this influence might be the opportunity to sustain a superior economic position in the marketplace, potentially leading to higher salaries or income.