The Empire Builders: Power, Money, and Ethics Inside the Harvard Business School. - book reviews

Business Horizons, July-August, 1989 by Guy Alchon

From their earliest years, then, business schools and their advocates existed within a closed loop of supporting rationales. Business schools would generate scholarship and young professional managers who in turn would apply their expert training to the successful running of the economy. This helped add the legitimating gloss of scientific expertise to modern capitalism, which in turn helped to ratify the importance of trained, professional management.

Over the last generation, however, professionalism and expertise have lost much of their power to convey authority and legitimacy. Official lies, stupid policies, and the simple accretion of mistakes have hurt the reputations of experts and professionals. Public skepticism of expertise may be a dangerous threat to reason and authority or a hopeful step toward political common sense. In either case, it is an important historical development and one that has affected many institutions, including business schools.

Business schools feel these changes because their historical origins, success, and legitimacy flowed from the premise that a more scientific and enlightened capitalism could be constructed and that business schools would be among its rightful architects. The fact that these notions sound vaguely antique today suggests both the size of the historical chasm created by the last 50 years and the terrible beating that scientific, professional, and expert optimism have suffered in the late 20th century.

Uncoupled from its animating purposes and rationale, the Harvard Business School suffers from problems more existential than ethical. Instead of seeking earnestly to fix the organization, J. Paul Mark might more usefully have explored it as a case study in the pathology of modern institutions that are divorced from their origins and devoid of underlying purpose.

J. Paul Mark. The Empire Builders: Power, Money, and Ethics Inside the Harvard Business School. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1987. 303 pp. $19.45.