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This paper aims to use the origin story of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management as a foil for unpacking the tensions between deep disciplinary specialization and liberal education in business schools in Canada and the USA. Ultimately, the paper reveals that those tensions are not irreconcilable, and that through the fortunes of historical contingencies and deliberate decision-taking, a faculty can embrace the benefits of both breadth and depth.

The paper proposes a critical organizational history of management education through a case study. By drawing on secondary literature and archival sources, the authors focus on moments in business education, such as the founding of the Wharton School of Business, the release of the Carnegie and Ford Reports and the trend towards increased specialization to situate a case study of Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management.

The authors find that the evolution of business education in North America from its broad, liberal origins towards narrow, specialization has come at a cost to some of the benefits of business and management education. An alternative approach, one reflected in the design of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management, its programme offerings and its interconnection with other disciplines, enables the advantages of deep disciplinarity to co-exist (and cross-inform) with the advantages of liberal approach to knowledges.

The Dalhousie model offers business schools an example of a faculty that balances the rich insights of liberal interdisciplinarity with the need for sophisticated approaches to more granular, often disciplinary, topics. In addition, the paper offers the story of a multidisciplinary management faculty, some explanation for how that faculty was maintained despite pressures towards specialization; and in doing so, contributes to the limited historical research of management education, particularly in Canada, post-2000.

This paper aims to present the progress of the implementation of sustainability in business schools in line with the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) and its principles of responsible management education.

By analyzing the content of the Sharing of Information on Progress reports from PRME signatories, this study identified significant developments in the strategies business school use to implement sustainability. However, it seems that a framework that business schools can apply to accomplish that goal is still lacking. This paper proposes a framework that addresses four components of the integration process and stresses the important role of stakeholders. The authors discuss the results from 2021 in comparison to the results of a previous analysis of the first 100 signatories from 2010 and analyze the findings in relation to the developed framework.

This study shows that business schools have improved their sustainability engagement in many areas (e.g. education offerings and teaching methods, campus practices and engaging stakeholders). However, less attention has been paid to other aspects, such as reviewing and assessing, capability development or communication, which could slow the transformation process. The authors discuss further implications of the findings for enhancing the PRME signatories’ ability to implement the underrecognized aspects.

While the analysis focuses on the status and progress of the integration of PRME within business schools during the past decade, the framework may enable higher education institutions to analyze their potential to implement change and plan future transformation strategies.

This paper aims to theoretically answer the question: why might business schools in Egypt fail to develop responsible leaders?

The author starts by discussing modernization theory (Lipset, 1959) – which highlights the idea that the more educated people there are in a given society/nation, the more calls for democracy, social citizenship and social justice will be launched – to address the strong association between the quality of business learning and the development of responsible leadership norms. Moving forward by focusing on the theory of education (Dewey, 1916) and institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), the author finds the main conditions needed to develop responsible leadership norms among business school students.

The author identified the following three necessary conditions: implementing responsible management education, sustaining management learning and ensuring that a purposive hidden curriculum is well-planned in business schools. The author sees these as the main priorities for developing responsible leadership skills among business school students in Egypt and similar post revolution countries.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in responsible leadership, public administration and higher education literature, in which conceptual studies on the role of business schools in post-revolution periods and conflict zones has been limited until now.

This study reviews the teaching of real estate in the USA for the first 100 years after the foundational curriculum was laid down in 1923 by three key institutions: the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), the Institute for Research in Land Economics and Public Utilities (The Institute) and the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). Its line of investigative pursuit is the persistent lamentation by American real estate scholars that real estate is not getting the respect it deserves as an academic discipline compared to its peers in the school of business such as accounting, finance and marketing. The study addresses a fundamental question: What is the cause of this endless “search for a discipline”? This is motivated by the belief that identification of the root cause of this “search for a discipline” will lead to the requisite solution: the intellectual foundation of the real estate discipline.

The study used qualitative document analysis to review two primary documents published in 1959 as reports on business education in the USA: (1) Higher Education for Business, financed and sponsored by the Ford Foundation, and (2) The Education of American Businessmen – financed and sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The impacts of the publications on the teaching of real estate to date have been reviewed in the context of scholarly actions and literature that has been generated in relation to the two documents.

The two primary documents impacted negatively on the teaching of real estate. The committee members who produced the two reports had indicated that real estate did not fit into the business curriculum hence should not be taught in business school. This conclusion led to unintended negative outcomes for real estate education. The negative impact of the reports arose principally because the teachers of real estate misinterpreted the outcome to mean that they should tweak the real estate curriculum to fit in the pedagogical framework of the business school. This reaction is responsible for perpetuating the identity crisis that has plagued real estate as an academic discipline since its inception as a subject of study in 1923. Secondly, at the inception of the real estate education in 1923, while the AACSB accepted real estate as a discipline in the school of business, Richard T. Ely wrote the curriculum under land economics which has led to the persistent collegiate dilemma regarding the teaching of the discipline.

The study sheds light on the situation of business education in the USA and AACSB-accredited colleges internationally. It draws attention to the incoherent body of knowledge of business education and will help schools of business to redesign their curricula to include course contents that rightly reflects the business oriented academic disciplines.

The study is timely as it has been done 100 years since the development of the first standard collegiate real estate curriculum following the 1923 conference at Madison. The study has reviewed the first 100 years in terms of the persistent quest: “in search of a discipline”. In so doing, it has uncovered the root cause of this search during the first centennium; and to end the search, it proposes that real estate should not be taught as a business discipline.