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Business schools offer a unique window into the making of corporate morals since they bring together future executives at formative moments in their professional lives. This paper relies on an analysis of faculty’s teaching tasks at the Harvard Business School to better understand the making of corporate morals. More specifically, it builds on a coding of teaching notes used by faculty members to highlight the importance of silence in promoting a form of moral relativism. This moral relativism constitutes, I argue, a powerful ideology – one that primes business leaders not to vilify any moral stand. In such a context, almost anything can be labeled “moral” and few behaviors can be deemed “immoral.”

This paper aims to study the origin story of Harvard Business School’s involvement with the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad to study the reasons for the spread of American management education. It introduces both the explicit influence of Cold War politics and Indian development imaginaries to the export of American management thought in the early 1960s.

This paper relies on archival research for its primary source material, drawing upon rich archives of documents found at the Baker Library of Harvard Business School.

Harvard’s role in Ahmedabad was explicitly influenced by the Cold War anti-communist foreign policy of the USA, but did so opportunistically and contrary to the Ford Foundation’s (FF) original plans. Vikram Sarabhai, who was a key player in the Indian national imaginary of development, invited Harvard on his own initiative and forced the foundation to follow his interests rather than being a mere “subaltern.”

This paper could additionally add to the historical debate about the scope and periodization of the Cold War and the role of non-state actors.

This paper covers new ground in exploring the early connection between the Indian development imaginary and business education. It concludes that the export of hegemonic US management education was not successful during Cold War, and the FF was not as dominant as it was made out to be.

This paper aims to explore the early days of business education with the aim of understanding how the Harvard Business School (HBS) contributed to the constitution of “management” as a science-based profession. The research focuses on HBS signature pedagogy, the case method and its role in the institutionalization of managerial knowledge.

The research is based on a qualitative content analysis of HBS Annals published between 1908 and 1930. Through a manual coding of the Annals, the paper traces the diffusion of the case method in the curriculum and connects it with the institutional transformations that took place between 1908 and 1930.

The data show how HBS curriculum transitioned from lectures to case teaching in the aftermath of First World War. This pedagogy allowed HBS to demonstrate the possibility of systematically investigate management problems and to deliver business education at scale. The discussion argues that the case method, acting as a boundary object between business praxis and management theories, constituted management as a science-based profession.

Recent debates have emerged about case method’s ability to critically question socio-economic structures within which business is conducted. This paper contributes to the debate arguing that the historical and institutional factors leading to the affirmation of this pedagogical approach had a substantive role in the type of knowledge produced through its application. The findings challenge the idea that the affirmation of the case method is attributable to its epistemological primacy in investigating business problems.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

The Harvard Advanced Management Programme (AMP) is the oldest, largest and most elite of the university executive development programmes. It grew out of the need to re‐train large numbers of executives as the economy shifted from a peace‐ to a war‐time footing in the early 1940s. The programme became so popular that it spawned over 30 other executive development courses at other top business schools, as well as countless specialised short university courses for executives. After the war, the AMP helped executives regain a peace‐time perspective. The AMP has been going strong since then and at present counts thousands among its alumni. The current fee is above $17,000 for the 13‐week session, space is limited and admission is competitive.

This paper provides a profile of the 1,454 business chair professorships in the United States in 1997. The five disciplines covered are accounting, economics, finance, management, and marketing. The University of Pennsylvania had the largest number of chairholders in business in 1997. Three other schools that had more than 40 chairholders each were Harvard, Northwestern and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Harvard produced the highest number of graduates serving as chairholders followed by Chicago, MIT, Texas at Austin, Illinois, and Stanford. Most of the schools that produced large numbers of chairholders are listed among the best business schools in the United States.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Keio University has been in the vanguard of adult business education since 1956 when it introduced American management techniques into Japan by initiating the annual one‐week “Keio‐Harvard advanced management programme” for top businessmen in Japan. But it was not until 1978 that Keio Business School (KBS) began to offer the MBA programme, a two year full‐time course heavily influenced by the style of business education at Harvard. It remained the only educational institution in Japan to offer an accredited postgraduate business education qualification until the late 1980s. With a recent government reform in postgraduate education, however, it faces competition from both emerging part‐time and one‐year full‐time MBA courses at other universities in Japan, as well as from overseas MBA programmes. Reports on the results of two surveys carried out among its alumni which show that, while the graduates’ support for the existing programme is overwhelming, they also point out the danger of complacency and rigidity which the School needs to overcome in adapting to the changing needs of the business community.

Communication studies have expanded significantly around the globe in the last decades. Due to new channels of communication and more and more mediatised societies, the role of communication has gained significance. In contrast, communication does not seem to be a topic of high priority for many corporate leaders. They often still value communication as a mere support function.

This chapter explores communication courses of business schools in the United States and Europe. It is hypothesised that only if communication courses are recognised in such programmes the profession of business communicators will realise entry into the highest levels of corporate decision-making.

The main question is how far top-ranked Master of Business Administration (MBA) programmes integrate communication courses. This is investigated via website analysis and interviews. This chapter also provides explanations for the current status quo. The results will be of interest to all those responsible for shaping MBA curricula and give insights into how the communication discipline is viewed by leaders of business schools.