The term business studies is a loose generic title for several related aspects of enterprises and their environments, foremost among these being administration and management, accounting, finance and banking, international relations, marketing, and personnel and industrial relations. There is considerable disagreement, however, on the extent to which scholastic, managerial or professional values should predominate in the framing of the curriculum and in research and teaching objectives.
It is usual to trace modern ideas on business studies to formative developments in the USA, where the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce was the first of 20 schools of business administration and commerce to be founded between 1881 and 1910. But it was particularly in the next two decades, when a further 180 schools were established, that the distinc-tive US style of business education, with a high degree of abstraction and a quantitative approach to the solution of problems, became firmly rooted (Rose 1970). Management education developed much later in Europe, originally under the tutelage of practitioners from the USA. Indeed, in Britain, it was not until 1947 that the first major centre, the Administrative Staff College at Henley, was inaugurated. There are now several leading European institutes for business and management studies. In both Europe and Japan, there have been active attempts to develop programmes which are distinctive from the original North American model, a change which has been facilitated by the considerable interest in business studies in Third World nations and by the rigorous analytical techniques which have latterly evolved in the USA.
The precise causes of the expansion of business education are open to some doubt, although processes of rationalization in modern societies and the rapid growth in numbers of managerial personnel have been signal influences. Further favourable trends have been increased international competition and investment, major technical changes, a larger scale and greater complexity of modern enterprises and a facilitative role of governments.
However, opinion differs on whether business studies should become an empirical social science or whether, to the contrary, it should be founded on a series of prescriptive values (what should be accomplished) and ideas (what can be achieved) in actual employing organizations. A particular problem of internal coherence in business education also stems from the varied subject backgrounds of research workers and teachers, a situation which has militated against an adequate interdisciplinary synthesis.
In principle, the theoretical linkages between the main areas of business studies are examined in business policy, although this has in practice become a highly specialized area dealing primarily with the intertemporal concept of strategy. In substantive terms, organizational behaviour is the most obvious branch of study that connects the disparate approaches within the business field. Nevertheless, its excessive reliance on contingency theory (which implies that whether a particular organizational form is effective depends on the nature of the environmental context) has proved to be an encumbrance, since challenges to this approach have ensured that there is no longer a generally accepted model for conceptualizing business behaviour.
A further critical issue in business studies is the extent to which, regardless of cultural, socioeconomic or political conditions, common administrative practices are appropriate on a worldwide scale. The earliest perspectives tended to assume a considerable uniformity, the various strands being combined in the ‘industrial society’ thesis in which a basic ‘logic of industrialism’ was seen to impel all modern economies towards similar organizational structures and modes of administration (Kerr et al. 1960). This complemented the earlier work on classical organization theory, which postulated universal traits of business management, and on studies of bureaucracy, which arrived at similar conclusions. In this approach, too, a key assumption was that there had been a divorce of ownership from control in the business enterprise that, in turn, had ensured the convergence of decision-making processes between societies with ostensibly irreconcilable political ideologies and economic systems.
More recently, however, the ‘culturalist’ thesis has emerged as a check-weight to these universalist approaches. This assumes great diversity in business behaviour and ideology occasioned either by variations in the ‘task’ environment (community, government, consumer, employee, supplier, distributor, shareholder) or, more especially, in the ‘social’ environment (cultural, legal, political, social). Above all, it emphasizes that each new generation internalizes an enduring strain of culture through its process of socialization, with people in different countries learning their own language, concepts and systems of values. Moreover, such deep-rooted cultural forces are continually reasserted in the way people relate to one another and ensure that organizational structures which are not consonant with culturally derived expectations will remain purely formal.
Divergence in business organization and practice can also stem from temporal as well as spatial differences between societies. Indeed, ‘late development’ would appear to enhance a mode of industrialization quite distinct from the earliest western models, with the state being more predominant at the expense of a laissez-faire ideology, educational institutions preceding manufacturing, more substantial technical and organizational ‘leaps’, human relations and personnel management techniques being more advanced, and large-scale enterprises being deliberately constructed as a spearhead for economic advancement (Dore 1973). In this respect, too, the choices of strategic elites are as important as the constraints of environment and organizational structure in determining which types of business conduct become ascendant in any given society.
Since the Second World War, business studies have been influenced by notions of ‘human resource management’ (Blyton and Turnbull 1992). The issue here is whether business managers have wider moral obligations, beyond seeking to enhance profitability and efficiency. ‘External social responsibility’ is particularly relevant to marketing policies. Various ethical questions are raised by the strategies and techniques for promoting different types of goods and services (Baird et al. 1990). ‘Internal social responsibility’ has to do with employee welfare and satisfaction, and human relations in the enterprise. More broadly, there has been a major expansion of research and teaching in the fields of personnel management and industrial relations (Schuler and Huber 1993).
The structure of business studies courses often shows evidence of a tension between professional and managerial approaches. Another unresolved issue is the extent to which business studies should concentrate on the development of empirical social science, perhaps at the expense of consultancy work.
Michael Poole
University of Wales
References
Baird, L.S., Post, J.E. and Mahon, J.F. (1990) Management: Functions and Responsibilities, New York.
Blyton, P. and Turnbull, P (1992) Reassessing Human Resource Management, London.
Dore, R.P. (1973) British Factory—Japanese Factory, London.
Kerr, C., Dunlop, J.T., Harbison, F.H. and Myers, C.A. (1960) Industrialism and Industrial Man, Cambridge, MA.
Rose, H. (1970) Management Education in the 1970s, London.
Schuler, R.S. and Huber, V.H. (1993) Personnel and Human Resource Management, Minneapolis, MN.
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