> My sense is that if schools and companies alike practiced (what I call)
> "essential thinking," then students could very well come out with a
> foundation in BOTH academics and research (and sales and psychology and
> philosophy).
>
> >From my experience with schools, many teachers today don't themselves
> think "essentially," so have no way to pass this to their students.
> Teachers present a curriculum and students follow it, seldom with
> perspective on how it relates to other disciples, or how it could possibly
> apply to real world problems or the future. I see very little
> conversation anywhere that zeros in on essentials as such, both data and
> ways of thinking, and extrapolates consciously from there. Of course, it
> is the classical education that would have this working foundation of
> essentials, now mistakenly touted as overly intellectual and out-of-touch.
> Not necessarily, depends on how it's done.
>
> We have to get past the either/or thinking that says academic OR
> research, theory OR practice, management OR labor, etc etc.
H. Thomas Johnson, in _Relevance Regained_, suggested that business
education in the US got onto the wrong track in the late 1940's and early
1950's when large numbers of GI Bill students decided to major in
business administration. Before that time, most business courses were
taught by practitioners who were adjunct faculty, but when the demand
increased, it was necessary for business education departments to remake
themselves into a form that would be acceptable to faculty committees,
i.e. to consist of faculty with doctorates in the subject. In order to
make business administration an Academically Rigorous[tm] discipline, the
early PhD programs cobbled together a supposed foundation for business
administration based on economic theory (which would up treating people
within business organizations as autonomous producers and consumers) and
behaviorist psychology (which assumed that it was possible to determine
how people in business organizations would respond to incentives by
studying rats and pigeons in the laboratory). One of the shortcuts
Johnson accuses them of having taken was to equate the fixed
cost/marginal cost duality in economics with the fixed cost/variable cost
duality in accounting.
The upshot of all this, Johnson claims, is that business administration
academics never developed a native theory of how managed organizations
operate, but rather tried to force inapplicable paradigms onto the
field. This was compounded by an insistence that it was "unscientific"
to study the operations of individual organizations rather than
large-sample macro-results.
Johnson's argument reminded me of two other academic developments: the
rise of psychometrics and the use of IQ testing among the general
population, much of which was motivated by academic psychologists' desire
to turn their discipline into a "hard science," and some of the odd
effects of attempting to transform the social change movement of feminism
into the academic discipline of Womens' Studies (where again it seems as
if professors had to cobble up Theories on demand so they could Publish
rather than Perish).
Eric Bohlman (ebohlman@netcom.com)