In search of breadth and depth: the origin story of a multidisciplinary faculty of management
Abstract
Purpose
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.
Design/methodology/approach
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.
Findings
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.
Originality/value
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.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the anonymous peer reviewers, colleagues in the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie who were willing to read previous drafts, Kristin Williams (Director, Business, Acadia University) who encouraged us to author this piece and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for support.
Since submission of this article, the following author has updated their affiliation: Thomas Nichini is at Dentons Canada LLP.
Citation
Brooks, K. and Nichini, T. (2024), "In search of breadth and depth: the origin story of a multidisciplinary faculty of management", Journal of Management History, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMH-12-2022-0088
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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