Management Education

As organizations have grown in size and scale over time, so too has the need for the systematic training and development of managers. To fill that void, there has been an increasing creation and utilization of programs in which knowledge about the distinct functions of organizations could be transferred to the people who direct them. Today, all manner of organizations and institutions have begun to teach this class of individuals through numberless learning systems, curricula, and processes generally known as management education.

Although management education has existed in some form since ancient times, the advent of modern management education is a more recent phenomenon. It appeared almost in step with the basic structures of modern management, which is a practice that gained awareness as a distinct discipline in the years around World War II. Prior to then, management had not been commonly perceived as a central factor in any economy.

It was not until the late 18th to mid-19th centuries that a handful of figures across business, government, society, and the academy began to emphasize particular roles of management and structures of modern organization. And only by the outset of the 19th century, in the Scottish mill community at New Lanark, did Robert Owen effectively become the first manager, when he began to concern himself with specific issues related to work and worker. But while Owen espoused education as a necessary factor in forming the complete human, it was not until the late 19th century that the Japanese government-official-turned-businessman, Shibusawa Eiichi, began to strongly encourage higher education opportunities throughout the business community as a way to improve society. His focus on formal business education has been identified as the conception of the first professional manager.

Also by the late 19th century and into the first few decades of the 20th, the emergence of new organizational structures demanded substantive management and formal education for the people performing it. There had in the interim been a proliferation of study and thought on management and organization, especially as “Big Business” took shape in the years around World Wars I and II. By then, academic institutions, mainly in the Western part of the world, had for some [Page 1055]time been teaching in disparate areas and classifications of management; for instance, Harvard offered a program of study in business administration and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered courses in engineering administration. But in the new order following World War II, and notably with the establishment of the GI Bill in the United States, there came a growing demand for business-related courses. As a result, colleges and universities began to offer more graduate and undergraduate courses in areas such as marketing, finance and accounting, and organizational operation.

Besides the relatively new management education programs that got their start in the mid-20th century, many managers can benefit from informal continuing education.

But it was not until the 1949–50 academic year, when Peter Drucker joined the faculty of the Graduate Business School at New York University, that the world would be introduced to the first appointment of a professor of management. Through a combination of teaching and consulting work, Drucker observed and formulated the basic principles of modern management. Among his consistent, overarching themes was that it is the responsibility of management to develop people to perform productively and autonomously, and that the highly-skilled worker is the most valuable resource in any organization. These seemingly simple insights had vital implications as Drucker detected a broad social and economic shift from manual work to knowledge work. For it would become increasingly and continuously necessary for managers to learn about, understand, and integrate the principles and practices of good management.

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