Nothing Succeeds Like Failure : : The Sad History of American Business Schools / / Steven Conn.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2019
• VerfasserIn: Conn, Steven,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Histories of American Education
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (288 p.)

Do business schools actually make good on their promises of "innovative," "outside-the-box" thinking to train business leaders who will put society ahead of money-making? Do they help society by making better business leaders? No, they don't, Steven Conn asserts, and what's more they never have. In throwing down a gauntlet on the business of business schools, Conn's Nothing Succeeds Like Failure examines the frictions, conflicts, and contradictions at the heart of these enterprises and details the way business schools have failed to resolve them. Beginning with founding of the Wharton School in 1881, Conn measures these schools' aspirations against their actual accomplishments and tells the full and disappointing history of missed opportunities, unmet aspirations, and educational mistakes. Conn then poses a set of crucial questions about the role and function of American business schools. The results aren't pretty. Posing a set of crucial questions about the function of American business schools, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure is pugnacious and controversial. Deeply researched and fun to read, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure argues that the impressive façades of business school buildings resemble nothing so much as collegiate versions of Oz. Conn pulls back the curtain to reveal a story of failure to meet the expectations of the public, their missions, their graduates, and their own lofty aspirations of producing moral and ethical business leaders.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: The Beast That Ate Campus -- 1. The World before (and Shortly after) Wharton: Getting a Business Education in the Nineteenth Century -- 2. Teach the Children . . . What? Business Schools and Their Curricular Confusions -- 3. Dismal Science versus Applied Economics: The Unhappy Relationship between Business Schools and Economics Departments -- 4. It's a White Man's World: Women and African Americans in Business Schools -- 5. Good in a Crisis? How Business Schools Responded to Economic Downturns-or Didn't -- 6. Same as It Ever Was: How Business Schools Helped Create the New Gilded Age -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index