If university management schools fail to impress the practitioner world and at the same time invite suspicions about its intellectual underpinnings from peer academics (THES, August 30) we ourselves are very much to blame. The vast majority of those who teach management studies have never experienced managing at the very levels where the theories and concepts espoused can be personally tested for their rigor and realism. Lacking this "touch" with the real, it is not surprising that many management academics are unable to impart what A. N. Whitehead called "zest".
Also, few university management schools have attempted to establish their raison d'etre in relation to the ideals and aspirations of a traditional university education, and to critically examine the metatheoretical assumptions underpinning management knowledge. The first leads to a preoccupation with pragmatic concerns, the second leads to a proliferation of symbolic representations which "multiples without end the number of its point of view in order to complete its always incomplete representation" (H. Bergson, 1913).
A. N. Whitehead (1932) insisted that university education is "discipline for the adventures of life". More especially, university business schools are essentially about the cultivation of "business foresight" in which "an unspecialised aptitude for eliciting generalisations from particulars and for seeing the divergent illustration of generalities in diverse circumstances" (1933) is developed. Such a reflective power is essentially a philosophic habit developed through metaphysical inquiry.
Perhaps we should also take heed of his closing observation that "a great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions. Low thoughts mean low behaviour, and after a brief orgy of exploitation, low behaviour means a descending standard of life" (ibid). Maybe we might eventually gain some academic respectability if we pursued these ideas.
Robert Chia Senior lecturer in management Department of accounting, finance and management, University of Essex