Three world experts share their insights on designing the business school of the future, and how to make it work.

Reveals how the era of virtual technology and a more liberal attitude in classical academic institutions heralds the arrival of a better kind of business school.

With business schools becoming increasingly market-driven, questionable trends have emerged, such as the conflation of academic and corporate management, and the notion that academics and students are market players, who respond rationally to market signals. Using individual studies from leading scholars in a variety of disciplines and countries, this book identifies the global pressures behind these trends. It focuses on the debates surrounded the commercialization of business schools, and the rise of different methods of measuring their success. In their unique approach, the authors and editors discuss the impact of the confrontation between the timeless values embodied by Minerva, the Roman goddess of Wisdom, and the hard realities of competition and corporatization in modern society. This book will be compelling reading for students and academics in critical management studies, organizational studies, public management and higher education, as well as for stakeholders in academia and educational policy.

With more than 14,000 business schools worldwide, what is included in their curricula matters for how the economy and the corporate system are managed. Business schools should be subject to scholarly inquiries and critical reflection. While many studies of business schools examine its general role in the tertiary education system and in society more broadly, this volume examines how one specific theoretical perspective and a normative model derived therefrom were developed and gradually appropriated within the business school setting. This volume demonstrates that agency theory, based on a daring conjecture that firms can be construed as bundles of contacts, rose to prominence in the business school context. It examines how the elementary proposition of agency theory, that the firm is to be considered theoretically and practically as a "nexus of contracts," was never consistent with corporate law and contract law, and it was empirically unsubstantiated. Business schools are under pressure to teach not only practically useful theories and models, but also theories that are also scientifically qualified. Despite having this ambition, certain theories are widely taught despite failing to live up to such declared ambitions, which means that business schools may be criticized for including theories on ambiguous grounds in the curricula. This book examines how business schools seek to honour the ambition to teach both scientifically verified theories and practically useful concepts and models, and how the tensions derived from this duality may be problematic to handle. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and advanced students in the fields of management education, organizational studies, and legal theory.