Includes bibliographical references (p. 483-507) and index.

The professionalization project in American business education, 1881-1941 -- An occupation in search of legitimacy -- Ideas of order: science, the professions, and the university in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America -- The invention of the university-based business school -- "A very ill-defined institution": the business school as aspiring professional school -- 2: The institutionalization of business schools, 1941-1970 -- The changing institutional field in the postwar era -- Disciplining the business school faculty: the impact of the foundations -- 3: The triumph of the market and the abandonment of the professionalization project, 1970-the present -- Unintended consequences: the Post-Ford Business School and the fall of managerialism -- Business schools in the marketplace.

"Rakesh Khurana shows that university-based business schools were founded to train a professional schools were founded to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors and lawyers but have effectively retreated from that goal, leaving a gaping moral hole at the center of business education and perhaps in management itself." "Today, Khurana argues, business schools have largely capitulated in the battle for professionalism and have become merely purveyors of a product, the MBA, with students treated as consumers. Professional and moral ideals that once animated and inspired business schools have been conquered by a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of share profits. According to Khurana, we should not thus be surprised at the rise of corporate malfeasance. The time has come, he concludes, to rejuvenate intellectually and morally the training of our future business leaders."--BOOK JACKET.