Professional School Obsession: An Enduring Yet Shifting Rhetoric By Us Business Schools

Over the past two decades, prompted in part by a series of corporate scandals, different views have been voiced about why U.S. business schools have purportedly lost their original ambition to become professional schools and, thus, to make managementa "true" profession,and how this ambition could be restored. This paper puts these debates into a longer-term perspective by showing that such claims have been present for more than a century. The paper examines the evolving rhetoric of the protagonists and their critics over five periods, each marked by different contexts, which shaped the ambitions of schools of business to be recognized as professional schools. These claims, the paper shows, had a common thread for over 100 years, which was the recurring reference to other professional schools-namely those of medicine and law, and at times engineering, which had already achieved the coveted status when U.S. business schools first originated. We ultimately argue that, given the rhetorical nature of these claims, suggestions that business schools lost their way or ought to return to some idealized past are largely futile. Future discussions should therefore focus on purpose and power rather than profession.