What Business Schools Can Learn from Public Management—and Vice Versa

Abstract

Continuing 21st-century Wall Street ethical scandals have triggered calls, by leading business school professors and others, for major reforms in the MBA curriculum. The goal of this reform movement is to challenge the dominance of the nonnormative organizational economics paradigm in MBA education by introducing a management model that features both efficiency and ethics as co-equal determinants of organizational outcomes. The article argues that diffusing public management’s market efficiency/public failure model across the MBA curriculum would accomplish the reformer’s institutional and societal objectives. Moreover, the implementation and diffusion of this construct into the MBA curriculum would both (a) help public management escape the intellectual absolutism of what Kelman (2007) calls the “public administration ghetto” and (b) enhance the discipline’s reputation as an ethical decision-making model in the marketplace of management ideas.