Commentary: Before We Abolish Business Schools, Let’s Look Beyond The West

Christopher Marquis’s recent New York Times essay calling for the abolition of business schools has generated a lively and much-needed debate. Nicolai Foss, Brayden King, Shivaram Rajgopal and Witold Henisz have offered thoughtful responses, challenging the assumptions behind Marquis’s critique while acknowledging many of the problems he identifies.

Yet one fundamental question remains largely unexplored: Can we draw universal conclusions about business schools from experiences rooted predominantly in the United States and Western Europe?

For international business scholars, this question goes to the heart of our discipline. One of its central insights is that institutions, organizational practices and management models developed in one country do not necessarily serve the same purposes or produce the same outcomes elsewhere. Their functions are shaped by the institutional environments in which they operate.

If context matters for multinational enterprises, why should it matter any less for business schools? India offers a compelling illustration of why Marquis’s argument, however important, is incomplete.

WHEN BUSINESS SCHOOLS WERE ABOUT NATION-BUILDING

When India gained independence in 1947, the country faced an enormous challenge: building the managerial and organizational capabilities required for economic development. Industrialization, infrastructure, public enterprises and agricultural modernization demanded professional management expertise that was in short supply.

Management education emerged partly in response to these needs. The Indian Institutes of Management at Calcutta and Ahmedabad, established in 1961, were products of this developmental ambition. Although both benefited from American institutional partnerships, with MIT and Harvard Business School respectively, their objectives were shaped by India’s circumstances.

Their purpose extended beyond preparing graduates for corporate careers. Management education was also expected to improve organizational effectiveness across industry, public administration and the wider economy.

IIM Bangalore, established in 1973, makes this particularly clear. Its original mandate included developing management capabilities for public enterprises, agriculture, rural development, infrastructure and sectors traditionally outside formal management education.

This history complicates Marquis’s distinction between professional schools serving public purposes, such as medicine and law, and business schools principally advancing private interests.

In India, building managerial capabilities was itself considered part of serving the public good. Nor were the IIMs alone. The Faculty of Management Studies at the University of Delhi, established in 1954, developed professional management education within the public university system. The National Institute of Industrial Engineering, established in 1963 and now IIM Mumbai, emphasized industrial productivity and operational capabilities.

Perhaps the most revealing example is the Institute of Rural Management Anand, established in 1979 by Verghese Kurien, a central figure in India’s dairy cooperative movement. Its purpose was to develop managers for rural cooperatives and development organizations.

These institutions were responding to different societal needs, not simply reproducing shareholder capitalism.

IMPORTED MODELS, DIFFERENT PURPOSES

There is an important irony in this history. India’s leading management schools borrowed extensively from American business education, including curricula, case teaching and research traditions. Yet the institutions created around these practices served purposes shaped by India’s developmental priorities.

This illustrates a familiar international business phenomenon: the transfer of an organizational model does not guarantee the transfer of its original institutional purpose.

Practices acquire different meanings as they interact with local institutions, economic conditions and societal expectations. India’s private management institutions further illustrate this diversity. XLRI, established in 1949, initially offered courses for trade unions and subsequently developed strengths in industrial relations and human resource management. The Indian School of Business, which welcomed its first students in 2001, emerged in a different economic environment, responding to India’s growing global integration and demand for internationally competitive management talent.

These institutions reflect changing economic and organizational needs across different phases of India’s development. Their histories are difficult to capture through a single narrative of what business schools supposedly are.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTION: HAVE INDIAN BUSINESS SCHOOLS CHANGED?

None of this means Indian business schools have necessarily fulfilled their original developmental ambitions. Indeed, IIM Bangalore’s own institutional history acknowledges an early difficulty: public-sector enterprises were reluctant to recruit its graduates despite the school’s orientation toward that sector.

The distinction between institutional purpose and actual outcomes matters. Schools may be created to address societal needs without necessarily succeeding in doing so.

More importantly, the evolution of Indian management education increasingly reveals some of the problems Marquis identifies. Leading institutions compete for rankings, prestigious recruiters, high placement salaries and international visibility. Private management education has expanded significantly, creating new opportunities but also concerns about quality, affordability and commercialization.

In pursuing international recognition, Indian business schools have increasingly adopted the standards, incentives and measures of success associated with globally prestigious institutions. There is nothing inherently wrong with adopting international standards. They can improve educational quality, research capabilities and global mobility.

But they raise an uncomfortable question: Have some Indian business schools become so focused on demonstrating their similarity to leading Western institutions that they risk losing sight of the distinctive needs they were established to serve?

This is where Marquis’s critique becomes particularly relevant beyond the West, although perhaps not in the way his original argument suggests.

GLOBAL CONVERGENCE DOES NOT MEAN UNIVERSAL PURPOSE

Brayden King asks what business schools are for. It is exactly the right question. But should we expect the answer to be identical across countries?

In India, the challenge may involve helping family enterprises professionalize, entrepreneurs scale their businesses, manufacturers enter international markets and organizations develop the capabilities needed to compete globally.

These are not necessarily the same priorities that dominate conversations about elite MBA education in mature Western economies. They are also not alternatives to responsible management. Capability development, sustainability, ethical leadership and accountability must increasingly go together.

Foss is right that incentive problems do not justify abolishing institutions. Henisz rightly emphasizes accountability for broader societal impacts. But international business scholarship adds another consideration: what constitutes meaningful impact is partly shaped by institutional context.

A business school’s contribution cannot be assessed solely through starting salaries, rankings or publication counts. Nor can its social value be established merely by invoking an admirable founding mission.

The more meaningful question is whether it develops capabilities that organizations and societies genuinely need, and whether those capabilities create lasting economic and social value. Marquis deserves credit for challenging business schools to reconsider their purpose. But a debate focused primarily on elite Western institutions risks overlooking the diversity of roles management education has historically played elsewhere.

The globalization of business education has encouraged institutions to converge around similar models of excellence, even as the needs of the societies they serve remain different. That is the paradox the current debate must confront. Before deciding whether business schools should be abolished or reinvented, perhaps we should ask a more fundamental question:

Have we confused the globalization of the business-school model with the universality of its purpose?

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Vikas Kumar is a Professor of International Business at the University of Sydney Business School in Sydney, Australia. Before joining the University of Sydney, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Management at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy.

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