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- Title
A Case for Great Books in Management Education.
- Authors
Duncan, W. Jack
- Abstract
This article stresses the need to include the study of great books in the business education curriculum. Even in the electronic age, it is hard to image life or the academic enterprise without books. In a few colleges a select group of great books are so highly regarded that the entire curriculum is built around reading and understanding the ideas contained within them. Some people devoted to this great books tradition equate education with mastery of these works because, according to them, they require us to deal with humanity's greatest questions--the existence of God, the nature of love, the possibility of immortality, the achievement of freedom. Business schools, as a general rule, do not attach such importance to great books or to what might be great books in the making. The paradox is that much, if not most, of the conventional wisdom of a discipline is chronicled in the books written by its academic masters. And, research has shown that mastery of a discipline is an essential foundation for expanding the frontiers of knowledge. The long list of what makes a book great, however, can be summarized under four general headings: great books are central to the development of a discipline; great books continue to be relevant to today's issues; great books allow us to locate our own time in the discipline's evolution; and great books allow broad access to some of the great minds in the field.
- Subjects
BUSINESS education; CURRICULUM; BOOKS; BUSINESS schools; MANAGEMENT
- Publication
Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2004, Vol 3, Issue 4, p421
- ISSN
1537-260X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5465/AMLE.2004.15112549