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THE DEVELOPMENT OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT SKILLS

Cambridge Judge Business School. opened in 1995


In my last article I discussed the Griffiths Report of 1983 which began the process by which decision making passed out of the hands of doctors (who had been jealous of their power when the NHS was set up in 1948 but who had already been obliged to share it to a great degree with other health professionals, nurses among them, in the 1974 reform) into the hands of professional managers, but I wonder if I attached sufficient importance to it. According to Darren Williams' book Clear Red Water (showing how Wales managed to keep clear of many of the reforms introduced later under New Labour) the numbers of this 'new stratum of general or senior managers ... in England grew from 1,000 in 1986 to 16,000 in 1991 and then to 26,000 in 1995.' Where did they all come from? Surely we can relate this to the revolution that has occurred over the past fifty years in the development of business studies as an academic discipline.

According to a report on UK Business Schools: Historical contexts and future scenarios (Evolution of Business Knowledge/Advanced Institute of Managerial Research, 2016): 

'Business schools developed late in Britain, but grew rapidly in the latter part of the twentieth century. There were no business schools in British universities before 1965, but by the beginning of the twenty first century there were approximately 120. Whereas in 1961 a university professor could confidently assert that "management has not yet passed the test of being a study discipline in the universities", by 2004 the business and management subject area accounted for one in seven of all students in British universities – and one in five of all postgraduates. In a rapidly growing HE [Higher Education] sector no subject discipline has undergone a more remarkable rise than business and management." 

Another account (a review of Allan Williams: The History of UK business and management education - https://www.bl.uk/business-and-management/editorials/book-review-the-history-of-uk-business-and-management-education) 'in 2010 there were more than 250,000 full-time equivalent students studying business and management at foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate levels in publicly funded UK universities, and another 20,000 in private institutions: 15% of all HE students in the UK. There are also over 11,000 academic staff - compared with fewer than 10 in 1945. So that Business and Management is now the largest discipline in UK Higher Education.' 

This seems to correspond rather neatly to the explosion of management roles within the NHS.

Those of us who supported the Bullock Report on Industrial Democracy in the mid to late 1970s may remember that one of our arguments was the general incompetence and weakness of British management. We thought that the workers, having a lively interest in the wellbeing of the place where they were working, could do better. But we of course were not the only people who had noticed the problem, and we could be impressed by the energy and commitment shown by the ideological supporters of free market capitalism. I am not in a position to provide a good account of the history of the development of business studies in Britain but if I rely on my memory of what I observed at the time it was happening I would say that the initiative came largely from individual businessmen. It could hardly have come from the Universities, torn as they were between Trotsky and Althusser nor, whatever encouragement they would soon get from Mrs Thatcher, from government in the 1970s. It was, it seems to me, the initiative of determined and intelligent wills with a better idea of their own interests and what to do about them than was being shown at the time among the supporters of the working class.

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