Reorienting Management Education

The recent economic crises added fuel to the debate about the social impact of the teachings of economics and of management theory.

After about 200 years of imitating the methods of the natural sciences and their thoroughly positivistic approach, and after decades of relegating any and all moral considerations to the margins of business theory, often belittling its tenets as not amenable to quantitative models, now, arguably, a paradigm shift is under way. We are seeing an ever stronger (re-)orientation of economic and business theory towards the social sciences and the humanities, and we are witnessing the return of qualitative methods and ethics to economics.