book
From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession
Khurana, Rakesh. From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Why this matters here
Khurana’s history of American business schools traces how management’s professional-ambition era gave way to a market-oriented model in which metrics, shareholder alignment, and technical competence crowded out thicker claims about institutional purpose. Coupling uses that shift as a hinge for incentive-layer critique: compensation can be tightly tied to performance measures while judgment remains uncoupled from long-term operational risk and downstream harm. The source documents the unfulfilled promise of management as a profession; the book asks whether “aligned” incentives still leave consequence pathways broken.
