Britannia and her Business Schools

Business education constitutes a significant part of offerings at modern universities. It started to emerge on both sides of the Atlantic around 1900, despite considerable resistance from professors of established disciplines. In Europe, it was mainly established outside universities, as at Handelshochschulen in Germany, écoles de commerce in France and handelshögskolor in Scandinavia. The UK in contrast was much slower to take up business education. With the exception of the London School of Economics and Political Science, which turned more into an institution preparing graduates for civil service, and accounting education in Birmingham and Manchester, it was not until the mid‐1960s that academic business education took off in the UK. This paper elaborates on the reasons for this development and shows how earlier traditions were challenged after the Robbins and Frank reports. As a result, five groups of top institutions for business education have been identified and labelled: (1) Front‐runners, (2) Engineers, (3) Frankies, (4) Followers, and (5) Latecomers. The paper also demonstrates that the relatively late diffusion of business education has implied that UK business schools have been relatively less prominent in publishing in relation to US business schools. However, a comparison between two periods (1981–1992 and 2005–2009) of publishing in 15 top journals indicates that UK business scholars are gaining ground. At the same time most top references in the published UK papers have US authors.