哈佛商学院对管理发展的贡献.docVIP

The Contribution of the Harvard Business School to Management Control, 1908 - 1980 Stephen A. Zeff Rice University June 2008 The Contribution of the Harvard Business School to Management Control, 1908 - 1980 Introduction The ascendancy of management control at the Harvard Business School occurred over a period of decades. In order to appreciate the stages in the development in thinking by the faculty across the years, it is instructive to review the evolution of the accounting curriculum from the beginning of the Business School in 1908 to the 1970s. The two leaders in the transformation from accounting to management control were Ross G. Walker and Robert N. Anthony, the former having been the latter’s mentor. Together, they established the concept of control, in stages, from the 1930s to 1982, when the latter retired from the faculty. Beginning in the 1950s, the Control faculty, led by Anthony, published a series of books containing textual material and cases that diffused its teaching and research philosophy around the globe. The focus of this paper is therefore mainly on the evolution of the accounting cum control curriculum, and how and why it changed. Harvard Business School was not alone in forging this development. Comparable development was noticeable at Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT , across the Charles River. And the University of Chicago was, without question, a major contemporary leader as well. The essence of this movement was to emphasize concepts and the management use of accounting information over technique. The paper begins with a digression in which three leadership roles identified with the Business School prior to Second World War are sketched. The author believes that these roles are little known and deserve to be better known. The discussion then proceeds to trace the evolution of the Business School’s accounting curriculum until the 1930s and 1940s, when the control concept made its debut. The narrative then turns to the ev