Part of the problem is the way that management research — like so many areas of knowledge — tends to explore ever more obscure topics as scholars seek out an unvisited niche. With reason, Ms Pearce is particularly baffled by so-called "critical management theory". A description of this abstruse subject on the Academy of Management website announces that "Our premise is that structural features of contemporary society, such as the profit imperative, patriarchy, racial inequality and ecological irresponsibility often turn organisations into instruments of domination and exploitation." Few are the companies happy to pay $50,000 for their top managers to learn that.

Pulling together research and teaching will be hard. "You are starting to get splits," reports Roy Lewicki, editor of Academy of Management Learning and Education: "Contract faculty teach, and tenured faculty mainly do research and are better paid." Perhaps the professionalisation of management teaching, recommended by those two reports of the late 1950s, has now gone too far. Perhaps management education would beat off its critics more effectively if it went back to its beginnings, and got more corporate managers to teach. It might be easier to train them to communicate properly with students than to get professional management academics to teach students to be good managers.

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