Teaching Economics in a Management School: Some Personal Quandaries

Abstract

At the risk of stating the obvious, to begin with, it may be noted that strictly speaking the discipline of Economics is not a management discipline.2 An archaic but non-believer way to describe it could be to give it a status of a ―subsidiary discipline‖, while to a sympathizer, it could be seen as a ―mother discipline‖. But then that kind of relationship could be relevant for other braches as well – the relationship between ―operations research‖ and ―operations management‖ could be a case in point here. Thus, a priori it could be difficult to discern the relationship between Business Management and Economics as one of offspring-parent or near/distant-cousins.3 Nevertheless, there is an influential view that management as a discipline is of recent origin; as per this view, the birth of the discipline can be traced among others in the writings of the French Engineer turned Manager Henri Fayol (1841—1925) (Wren and Bedeian, 2009). To Fayol, management theory is essentially ―a collection of principles, rules, methods, and procedures tried and checked by general experience‖. But what is meant by management principles