Purpose

This paper aims to use the origin story of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management as a foil for unpacking the tensions between deep disciplinary specialization and liberal education in business schools in Canada and the USA. Ultimately, the paper reveals that those tensions are not irreconcilable, and that through the fortunes of historical contingencies and deliberate decision-taking, a faculty can embrace the benefits of both breadth and depth.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper proposes a critical organizational history of management education through a case study. By drawing on secondary literature and archival sources, the authors focus on moments in business education, such as the founding of the Wharton School of Business, the release of the Carnegie and Ford Reports and the trend towards increased specialization to situate a case study of Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management.

Findings

The authors find that the evolution of business education in North America from its broad, liberal origins towards narrow, specialization has come at a cost to some of the benefits of business and management education. An alternative approach, one reflected in the design of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management, its programme offerings and its interconnection with other disciplines, enables the advantages of deep disciplinarity to co-exist (and cross-inform) with the advantages of liberal approach to knowledges.

Originality/value

The Dalhousie model offers business schools an example of a faculty that balances the rich insights of liberal interdisciplinarity with the need for sophisticated approaches to more granular, often disciplinary, topics. In addition, the paper offers the story of a multidisciplinary management faculty, some explanation for how that faculty was maintained despite pressures towards specialization; and in doing so, contributes to the limited historical research of management education, particularly in Canada, post-2000.

中文翻译：

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寻求广度和深度：多学科管理学院的起源故事

目的

本文旨在以达尔豪斯管理学院的起源故事为衬托，来揭示加拿大和美国商学院深度学科专业化与通识教育之间的紧张关系。最终，本文揭示了这些紧张局势并非不可调和，通过历史偶然事件的命运和深思熟虑的决策，教师可以享受广度和深度的好处。

设计/方法论/途径

本文通过案例研究提出了管理教育的批判性组织历史。通过利用二手文献和档案来源，作者重点关注商业教育中的时刻，例如沃顿商学院的成立、卡内基和福特报告的发布以及专业化程度不断提高的趋势，以达尔豪斯大学为例进行案例研究大学管理学院。

发现

作者发现，北美商业教育从广泛、自由的起源向狭隘、专业化的演变是以牺牲商业和管理教育的一些好处为代价的。另一种方法反映在达尔豪斯管理学院的设计、其课程设置及其与其他学科的相互联系中，它使深度学科的优势与自由主义知识方法的优势共存（和交叉）。

原创性/价值

达尔豪斯模型为商学院提供了一个范例，即教师能够平衡自由主义跨学科的丰富见解与对更细粒度（通常是学科）主题的复杂方法的需求。此外，本文还讲述了多学科管理学院的故事，并对如何在专业化压力下维持该学院的情况做出了一些解释；在此过程中，对管理教育的有限历史研究做出了贡献，特别是在 2000 年后的加拿大。