The Pursuit of Relevance in Management Education

The history of North American management education can be viewed as an extended debate over the proper balance between experiential knowledge and academic knowledge in the pursuit of relevance. This article explores some features of that debate, including arguments that relevance is usually ambiguous and myopic and consequently potentially pernicious, as well as claims that relevance as it is usually conceived is fundamentally irrelevant to the design of education. It examines how this debate has contributed to the evolution of business schools and suggests how the pursuit of relevance can be complimented with the pursuit of meaning and beauty.