In the debate about management as a profession there is as often a danger that we resort to comfortable but misleading opposites. It would be convenient if we could perhaps adapt the approach used by our legal and medical colleagues and consider more the notion of a paraprofession; but even this is not really possible since the expression “para” implies alongside a professional itself. So whilst paraprofessional may capture the intermediate status of management it would also imply that the full blown profession existed, which Richard Barker (Financial Times, September 5th) rightly denies.

Richard, however, goes on to make the assertion that “Business Schools are not professional schools but incubators for business leadership”, which seems to be rather confused. He elides two rather different issues: management as compared to leadership and teaching as compared to developing (incubating?). In the context of the first distinction, surely the nature of leadership abilities and capabilities are actually less amenable to codification and structuring than those of management. Maybe what Richard is getting at is the difference between teaching professional knowledge and developing particular “practical” abilities but then most professional schools would nowadays see themselves as trying to achieve a mix of these two.

Hence Richard is right if he is arguing that management is very unlikely to achieve absolute professional status but wrong if his approach is taken to mean that Business Schools should not continue to emphasise the importance of key elements of the professional approach: evidence based knowledge and ethical behaviour being two of them.

At AIM over the last several years we have not only supported a wide range of management research which plays a key role in building such an evidence base but also undertaken significant studies which look at both the range of types of Business School and the challenges involved in leading them.

Robin Wensley
Director
Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) Research