The Karpin Enquiry and the Role of Management Education in Australia: History Revisited?

Abstract

The report of the industry taskforce on management skills, chaired by David Karpin, has been the most recent in a succession of reports on Australia's need for management skills and the role of the education providers in satisfying them. According to the Karpin Report the main problem with Australian management is a lack of leadership skills and the failure of the educators to focus on training future leaders. Karpin feels that business and the educators are out of touch; that management academics have concentrated too much on producing graduates who can master statistical techniques rather than graduates who understand how to lead and communicate. In turn the Karpin Report has been accused by the same academics of perpetuating a narrow emphasis on managers as entrepreneurial leaders ignoring the whole range of functions required in the effective manager (Lamond, 1995).

This paper will not be concerned with criticising the apparent bias of the Karpin Report. It will be more concerned with understanding the social ground of the debate about management and management education itself. The paper is concerned with why there has always been a debate about what management is and what management education is appropriate. Definitions of management have always oscillated between emphasis on management as an ‘art’ inhering in leadership qualities and management as a ‘science’ inhering in technical skills. Business has always been ambiguous about what it wants from management education. It has always been attracted by the idea that management involves objective technical skills which could form the basis of rational means of control over the organisation. But at the same time there has always been resistance to the notion of the multiskilled professional manager whose skills lie in a specific discipline of management because of its implications for the maintenance of management prerogative. The apparent bias in the Karpin Report is seen as the most recent swing of the pendulum.