The attempt in the 1950s by Herbert Simon and his colleagues at Carnegie Tech to shift education for business from a vocational to a "science-based" approach was a harbinger of a wider transformation. In 1959, an influential report for the Ford Foundation titled Higher Education for Business noted the pedestrian, descriptive courses, the academic mediocrity, and the absence of a culture of research at many American business schools. Business, the authors of the report commented, "finds itself at the foot of the academic table, uncomfortably nudging those two other stepchildren, Education and Agriculture" (Gordon and Howell 1959, p. 4).

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 321