Abstract

Business historians have paid a great attention in the last forty years to the historical study of management education systems in a wide array of Western countries. The scholarship, however, has tended to put managers and business schools in the centre of the analysis, neglecting how management education was perceived from other professions, like engineering professions (Kipping, Amdam & McGlade 2020; Kipping, Puig & Üsdiken 2004; Amdam et al. 2003, Engwall & Zamagni 1998; Amdam & Dávila 2021). Literature, furthermore, has mainly focused on executive education, while in-company training and undergraduate studies remain under researched (Kipping 1998; Tumbe 2021). This paper contributes to literature by looking at management education at engineering schools and examines the time and content of the courses taught.
The paper addresses those issues comparing what happened in two late-industrializing European countries, Norway and Spain, in the second half of the 20th century. The comparison allows us to simultaneously evaluate the impact of national forces on the engineering profession’s perception of the role of management education for engineering practice. The latter changed indeed dramatically in both countries in the years that followed Word War II (Amdam et al., 2003; Puig & Fernández, 2003; Nygaard, 2020). If until the 1960s engineers were deemed qualified for top management positions based on high technical skills as well as practical manager experience, this shifted towards a need for management education in some form. American management models and methods were promoted in both countries by American missions and local productivity centres. But while the American management education and science have been present mainly at a theoretical level in the Norwegian case, Spanish engineers could also witness the American managerial competence in situ thanks to the partnerships created around the construction of American military bases in Spain and American direct investment.