Volume 6 No 1 (2016)   |   ISSN 2158-8708 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/emaj.2016.92  |   http://emaj.pitt.edu 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

A New Path for Management Education in an Emerging Country 
 

Ayşe Çoban Kayacı 
Istanbul Medeniyet University, Department of Management | ayse.coban@medeniyet.edu.tr 

 

 

 

Abstract 

Management education has a long history in Turkey, but it still has so many structural problems. Both scholars and 

practitioners complain about the inconsistencies with theoretical and practical sides of university education in the 

management field. Lack of critical thinking and ethical values have become first hand problems of management education 

both globally and nationally. This study focuses on the evolution of management education and its historical problems in 

the light of global perspectives. Suggestions to solve intrinsic matters in university education for a better human resource 

quality and business life for Turkey have been made. 

 

Keywords:  management education, Turkey, critical thinking, curriculum development 

 

New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. 

 

This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part  
of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. 

  

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Volume 6 No 2 (2016)   |   ISSN 2158-8708 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/emaj.2016.110  |   http://emaj.pitt.edu 

 

 

 

A New Path for Management Education in an Emerging Country 

Page |38| Emerging Markets Journal 
 

A NEW PATH FOR 

MANAGEMENT 

EDUCATION IN AN 

EMERGING COUNTRY 
 

Ayşe Çoban Kayacı 

 
1. Introduction  

 
It becomes a necessity that management 

education needs to be restored for the post-industrial 

requirements of business environment. An overall 

assessment of management education in higher education 

may contribute new paths for the applicants of business 

life. Although, it seems that the winner of the terrain of 

management education is North American school, there 

have been local applications and resistances for higher 

education in management field.  

 

The globalization process helped North 

American style to win this battle. In the post-industrial 

era, studying business has become so popular for 

students from different disciplines in most of the 

countries (Bruner and Iannarelli, 2011). Moreover, the 

evolution of management education has been discussed 

for Europe and Mediterranean Europe by most of the 

academicians in management field since 1960s.1 

Expanding markets, new business fields, social changes, 

increased mobilization and e-business activities need 

more talented and professional labor force. Most of the 

business schools try to educate students according to 

needs of business environment, but the education style 

still remains as absolute teaching for the students. 

Traditional classroom teaching has started to be 

ineffective for inexperienced students to develop 

organizational understandings (Shaw and Fisher, 1999). 

This study will discuss the history of management 

education in Turkey, different applications to restore 

higher education in different countries and a critical 

perspective of managerial thought in today’s business 

life. 

 

2. History of Management Education in Turkey 

The lack of critical thinking is an obstacle for 

management education in Turkey. Ozcan (2012), 

mentioned this problem by showing the immaturity of 

critical management studies which has been made so far. 

To understand the management education and its 

problems, it is an obligation to assess the history of 

management education of Turkey. 

 

The seeds of management education in Turkey 

have started to grow up in 1882 by constituting “higher” 

school of commerce in Istanbul. The education style of 

this school was affected from French “grandes écoles” 

because of the cyclical environment of Ottoman Empire. 

After the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, this 

school has become a faculty of Istanbul University and 

the effect of Continental Europe had been noticed in the 

style of education. In the second evolution of 

management education, the “higher” commerce schools 

had transformed into Academies of Economics and 

Commerce and the French school effect left its place to 

German effect in the management education area. In the 

third evolution, with the constitution of Middle East 

Technical University and Robert College, the 

management education was started to be dominated by 

the American style. The government’s economic 

applications and post-war conditions of the world also 

affected the country’s education system. The new 

universities had a new position in the education system 

of country by applying American management education 

style and teaching the courses in English. Moreover, the 

business environments in the country demand more 

professional labor force and managers to employ in 

developing industrial firms (Kipping, Usdiken, and Puig, 

2004; Sargut, 2009). In accord with these improvements, 

the education style has evolved to train individuals for 

managerial positions of the private sector organizations 

in management field (Üsdiken, 2009). It has been 

accepted by most of the academicians in management 

field that Turkey’s late industrialization and 

financialization has served the domination of American 

style in managerial thought and education (Kipping, 

Usdiken, and Puig, 2004; Sargut 2009). Actually, the 

influence of American style in managerial thought and 

education was perceived in Europe as well.  However, 

the European style was seen as more abstract cause of 

“business economics” and tended to be less disposed to 

train professional management (Kast, 1965). 

 

3. Praxis for a New Style and Critical Aspects 

In the post-industrial era, the economic crisis 

and financial scandals in business environment have 

made the managerial thinkers to re-think about the 

importance of values in management education. The 

transition of the values and ethics to management 

students has also been a problem for academicians. A 

special framework has been mentioned by Moosmayer 

and Bode (2010) to support a worldwide comprehension 

of different cultures and traditions about the effect of 

academicians on the values. This is to make clear precise 

hypotheses about academics’ influence on students and 

business environments and to develop management 

education (Moosmayer and Bode, 2010). This framework 

can contribute a different perspective for Turkish 

academia in management field. In the shadow of market 



Volume 6 No 2 (2016)   |   ISSN 2158-8708 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/emaj.2016.110  |   http://emaj.pitt.edu 

 

 

 

Ayşe Çoban Kayacı 

Emerging Markets Journal | P a g e  |39 

oriented view, the business life has sheltered all the risks 

of corrupt practices and financial scandals in Turkey as 

well. Focusing on managerial values and ethics would 

brighten the students for the practical side of 

management field and their future work lives. Students 

can achieve to assimilate the importance of values and 

ethics with the help of independent knowledge. 

Furthermore, it is globally very important to have an 

MBA degree and MBA holders have their own “habitus” 

which is highly oriented with “market capitalism”. There 

is a risk for MBA programs to reinforce unethical values 

and practices of “habitus”. For instance, the accreditation 

institutions can be a double edged sword for business 

schools and MBA programs to replace unethical 

standards and practices or to maintain preconceived 

values (Vaara and Faÿ, 2011). The research of 

O’Donovan (2010) in UK has shown that most of the 

undergraduate students in management field tend to 

gather absolute and transitional knowledge. The students 

at the undergraduate level generally want the definite 

knowledge about the lectures from their teachers or they 

try to categorize the knowledge in their lectures 

(O'Donovan, 2010). This is an alert for managerial 

thought, since it ignores to criticize the knowledge of 

management discipline. The students may have so many 

problems in their work life when they would try to solve 

the conflicts with absolute knowledge they got from their 

undergraduate education.  

  

Unfortunately, critical thinking and learning is 

not so common in Turkish society. The cultural context 

and social factors may have an important effect on 

epistemological beliefs (O'Donovan, 2010). Because of 

this effect, the examples or cases in management 

education classes would not be so applicable for the 

students. Even if the students get the absolute 

information from their undergraduate classes, they would 

fall in trouble to connect real life situations. Most of the 

cases and applications in management classes are from 

American books or articles and most of the times the 

solutions can’t respond local needs of business life. 

  

Another study has been offered by Rousseau 

(2007) to assemble the practical and theoretical side of 

management education. An online access portal that 

helps the researchers, educators and practitioners to meet 

and discuss the practical questions, problems and 

research results is called as the Evidence Based 

Management Collaboration (EBM) (Rousseau, 2007). 

Rousseau (2007) thinks that EBM can be a pivot to 

transfer the abstract knowledge of organization science 

into the practices of business life. This praxis would be 

beneficial for Turkish management education to 

constitute a local case database to respond our local 

problems since the imported cases in management 

classes try to impose an American managerial thought. 

The changes in management education would need an 

institutional policy to sustain the new style of education. 

However, universities with powerful and 

professionalized faculty members may resist to develop 

an institutional policy and follow it (Kraatz, Ventresca, 

and Deng, 2010). 

 

It has become so common to constitute 

partnerships among business schools. Most of the 

business schools in the world (about 65 %) have 

developed partnerships with U.S. business schools. 

According to reports, European business schools have the 

highest level of this ratio by having one or more partners 

for each business school from all over the world (Bruner 

and Iannarelli, 2011). Even though adopting the 

management education into the local needs of business 

environment is important, Turkish business schools 

should create new partnerships especially with European 

business schools to eliminate American style 

management education and to bring a more critical 

perspective to the field. There is evidence about the lack 

of studies for critical management thinking in the 

management field of Turkey. Ozcan (2012) has proved 

that by his study about investigating the proceedings 

which was presented in National Management 

Organization Conference since 1993. The results of the 

study have shown that there have been a high level of 

studies about bullying and mobbing, gender based power 

relations, discrimination, sexual harassment, 

managerialism, etc. which can’t be ignored since the 

topics are related to critical thinking. However, these 

topics generally have focused on “behavioral” part of 

management field. The study shows that Turkish 

management education has grown an adequate critical 

approach in behavioral field of organizational study and 

these attempts probably would have reflections in 

classroom teaching (Ozcan, 2012). Students should be 

imposed to criticize about the facts of business life by 

expanding the topics about power relationships, 

discrimination, sexual harassment and performance based 

evolutions in management departments. Even though 

there has been a spreading for cognitive approaches in 

the latest years, the academicians should focus on the 

critical aspects of these approaches.  

 

Besides the need for critical thinking in 

management studies and education in Turkey, 

management scholars should focus much more on social 

responsibility issues in organizations. It has been 

criticized that managers don’t use social sciences for 

social responsibility in management and they prefer to 

struggle with age-old problems of costs and employee 

loyalty by the help of social sciences. At this point, social 

scientists have been seen as the collaborators of 

managerial elites to dominate the employees (Baritz, 

2005). Furthermore, management education is seen as so 

ideological because of its assistance to foster the internal 

solidarity of management and to support managerial 

authority over subordinates (Anthony, 2005). Since the 

cognitive approaches have imposed the individuals to 



Volume 6 No 2 (2016)   |   ISSN 2158-8708 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/emaj.2016.110  |   http://emaj.pitt.edu 

 

 

A New Path for Management Education in an Emerging Country 

Page |40| Emerging Markets Journal 

behave in performance focused base, critical 

understandings can eliminate the pressures for the 

individuals. In addition to social responsibility issues, 

sustainability in management education could be 

significant for both practical and theoretical aspects. 

Sustainability can be achieved by curricular and co-

curricular learning as well as effective decision makers in 

business schools (Rusinko, 2010). Unfortunately, 

Turkish business schools generally suffer from chopping 

and changing curriculums according to decision makers’ 

education profiles rather than the needs of students and 

business life. However, sustainability has become a 

popular issue for business firms, which management 

scholars deal with. There is an urgent need for arranging 

curriculums for sustainability oriented view in lectures 

and contribute to it by supporting both students and 

academic staff practice sustainability activities. Likewise, 

graduating managers of future should have basic skills 

and knowledge about research and development oriented 

firms. At this point, it has been highly recommended by 

scholars to develop curriculums with the help of science 

courses. Science courses are seen as good sources for 

cultivating critical thinking and inductive reasoning of 

management students. Collaboration with science and art 

faculties is seen as a must to have rich curriculums in 

management or business departments and schools 

(Ledley and Holt, 2014). In the manner of collaboration 

with other scientific fields, Turkish business schools or 

management departments still lack a lot. Most of the 

students cannot show success in math lessons and there 

have been so few examples which have a philosophy of 

science lecture at undergraduate level. 

 

 Moreover, business schools have shown a great 

loyalty to the benefits of high status shareholders until 

this time (Emiliani, 2006). This situation is similar in 

Turkey. At this point, Emiliani (2006) has suggested that 

business schools should train their students for 

considering all stakeholders’ benefits in organizations 

and a “human-economic” approach should be accepted to 

designate the principles for distributing the benefits. In 

Turkish management field, the lack of critical 

management studies has strengthened the domination of 

supporting top management privileges and a “human-

economic” approach for management classes is also 

applicable for a better education style. Another advice of 

Emiliani (2006) for improving management education is 

teaching students to focus on not only the results, but 

also the processes of activities in every department of 

organizations. A systematic approach would be 

beneficiary to fully understand all of the operations and 

problems in the organizations (Emiliani, 2006). System 

thinking has become popular in management field since 

1960s and a holistic view has brought to light so many 

managerial problems (Scott, 2003). However, when it 

comes to management education, the classroom teaching 

methods and academic research become distinct. It 

should become common to consider the topics of 

organizational field with the relations among other study 

areas. It is known that organizational field is a trans-

disciplinary study area, but in classroom teaching it can 

be hard to understand the relations of topics in one 

lecture with other lectures of the area. The lecturers of 

organizational field should build up the bridges between 

Organizational Behavior classes and Human Resources 

Management classes or Strategic Management classes 

and Organization Theory classes. By this way, 

management students can overcome business problems in 

their future life. However, business schools and 

management scholars cannot be adequate for bridging the 

theoretical and practical sides of the field since they are 

reluctant to learning. Most of the business schools are not 

reflexive and they don’t adopt the idea of “education for 

change” rather than “change in education”. In the present 

view of change idea in business schools, individuals can 

learn through higher education. On the other hand, in 

organizational learning literature, change is possible with 

learning within higher education. Most of the business 

schools in western countries are highly concerned with 

ranking issues which are short term problems. It is 

similar for Turkish business schools. They are interested 

to gather the attention of successful students in university 

entrance exams and make them to choose their 

institutions among other schools. However, having the 

students with greatest scores is not sustainable to be a 

prestigious business school in the long run. Some of 

prestigious business schools in Turkey suffer from 

awkward organization structures and can fail to meet the 

expectations of successful students. This awkwardness 

generally results from academicians’ and management’s 

behavior for not being open to criticism. Individual 

learning cannot be separated from organization learning, 

especially for education institutions (Solitander et al., 

2011).  

 

 In addition to considering all shareholders’ 

benefits, human resources development topic is 

important for management education. Holden and Griggs 

(2011) have claimed that HRD is usually taught with a 

managerialist perspective. Their study has supported the 

idea of evaluating the human resources politics more in 

human resources management classes to prepare the 

students for real business problems. The condition of 

having a more critical curriculum has been partially 

achieved in their business department. Also, another 

claim of them is that, having a critical curriculum can 

provide advanced critical management thinking in their 

classes (Holden and Griggs, 2011). This approach should 

be considered with the need for critical studies for 

management in Turkey and can be applied to improve 

Human Resources Management courses. Since there has 

not been enough research outputs about Human 

Resources Management topics and graduate programs in 

Turkish universities, organizations may abstain from 

getting support of management scholars. As a result, 

most of business organizations may prefer global 



Volume 6 No 2 (2016)   |   ISSN 2158-8708 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/emaj.2016.110  |   http://emaj.pitt.edu 

 

 

 

Ayşe Çoban Kayacı 

Emerging Markets Journal | P a g e  |41 

research outputs about Human Resources Management 

problems and still suffer the inconsistency of solutions 

with Turkish cultural context (Aycan, 2001). These 

problems are another indicator for insufficient and 

reluctant management education as well as organizations 

in Turkish universities. As mentioned before, business 

schools and scholars should be more open to criticism 

and not undermine the needs of practical side. 

Academicians may try to collaborate with practitioners 

when conducting research in Human Resources 

Management and other fields of management education. 

 

 Another important point for management 

education is its relation with research field. Studies have 

shown that, a positive correlation can be seen between 

high quality teaching and high quality research (James, 

2011). This point should also be considered for the 

Turkish case. High quality research has generally been 

made possible by old business schools or private 

universities. The business schools in Anatolian 

universities still struggle for qualified academic stuff for 

high quality research and education. A more 

homogeneous distribution of academic staff has to be 

accomplished for the future of business education. 

 

4. Conclusion 

 Most of the examples of this paper have been 

derived from American or British academic studies. The 

content of these studies have an aim of improving the 

management education in business schools. As expected 

from American style, the advices and applications of 

education improvement studies are generally firm or 

stakeholder oriented. On the other hand, studies from 

British academicians have opened a new direction for 

management education with a critical and individual 

oriented perspective. Most of the praxis and suggestions 

in this paper depend on the critical perspective of British 

or European style in managerial thought. However, 

developing and changing economic conditions of Turkey 

can’t be isolated from American type managerial 

thought. Because of this situation, management lecturers 

and academicians have to combine these different styles 

to consider the beneficiaries of all the stakeholders in 

organizations. New research areas should be filtered with 

a critical thought not to exploit lower level employees in 

business life. A more comprehensive study can be made 

to understand additional needs of management education 

in Turkey. Curriculums of business schools would be key 

evidences for a future study.  

 

 

 

 

 

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Notes 

The idea is derived from the articles of 

Kipping, Üsdiken and Puig (2004) and 

East (1965), finance and law. 367-389.