Management Education in India ― Perspectives and Practices

This volume merges the larger debate about past achievements, present challenges and the overall purpose of management education. While being sensitive to the global context, it specifically focuses on India. The increasing number of business schools and management institutes offering a plethora of programs is a testimony to the enormous demand that management education spawns. Management education in India has come to be seen as the sure path to professional success and the ultimate guarantee of realization of parental aspirations and societal expectations. 

Given the centrality of management education in public imagination and the attendant institutional expansion, a stocktaking of the field is important. The teaching of management requires serious reorientation and recasting to cater to the present demands of an integrated global order. Against this background, the editors and contributors to the book review the trajectory of the field, critically analyze the methodologies and subject areas covered under management courses; analyze the synchrony or the lack of it between education and reality/practice; and discuss the major institutional and academic roadblocks in current management education and the potential ways to overcome them to create more meaningful courses for students. As such, it is one of the first books of this kind providing a perspective from the Global South.

Manish K. Thakur is Associate Professor at the Public Policy and Management Group of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata. Previously, he was lecturer in sociology at Goa University (1997-2007). His published research deals with aspects of water resources management, rural development knowledge institutions and discourses, research-policy interface, political culture, place of sociology in management education, social movements, intellectual history and indigenous theories.

R. Rajesh Babu is Associate Professor at the Public Policy & Management Group of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. He is current the Editor-in-Chief of Decision - the IIM Calcutta journal of management. He worked as senior legal officer at the international organization, the Asian African Legal Consultative Organization (2003-2009). His research focus and areas of interest include, WTO Law, constitutional law, judicial management, higher education, property rights, investment and arbitration.