Not yet the business
From Geoffrey Sampson
Sir: In his enthusiasm about the trend for students to choose business-studies courses, Leo McKinstry (‘Young people are the business’, 12 November) never considers whether that subject is capable of offering the intellectual training that higher education is expected to provide. A few years ago I started teaching business studies and I was astonished to discover how thin the literature of business and management is. Again and again, widely praised contributions prove to consist of just one or two banal ideas stretched out to book length, illustrated with graphics that do nothing to further the reader’s understanding but serve merely to pad out the pages. (This has been the subject of recent articles in both the Economist and Daily Telegraph.) I enjoy teaching and researching the subject — as retirement looms, it is relaxing to work in an area where the competition is weak. But, though there are exceptions, the general standard of academic literature in this field would be laughed out of court in any other discipline I know.
Geoffrey Sampson Uckfield, East Sussex
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