Academy, economy and polity: Betriebswirtschaftslehre in Germany, Denmark and Turkey before 1945

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0007679042000219178

This article examines the evolution of Betriebswirtschaftslehre (BWL) or the science of business economics in Germany, the model country for business education in the early twentieth century and two recipient countries, Denmark and Turkey. The article is principally concerned with the processes and outcomes of creating, in the case of Germany and importing in the case of Denmark and Turkey, a science of business economics. The aim of BWL should not be to develop recipes but to gain insight into economic processes. If useable results were to be produced as by-products on the way, so much the better, they claimed. However, the criterion of usability should never direct the selection of research questions. The divergent outcomes in these two recipient countries, also demonstrate the limits to identical reproduction in international transfers of ideas. This has to do, as the preceding accounts and discussion show, with contextual differences. It also has to do with the likely openness of those on the receiving side to other influences, as in the case of the parallel Anglo-Saxon orientation in Denmark and the French sway in Turkey. The resulting eclecticism at the receiving ends was due to traditions in place from historical influences as well as concurrent infusion of alternative logics and perspectives from other sources. Indeed, this may serve as a sustained source of differentiation between transmitter and receiving countries, because the former, as was the case with Germany in this instance, being at the forefront are likely to remain largely immune to any outside influence.