Stability and Change in Managerial Elites: The Institution of Management Education in Norway from 1936 to 2009

Abstract

Market transformations and organisational changes lead to new needs for managerial competence, and such changes are proposed to influence the institution of management education over time. However, in an examination of the educational backgrounds of Norwegian CEOs from 1936 to 2009, this paper finds that changes in the institution of management education cannot be interpreted as direct responses to the organisational and external changes that companies face. This study suggests that the institution of management education is modified rather than fundamentally changed. These modifications can largely be explained by the concepts of institutional solidarity (i.e. dominant agents define what management education is, and this understanding is difficult to change due to path dependencies in the recruitment of top managers) and institutional plasticity (i.e. the “stretching” of established institutional scripts to fit new contexts).