What follows is an outline of a paper that would review and revisit the themes of Barley and Kunda (1992) and Eastman and Bailey (1998); the idea would be to submit it for the AoM conference this summer in Montreal and then revise it for journal publication:
a) Intro--paper theme--a new look at the historical, cyclical, materialist classification of management scholarship by B & K and the different historical classification of management and legal scholarship by E & B, which is non-cyclical and idealist;
b) Predicting the recent past--does B & K's approach or E & B's work better to explain trends in management scholarship and education since the 1990s when B & K and E & B wrote? How about trends in legal education?
c) The basic dichotomy between utilitarianism and deontology; the prevalence of the former in management and of the latter in law;
d) Utilitarian-Benthamite and deontological-Kantian approaches to mediating the fact-value antinomy;
e) How management with its predominantly utilitarian mediation surfaces methodological "rationality of means" value competition and represses substantive "rationality of ends" value competition; how law with its predominantly deontological mediation surfaces substantive value competition and represses methodological value competition;
f) The greater salience of business ethics as a field relative to legal ethics; why the utilitarian mediation of management leads to the rise of business ethics and why the deontological mediation of law leaves legal ethics as a backwater;
g) The growth of a methodological split in the legal academy with the rise of law and economics; management in that respect as pointing the way for law;
h) Relevance of the analysis for management education;
i) Conclusion.