The growth and decline of transportation studies in undergraduate business education from the 1890s to the age of supply chain management in the 1990s

The study of transportation in business undergraduate higher education has grown and declined in the one hundred-year period from the 1890s to the age of supply chain management in the 1990s. This research focuses on freight transportation education.The research develops the evolutionary patterns of transportation education by examining 178 , transportation and related textbooks’ tables of contents and the transportation and related undergraduate business school course listings of nine selected universities from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. In addition, propositions are created to address the factors and drivers that influenced and shaped the patterns of transportation studies in business schools.

Thisresearch utilizes archival methodologies with tools and methods from content analysis and grounded theory to create and organize approximately nine thousand text units. The textbook chapters and the courses are analyzed within two basic categories, transportation modes and business functions, each of which further sub-categorized by decade.

Factors shaping transportation education include the size of transportation companies both in revenues and employment, the regulatory process that existed for most of the time frame researched, and demand for transportation as the UnitedStates economy moved from the industrial to the consumer age. Drivers that shaped transportation studies were early academic economists, the 1959 Ford and Carnegie studies of business school structure, and academics who focused on logistics near the end of the period studied.

Transportation education was found to be highly descriptive and focused on the pragmatic requirements of hiring companies and the extensive regulatory environment. Transportation studies werenotwellgroundedin concepts and theories and so were ill-equipped to respond to the significant shifts caused by deregulation and the growth of comprehensive supply chain management approaches.

Future research should include assessments of transportation knowledge and skills required by the global supply chain environment, as well as the academic relationship between transportation and logistics and supply chain education. In addition, an interdisciplinary framework for transportation studies which includes such fields as engineering, geography, planning and public policy, and netcentric technologies should be pursued.