About

Rakesh Khurana is the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development at Harvard Business School and also serves as a Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His academic background includes a B.S. from Cornell University, and an A.M. in Sociology along with a Ph.D. in Organization Behavior from Harvard University. Prior to his graduate studies, he was a founding member of Cambridge Technology Partners, working in Sales and Marketing. His research is primarily focused on how authority, legitimacy, and responsibility are constructed within modern institutions, with early work centered on executive labor markets and CEO succession processes in large, publicly held corporations. Drawing on macro-organizational theory, network analysis, and field-based research, he challenges conventional accounts that attribute executive turnover solely to firm performance and incentives, emphasizing instead the social embeddedness of CEO succession involving networks, intermediaries, institutional norms, and power relations. His notable work, including the book 'Searching for a Corporate Savior,' demonstrates that the external CEO labor market is highly structured and exclusionary, reproducing elite control under the guise of meritocracy. Building on these themes, his subsequent research examines the evolution of management as a profession, the legitimacy of managerial roles, and how management education and professional management have developed historically. His work explores how managerial legitimacy emerges from the relationship between business schools and the corporate workplace, and how globalization influences the moral and institutional foundations of American business leadership. Additionally, Khurana investigates institutional transformations within universities, analyzing their bureaucratization and resistance to reform, and proposing pathways for aligning governance with core academic missions. His contributions extend to understanding the social context of business leadership, the role of business schools, and the legitimacy of management as a profession, with significant publications including 'From Higher Aims to Hired Hands' and 'Searching for a Corporate Savior,' as well as collaborative efforts on leadership theory and pedagogy.

Research topics

• Business
• Political science
• Sociology
• Public relations
• Economics

Selected publications

• Designing New Digital Divides: Tech Platforms’ Myth of Inclusion Drives Exclusion

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2019-08-01

  article

  This panel symposium will bring together the CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty along with other leading experts in academia, public policy, and industry to consider the capabilities and responsibilities of executives, board members, public policy officials, and educators regarding our infatuation with and trust in pervasive social media platforms while still endorsing First Amendment free speech principles. How do revelations of negligent privacy protection, interference with democratic elections, the promotion of hate speech, the manipulation of outrage through intentional “false news” propaganda, and the intentional cultivation of societal strife across ethnic groups affect our understanding of inclusive organizations?

  PublisherDOI

• <i>High Tech and High Touch: Headhunting, Technology, and Economic Transformation</i>. By James E. Coverdill and William Finlay. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2017. Pp. 204. $95.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

  American Journal of Sociology · 2019-06-24

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Lofty Ambitions, Unfulfilled Promise: Business Education, Professionalism, and Ethical Leadership

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2018-07-09 · 1 citations

  article

  Duff McDonald's 2017 book, The Golden Passport, echoes many of the themes discussed by Rakesh Khurana in his 2007 book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, and his 2008 SIM/SBE Keynote Address, including the

  PublisherDOI

• Leading socially responsible, value-creating corporations

  2017-09-29 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  We explore the role of the corporate leader in creating value for stakeholders throughout three eras: one of naïve idealism, one of naïve cynicism, and an emerging era of rugged idealism. We explain how the role of the corporate leader and society’s perceptions of this role have changed and how leaders may now be able to create shared value for all stakeholders. Cases of leaders who created value or merely distributed value in each era are explored. Although there is no framework yet for how leaders can create value for all stakeholders, we note that a key theme among the companies illustrated is that each was able to align stakeholders’ interests to a degree that made the satisfaction of multiple needs not only possible, but profitable. We conclude by emphasizing the role of business schools in socializing business leaders and how these schools, by incorporating a more stakeholder-centric approach in their curricula, research, and culture, can develop leaders who are willing and able to address the diverse values and interests of their companies’ stakeholders. If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, February 28, 2014

  PublisherDOI

• The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital

  History of Political Economy · 2017-06-01 · 66 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper traces the career of Michael Jensen, a Chicago finance PhD turned Harvard Business School professor to reveal the intellectual and social conditions that enabled the emergence and institutionalization of what we call the “neoliberal common sense of capital,” what others have called the “shareholder value” view of the American firm. Jensen's work was embraced by a generation of corporate raiders aggressively advancing new financial practices and discourses. His contribution, commonly understood as “agency theory,” was intertwined with the transformations in corporate management and governance of the last decades of the twentieth century—from the junk bond market in the 1980s to the exponential growth of CEO pay in the 1990s to the shareholder value management strategies of the 2000s. While debates about the spread of neoliberal ideas and governance tools have largely centered on the transformations of the state and international institutions or the role of actively organized intellectual networks, this essay emphasizes the importance of identifying specific carriers of particular transformations within the space of American “business discourse.”

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Working of the Anti-Monopoly Law in India: an Exploratory Study and some Comparative Insights

  Developments in marketing science: proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science · 2015-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Leading Amidst Competing Technical and Institutional Demands: Revisiting Selznick’s Conception of Leadership

  2015-03-30 · 68 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This paper explores how Selznick’s approach to leadership can inform contemporary organizational theory and research. Drawing on Selznick’s writing in Leadership in Administration and related works, we characterize organizations as simultaneously technical entities pursuing economic goals and value-laden entities pursuing non-economic goals arising from their members and their role in society. These two aspects of organizations are deeply intertwined and in continual tension with one another, and the essential task of leadership is to uphold both – protecting and promoting values while also meeting technical imperatives. To do so, leaders establish a common purpose that includes values and ideals not just technical imperatives, they create structures and practices that embody this purpose, and they make organizational decisions and personal behavioral choices that are consistent with this purpose. We consider each task of leadership in turn, showing how Selznick’s ideas enrich and extend contemporary research on competing institutional logics, organizational design, culture, and identity, leadership, and meaningful work.

  PublisherDOI

• Management as a Profession

  Wiley Encyclopedia of Management · 2015-01-21 · 56 citations

  otherSenior author

  Abstract Assertions of managerial professionalism date as far back as the origins as management as an occupation in the late nineteenth century, as managers of large corporations presented themselves as stewards of the nation's economic resources. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, first a managerial and then a market logic pushed aside the professional identity of managers. As a result, management as currently practiced does not qualify as a genuine profession, reflected in its failure to develop the key criteria that define a profession: a specialized body of knowledge; a formal system that certifies that individuals have mastered that knowledge; a commitment to the public good; and a code of ethics with means to enforce it. The article concludes that the development of a more genuine professional identity and ethos for management could go some distances toward reorienting the practice of management away from self‐interest and profit‐maximization to an approach that seeks to create sustainable, value‐creating economic enterprises that benefit society as a whole.

  PublisherDOI

• Studying Elites in Institutions of Higher Education

  2015-11-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Leading socially responsible, value-creating corporations

  2015-09-11 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Christodoulos Stefanadis

  Athens Medical Center

  132 shared

• M. Boehm

  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

  64 shared

• Dimitris Tousoulis

  National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

  60 shared

• T. Murohara

  Charles University

  40 shared

• U. Laufs

  Scunthorpe General Hospital

  40 shared

• Nicolas Danchin

  Hôpital Européen Georges-Pompidou

  40 shared

• C. Torp-Pedersen

  Scunthorpe General Hospital

  38 shared

• C. Tsioufis

  Scunthorpe General Hospital

  36 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Sociology

  Harvard University

  1998

• M.A., Sociology

  Harvard University

  1993

• B.A., Sociology

  Harvard University

  1991