Late Business School Professor Melded Business and Social Science

Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus Charles J. “Chuck” Christenson, a noted expert in managerial accounting and control, died last week of natural causes at his home in Cambridge, Mass., at the age of 80.

Christenson, an active member of the Business School faculty for over 40 years, became a renowned and prolific pioneer in the field of Business Administration over the course of his career. At the Business School, Christenson taught first-year M.B.A. courses in managerial economics and control.

During his time at Harvard, Christenson’s research focused mostly on the applications of the social sciences to business and managerial economics.

“Chuck didn’t write a lot, but what he did was related to what type of knowledge you can gain from doing this type of social science research,” said Baker Foundation Professor Robert S. Kaplan of the Harvard Business School. “He was a student and a follower of writers like Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper who taught about what you can know and how you learn it from scientific investigation.”

“Chuck strove to apply those ideas to the types of social science and management science research that was being conducted at business schools,” he added.

According to Kaplan, Christenson was responsible for the introduction of quantitative methods of research to the Business School curriculum at Harvard and throughout the country.

Born on Sept. 25, 1930 in Chicago, Christenson began his academic career with a bachelor’s degree in industrial and labor relations from Cornell, according to a University press release. Christenson would go on to receive an MBA and a doctorate from the Business School.

Following a 2-year stint with the U.S. Army, where he contributed to the development of the Army’s first cost-based budgetary control system, Christenson returned to the Business School to pursue a doctorate in business administration. By 1961, he had joined the faculty, by 1968 he had been promoted to full professor, and by 1980 he had been named to the Royal Little chair—a position he would hold for the remainder of his life.

Though rather reserved and shy in disposition, Christenson managed to leave an impression on some of his colleagues.

Kaplan described Christenson as an introverted man with a dry sense of humor that showed up in seminars.

“Some of his researchers told us about how they didn’t like to do field research because they ‘couldn’t learn anything from a sample size of one,’” Kaplan recalled. “But Chuck said, ‘You know, we have only one solar system, but we’ve still learned a lot from studying it in great detail.’”