The teaching and research programs of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration brought together different groups of reformers. While Dean Edwin F. Gay and his academic colleagues explored new approaches to economics, their partners in the business world promoted various and often conflicting views on management. As carried out in the context of political controversies on regulation, the plan to found a “science of business” revealed the lack of homogeneity of managerial cultures. The most ambitious experiments conducted at the school brought to the fore the rivalry between the cultural traditions of factory work and those prevailing in banking and commercial activities.