Most business school research ‘lacks real-world relevance’

Business school academics globally are spending far too much time writing journal articles that do not pursue meaningful real-world effects at a time of dire need for improvements in human conditions, an international analysis has concluded.

The assessment led by Usha Haley, professor of management at Wichita State University, combines results from surveys of hundreds of faculty to portray an academic field that has grown increasingly irrelevant while important concerns about the role of companies in society escalate around it.

Given their potential importance, business schools “should not continue, in the form in which they are currently”, Professor Haley said.

Excessive emphases on journal publication have long raised concern in higher education across various fields. A Times Higher Education survey last year of nearly 10,000 academics found that scholars persist in their overwhelming reliance on measuring each other through metrics such as journal prestige and author citation scores.

Those struggles with real-world relevance, experts warned, stand as especially important in a field such as business, given the power of economic and corporate decisions to affect overall societal well-being.

The Covid crisis, Professor Haley said, has provided a hugely important example of business schools broadly failing in their missions to help society. While various governmental and health organisations warned for years about the risks of a civilisation-altering global pandemic, she said, business schools appear to have largely overlooked the possibility, paving the way for disastrous economic effects once one arrived.

The business field’s top 50 journals, as ranked by The Financial Times, offered only “minuscule coverage” of potential pandemic planning and implications ahead of the Covid outbreak, Professor Haley said. Overall, such journals put “very little emphasis on actually creating revolutionary or disruptive knowledge”, instead preferring “incremental knowledge production”, she said. “It’s the safest route to take,” she explained.

The head of the world’s largest accreditor of business schools endorsed the concern. Business-related research “needs to be spent in the service of a higher good”, said Caryn Beck-Dudley, outgoing president of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. “Otherwise, what are we spending all of our time doing?”

Other critical areas that major business journals and their academic authors rarely address, beyond pandemic preparation, Ms Beck-Dudley said, include water scarcity and desertification, and issues of population and poverty. “The journals where business scholars publish, by and large, are not looking at what business problems are,” she said. “They’re looking at what the discipline considers problems.”

The study of business school behaviour by Professor Haley and her team was published by Sage as a peer-reviewed white paper separate from any of its journals. Professor Haley’s own survey component covered 373 researchers in business and management – mostly from the US, UK and India – of whom 81 per cent said that it was important or highly important that their research have value outside academia, yet with only a third believing their university shared that perspective.

The team cited the THE study and other surveys of business school academics by Sage and the Academy of Management as reinforcing the sense of misguided institutional missions.

Ms Beck-Dudley said that her association was using its accrediting power to try to force improvements. Starting in 2020, it adopted the Sustainable Development Goals defined by the United Nations as yardsticks for the types of topics it wants to see addressed by the business schools it accredits worldwide. Back in 1985, that kind of peer pressure by the AACSB led business schools to universally adopt programmes in ethics, Ms Beck-Dudley said. A similar outcome should now be expected on topics of real-world societal value, as business schools seek their once-every-five-years reaccreditation, she said.

“That’s our way of hopefully pushing pretty hard on our schools,” said Ms Beck-Dudley, former dean of the business schools at Santa Clara, Florida State and Utah State universities.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com