Management journals’ “slavish devotion to theory” is stifling original research, according to a former president of the world’s largest association devoted to management research and teaching. The critique appears in this week’s BusinessWeek and is adapted from a longer article in the current Academy of Management Journal. Ten leading management scholars weigh in on the issue in a special issue of the journal.

Donald C. Hambrick, a professor of management at Pennsylvania State University and a former president of the Academy of Management, says theories serve some important purposes, such as helping scholars organize their thoughts and generate coherent explanations.

“But they are not ends in themselves, and in academic management we have allowed obsession with theory to compromise the larger goal of understanding,” Mr. Hambrick writes. “Most important, perhaps, it prevents the reporting of rich detail about interesting phenomena for which no theory yet exists but which, once reported, might stimulate the search for an explanation.”

Mr. Hambrick says business schools’ “obsession” with theory began after national reports in the late 1950s that concluded that business schools lacked academic sophistication. He believes the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.

He proposes that management journals, rather than require a “contribution to theory,” instead ask whether a paper has “a high likelihood of stimulating future research that will substantially alter managerial theory or practice.” —Katherine Mangan