January 14, 2008

Former Academy of Management President Says Journals Stifle Research

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

Comments

1. This is not just true of management journals! As a former communication scholar, I was often dismayed at the lack of creativity journals encourage. Articles are expected to be formulaic, and new ways of approaching material are not well-received. It’s one of the reasons I left academia.

   — AF    Jan 14, 04:04 PM    #

2. This has been coming for a long time. To add, this is going to put more pressure on the AACSB to change they way it operates.

   I have an article in peer review that discusses the antiquated machinery that management education has become… especially on the graduate level. Things have got to change or the MBAs being produced in the traditional setting are going to continue to be behind.

   — BG    Jan 14, 04:11 PM    #

3. If you look back, every five year period, since the founding of the AofM journals/reviews, there has been a change of editors with either the old editor or the new one lamenting that no one reads their publications and no impact on practice has ever been noted from all the research their thousands of scholars perform. Not that these regular lamentations ever impact professorial or tenure-committee practice!

   It would not be an academic journal without such regular lamentations!

   Aw, the poor poor journal, all those articles, all those references cited, all those Structural Equation Modeling (oh! that is out of style?) datasets—for naught?

   I remember Harvard scholars doing 2 decades of publishings of reworded Japanese quality techniques, reworded so as to leave “Japan” out entirely, turning “borrowing from better competitors” into “reinventing re-engineering via theory-led research”. I remember businesses learning 200,000 to 300,000 times more yearly from Japanese quality experts than from US management schools. I remember MIT and Harvard publishing pitiful distortions of Japanese quality methods—distorting the team nature into individualist stuff, distorting the social impacts into technical stuff, distorting the new uses for stats into new stat technique stuff. Never was the cowardice of assimilating the different till what was left was individualist, analytic, elitist enough to fit one’s current ineffective reality without demanding change better demonstrated than by those scholars.

   Why have we so many “scholars of management” anyway? Could it be lust for money? Oh, no! Don’t say it!

   I find reading articles about lust for money (studies of “the creativity” in businesses, by department heads at certain Ivy League institutions; studies well reporting method but chinchy about reporting results, holding back “good stuff” for lucrative private consults) off putting, vulgar, and anti-intellectual, personally.

   We are now in the midst of a global recession, where millions in many nations will pay with lost jobs, kids not going to college for Milton Friedman’s excesses and Greenspan’s wimpyness and intellectual enfeeblement by Ayn Rand. Never was the practical pain of how we teach and what we research better expressed in the misery of ordinary people and their life conditions.

   It is a pitiful, vulgar, greed-filled, academic spectacle of the highest order. It is worthy of tenure in our minds.

   — Richard Tabor Greene    Jan 14, 05:14 PM    #

4. Couldn’t have said it better myself, Richard!

   But now to another nonsense, this time about the postulate of Mr. Hambrick that the editor needs to determine whether a paper has “a high likelihood of stimulating future research that will substantially alter managerial theory or practice.” Rather than hitting the largest drums possible, and demanding every paper to be a super stimulus, a shot in the withering arm of intellectual management, and a jolt delivered by Dr. Volta himself to trigger the muscle plates of the moribound practitioners of the noble art, maybe we ought to simply hope the submitted papers cease to be utterly banal, part with the habit of rehashing the obvious, abstain from creating new linguistic monstrosities, and refrain from insisting on being forever “innovative” and “original.” I have seen, during my fairly long career in the often bewildering world of science and scientific publishing a fair number of “mundane,” utterly “un-original” papers that have been rejected as worthless by several wondrously edified editors. Papers which, after being printed, but not on the illustrious “1st tier” pages so beloved by the academic promotion committees, led to significant downstream discoveries, creation of new academic “haute coutures,” and helping to create not only a new herd of haughty editors, but also a series of “publishable,” and “highly original” works. The latter, naturally, printed in the said 1st tier journals.

   — Dag von Lubitz    Jan 14, 08:19 PM    #

Previous: UMass-Amherst Alumni Association Bucks the System
Next: Ecological Society Urges Research on Biofuels' Downsides