academics must bridge divide with business - ft
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7/31/2019 Academics Must Bridge Divide With Business - FT
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SOAPBOX April 23, 2012 12:05 am
Academics must bridge
divide with businessBy Kai Peters
Recently Ive attended the 25th anniversary dinner of the
British Academy of Management, the 50th anniversary
dinner of the Journal of Management Studies, a meeting
with David Willetts, minister
of state for universities and science, and a meeting with the
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, convened
by Ernst & Young, the consultancy.
All of them had the same theme: sometimes as an
observation or lament and other times as a genuine
frustration: the link or lack thereof between business
school research and business.
Academia is slightly conflicted. Rationally, academics recognise that business schoolresearch should have intellectual rigour but it must ultimately be useful for business.
Some academics make well-meaning efforts to show correlations or causality between
research and impact. Others, both publicly and privately, complain that the sy stem of
academic publishing is increasingly quantitative and highly specialised, forcing them into
a publish or perish game where careers are defined by articles published in a small
range of journals.
In some institutions, economists and econometricians are redefining traditionally
qualitative fields such as organisational behaviour and human-resource management
into quantitative domains. While this can offer new perspectives, it can also create a
situation where journal articles become patently impenetrable certainly to
practitioners.
Every now and then, either as compulsion or in encouragement, funding bodies try to
promote relevance. For the next research evaluation in the UK, impact has been tossed
around as one of the criteria to evaluate research and subsequently to allocate funding.
Major initiatives such as the recently concluded Advanced Institute of Managementdrew together academics from various institutions with more of a reward than a
punishment approach and tried to encourage intellectually rigorous but practical
research. Very good work was produced, but the link to practice never really
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materialised.
So if funding councils, politicians and academics cannot find a solution to the divorce
between business school research and practice through the above means, is there
another way to frame the discussion that can be more productive?
From my vantage point, the system of business schools is simultaneously consolidating
and disaggregating. At the prestigious end of the spectrum, a winner-takes-all situation
is becoming more apparent and traditional research will no doubt continue. Pleasingly,
some of these institutions also have sufficient resources for what is in effect a translation
department where research is reframed for non-academics. At the other end of the
spectrum, the business school value chain is being disaggregated by newcomers focused
on specific aspects course offerings, online education, executive education or
consulting and where, in some cases, no research at all is taking place.
The market is in flux and the landscape is changing rapidly with UK speculation aboutnot whether universities will fail but how many will. If some players disappear and
heterogeneity emerges, homogenous systems for research encouragement or evaluation
do not seem suitable.
Where funding is concerned, surely targeted funding is sensible and a link between the
academic and the rigorous practice-oriented criteria should be broken. Both are
valuable in their own right.
The link between research and teaching can be split; the German system of funding
with Max Planck Institutes aimed at fundamental research, and Fraunhofer Institutes
aimed at applied research, is outstanding. They are not fully rounded research and
teaching institutes, nor do they pretend to be.
And as for rankings, evaluation and assessment, a nuanced line needs to be taken.
Evaluating schools with different missions and funding models, on the basis of the same
small selection of prestigious journals, is questionable. One size does not fit all.
Kai Peters is chief executive of Ashridge