Management Research & Management Practice: Is the

Relevance Gap Closing?

Prof Les Worrall

Management Research Centre

UWBS

Sources of management research income and funding to UK Business Schools

0

5

10

15

20

25

95-6 96-7 97-8 98-9 99-0 00-1 01-2 02-3 03-4 04-5

Public Sector

OST

Private Sector

What are these market signals telling us?

• The private sector does not see the ‘value proposition’ of management research (in plain speak, do they think it’s useless?)

• ‘Easier to get’ public funding is displacing harder to get private sector funding

• There are widening gaps between the (private sector) practitioner view and the (public sector) academic view

• The public sector is more amenable to academic research

• Central government exhortations to improve the transfer of knowledge from universities are just not working?

Problems with academic management research

• Evidence that academic management research has had and continues to have little effect on practice

• Low face validity among potential users• A ‘utilisation problem’• A ‘relevance gap’• Management researchers and practitioners

problematise management in different ways • The rigour-relevance “double hurdle” debate

(Pettigrew)

The fad/academic research dilemma

• While academic management research has a ‘utilisation problem’ fads do not – why?

• Even the most harmful of fads can (and do) run rampant

• Are practitioners suckers for sophistry?• What mimetic properties do fads have that

academic research does not possess?• Do managers lack the skills to differentiate

sophistry from knowledge because of how they have been educated in business schools?

Hambrick’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” analogy

Hambrick (1993) – ‘we will find out that things might have worked out very well without us’

Where is our Clarence and our happy ending?

How can we make more of a difference?

What are the problems with management research?

• Seen as problematic by ESRC• Heterogeneous and fragmented• Management not a discipline but a confluence

of fields of enquiry• Lacks scientific identity and has multiple

ontologies and epistemolgies• 2001 RAE over 1,500 journals cited in the

B&M Unit of Assessment

Problems with the social organisation of management research

• Business Schools – the cash cow at the forefront of commodified education

• Economics, psychology etc departments often transferred (unwillingly) into Business Schools

• Tensions between teaching & research due to the intensification of academic work – more (and weaker) students, less funding per student

• Academics’ research time and resources are being increasingly squeezed particularly in B&M

The effect of the RAE

• RAE has reified the traditional academic recognition system

• Publishing in top journals is the ‘gold standard’ • But little applied management research will get

published in the top journals• RAE emphasised transdisciplinarity but very little

was produced• The RAE has distorted management research and

it has swallowed up masses of academic time

The production and transfer of management knowledge

• Huge debates in the late 1990s about the need for new modes of management knowledge production and transfer (paradoxically, since then funding from the private sector has declined faster)

• Became encapsulated in the Mode 1/Mode 2 debate • Debates about how to ‘bridge the gap’ between

those who develop substantive theory and those who attempt to deploy it

• The need for complementary ‘substantive theories’ (episteme) and ‘theories of action’ (techne)

Mode 1 and Mode 2 compared (1)

Aspect Mode 1 Mode 2

Research boundaries

Single discipline, impermeable, paradigmatic conformityOften a-contextual

Transdisciplinary, permeableOften situationally specific

Stakeholders and audience

Academics often within a prescribed discipline and often a much smaller sub-field of ‘experts’

Academics and practitioners

Aim Production of new knowledge, theory building, adding to the base of disciplinary knowledge, replicability, validity

Applied and applicable research Intervention research

Mode 1 and Mode 2 compared (2)

Aspect Mode 1 Mode 2

Organisation Often individualistResearch agenda set autonomouslyHierarchicSubstantial commitment to extant bodies of knowledge

Team basedExternally defined research agendaHeterarchic, networked

Dissemination Peer reviewed journals controlled by other academics, well defined and institutionalised channels, single and limited public

Transfer into practice, practitioner-oriented journals, dissemination often through professional bodies, multiple publics

Usage Production precedes consumptionMay never be used to support practicePotential use does not influence research design

Simultaneous production and consumption: knowledge production and diffusion are interlinked and may be multi-modal

Mode 1 and Mode 2 compared (3)

Aspect Mode 1 Mode 2

Orientation Elitist, exclusive Simultaneous production and consumption: knowledge production and diffusion are interlinked and may be multi-modal

Evaluation criteria

Excellence as determined by peers, disciplinary norms and quality audits (e.g. the RAE)

Pluralist, participatory

Validation Validation through peer review and publicationValidation through an authority structure

Applicability, perceived usefulness by research users and contribution to practice by practitioners

Methodology Defined by the academic discipline

Validation in use

Mode 1 and Mode 2

• Mode 1 is ‘discipline based, university-centred, and dominated by highly trained individuals’; it is ‘primarily cognitive, carefully validated by peer review, and applied later, by others, if it is applied at all’. Huff (2000)

• Mode 2 leads to cultural change in host organisations as ‘managerial choices, endeavours and evaluations are progressively designed with increased scientific awareness’

• With Mode 2 'there is no better method to reduce misleading mimetic behaviour, blind compliance to gurus or fashion in management practice‘ (Hatchuel, 2001)

• Research organisation differs in some French and Swedish business schools with a stronger emphasis on transfer

What new modes of research organisation are needed?

Laboratory based scientists

Clinical practitioners

Health care practitioners

What new modes of research organisation are needed?

Laboratory based scientists

Clinical practitioners

Health care practitioners

Management

What new modes of research organisation are needed?

• Starkey and Madan (2001) identified that significant institutional, structural and cultural changes are needed to engender Mode 2 involving:– The reform of business education– Moving towards interdisciplinarity away from silos– Restructuring academic institutions to improve knowledge

exchange and dissemination– Creating new cross-disciplinary, impact-focused journals– Developing new measures of ‘academic impact’– Creating academic/practitioner forums to facilitate the co-

production of knowledge

The rigour and relevance debate

A typology of research

Mode 1

Mode 2

The Mode 1/Mode 2 debate

• It is not either Mode 1 or Mode 2• We need a more symbiotic relationship between

Mode 1 and 2• There are key issues to be resolved about the

social organisation of management research• There a key questions to be resolved about

academic recognition systems which rightly value rigour but under-value relevance and applicability

A way forward?

• How can we achieve a better integration of:– The scholarship of discovery (research)

– The scholarship of integration (synthesis)

– The scholarship of practice (application)

– The scholarship of teaching (pedagogy)

• ‘the only alternative to any form of ideological absolutism lies in intellectual pluralism, which is likely to lead to both better research and to broadened usefulness’ (Ghoshal, 2005)

Who will be the revelatory Clarence for management research? Will he ever arrive?

Will there be a happy ending? Or will academics become increasingly marginalised in the knowledge production business?