management research & management practice
TRANSCRIPT
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?