The schizophrenic life of an academic
Today’s Wall Street Journal had a fascinating article about the heated competition to become America’s Top College Professor. Aside from being personally inspiring (as someone who spent a lot of years trying to figure out the right classroom style), the story also points to the fundamental schizophrenia behind the conventional University (and by extension, business school) career track. Good teaching obviously matters to students—it can make the difference in what a student chooses to pursue in life, and can just as easily shut a particular subject or interest down. But, does good teaching matter to universities?
They all say that it does. But one could make the argument that teaching suffers when schools prioritize something else—their status and reputations—over what goes on in their classrooms. Indeed, as M. Harmon suggested in a wonderful article (Harmon, M. M. 2006. Business research and Chinese patriotic poetry: How competition for status distorts the priority between research and teaching in U. S. business schools. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 5(2): 234-243), schools’ ‘quest for status’ can consume resources and take time that obviously is then not available for teaching. The quest for status is reflected in an academic reward and prestige system that is heavily tilted toward scholarly publication over other forms of impact. Indeed, as the WSJ article points out, it is a system that resulted in more than 100 academic books being published on Shakespeare alone!
I’m a big believer in the power and importance of research—indeed, other than those of us whose jobs are blessedly focused on research, who has time to think these days? However, a reward system designed to produce high volumes of publications is apt to do just that, even if teaching gets a lower priority.
It’s therefore doubly refreshing to hear from those who have somehow managed the academic walk-the-plank: high quality publications and award-winning teaching. These top teachers deserve our considerable admiration.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on November 13, 2009
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Management Techniques actually work!
If you didn’t catch the article by Scott Thurm in today’s Wall Street Journal, you should check it out.
He reports that researchers from Stanford University, the London School of Economics and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that solid management techniques, yes, the kind we teach in business schools, actually make a difference to the performance of manufacturing plants. They found that better managed facilities employed management tools that helped them achieve better performance. It’s comforting to know that the research we do and the resulting tools and techniques can have a good performance effect.
Among the studies’ more intersting finding is that (for now) factories in the US are better managed than those in other countries. But - that gap could soon close, they warn.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on September 08, 2008
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The field of management enslaved by theory?
Don Hambrick, one of the management field’s leading academics comments on the way the field relies on theory in a recent Business Week:
Viewpoint January 13, 2008, 4:06PM EST
The Theory Fetish: Too Much of a Good Thing?
Management journals demand contributions to theory. But slavish devotion to theory inhibits other valuable research
by Donald C. Hambrick
Recently I was at a brown-bag seminar where a pair of faculty colleagues in our business school’s department of management sought advice about a preliminary research idea. We all quickly agreed that their research question was fascinating and would be of great interest to both academics and practicing managers. The only problem: The presenters had no theory.
No theory! Everyone knows that the top scholarly journals in management require without exception that manuscripts make contributions to theory. And so we spent the entire session that day going through our collective mental catalogues of theories. Theories that I’d never heard of were proposed. Things got a little frenzied: “Good God, there must be a theory that we can latch onto,” someone said.
Losing the Trees for the Forest
Because these researchers are savvy about academic publishing, their project likely will appear some day in a leading journal. But the straightforward beauty of the original research idea will probably be largely lost. In its place will be what we too often see in our journals and what undoubtedly puts non-scholars off: a contorted, misshapen, inelegant product, in which an inherently interesting phenomenon has been subjugated to an ill-fitting theoretical framework.
Many nice things can be said about theory. Theories help us organize our thoughts, generate coherent explanations, and improve our predictions. But they are not ends in themselves, and in academic management we have allowed obsession with theory to compromise the larger goal of understanding. 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.
Happily, our sister disciplines in business education—accounting, finance, and marketing—are not afflicted to the extent that those of us in management are. But the breadth and variety of the subjects that fall under the category of management exceed those of the other business school academic departments; a number of MBA-granting institutions, in fact, call themselves schools of management. If management scholars fail to connect with real-life managers or management scholarship is shrugged off by managers as irrelevant—both of which happen with regularity—the credibility of all business academe suffers.
Management’s idolization of theory began after two blue-ribbon reports of the late 1950s, from the Carnegie and Ford foundations, levied withering attacks on business schools for their lack of academic sophistication. As a result, in the 1960s and 1970s schools adopted a new commitment to drawing from basic academic disciplines (e.g., economics and psychology), and to analytic rigor, science, and—above all—theory. Since then, however, other fields have relaxed their single-mindedness about theory, while management scholars have not.
Trapped in Inertia?
To confirm this, I recently analyzed the 120 articles published in 2005 by three leading scholarly management journals—the Academy of Management Journal, the Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Science. Every one contained some variation of the word “theory.” In contrast, only 78% of the 178 articles published in 2005 in the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Finance, and Accounting Review contained those words. Moreover, they appeared 18 times, on average, in each management article, but only eight times, on average, in each non-management article. Finally, about two-thirds of the articles in the management journals had section headings that trumpeted “theory,” compared with one in five headings in the non-management journals.
I must admit to uncertainty about the reason for this continuing fetish; perhaps we in management academe are simply trapped in our own inertia. But at what a cost! To illustrate, let me take a hypothetical case from another field that has nothing to do with management or business.
Imagine it is the 1930s, and I am an epidemiologist who has a hunch that cigarette smoking is bad for people. Smoking is stylish and has even been portrayed as healthful, so nagging suspicions to the contrary can make me seem a bit of a crackpot. But I persevere, and, in a series of matched-sample studies, I find recurring evidence that smoking is associated with an array of serious health maladies. As an epidemiologist who is not a biologist, I have no clear insights about the central mechanisms at work, but, convinced my findings should be reported, I submit them to a prominent journal.
If the journal applied the criteria that prevail now in academic management, my paper would be rejected.
Scholarship Needs a Broader View
Note that I am not proposing that our top journals should lower their standards, only that they should shift them. Reviewers would still apply stringent requirements in terms of argumentation, acknowledgment of relevant literature, technical adequacy, and readability. But the requirement for a “contribution to theory” would be replaced with this test: Does the paper have a high likelihood of stimulating future research that will substantially alter managerial theory or practice?
With this criterion in place, some pieces that would be published under current standards would no longer qualify, leaving space in our most elite journals for more consequential articles of other types. In addition, second-tier journals should be inaugurated for the principal purpose of testing existing theories. Today, only papers that have brand-new theoretical angles will be accepted by our top journals; as a result, the vast majority of published ideas in our field are submitted to no tests at all; only a handful are tested even once; and fewer still are tested in multiple ways. If we are to develop a body of knowledge that managers can use for evidence-based decisions, we must allow for the requisite evidence to accumulate.
Let me be clear: Theory is critically important for our field, and we should remain committed to it. And, for sure, the greatest acclaim will always go to those who develop breakthrough theories. But there are other ways for knowledge to advance, and it is long past time we gave them their due.
Donald C. Hambrick is the Smeal Chaired Professor of Management at Penn State University and a former president of the Academy of Management. This article is adapted from a longer piece in the current Academy of Management Journal.
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Business Development Resources for New Entrepreneurs
As a sometime professor of entrepreneurship, I’m frequently approached by would-be entrepreneurs for help in fleshing out their business plans. While I enjoy doing this, it could very easily become a full-time job! I’ve therefore put together a resource list for new entrepreneurs that are free or very low cost, to use during the business definition stage of their ventures and to help them get those first few critical transactions going. Here are some of the resources I point people to:
Small Business Development Centers
Small Business Development Centers are usually associated with universities. These offer training and consulting services, courses, and sometimes contacts and connections to venture capitalists and angel investors. The main web page, including a location locator can be found
here.
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Columbia Faculty on “What is the Entrepreneurial Mindset”
Entrepreneurship is one of those terms that’s a bit like the old saw about art or pornography - “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it”. If you want to bring a collection of entrepreneurship academics to a screeching halt, just ask the question “What is entrepreneurship?” This will provoke such a long and heated debate that all other purposes of coming together get lost in the shuffle. This has gone on at least as long as the 18 years I’ve been in the field.
It was therefore interesting for Columbia’s entrepreneurship center to collect different faculty members’ perspectives on the notion of entrepreneurial mindset in one place. You’ll find their definitions and observations here.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on December 20, 2007
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