Rethinking Scholarly Impact in Business Schools
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It’s time that business schools take a broader approach to assessing what it means to have scholarly impact. We advocate for three main changes. First, business schools shouldn’t just measure impact from within academia but outside it as well. For example, rather than counting up the number of times a professor’s articles have been cited by other academics, we should also be looking at how often the work is cited or used by students, practicing managers, policy-makers, and in articles (e.g., news, periodicals, magazines, podcasts, etc.) that are mass-distributed to these multiple stakeholders. Doing this is called taking a “pluralistic approach to scholarly impact.”
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Second, we believe academics should focus on conducting research that positively impacts business and society, or what a global multidisciplinary team of leading management scholars calls “responsible research.” Responsible research has been described as research that balances the interests of shareholders with the social and economic outcomes of companies, uses rigorous research methods to understand puzzling local phenomena, and seeks truth above all else by using ethical research methods. Metrics that capture the extent to which research achieves these goals could be additional ways to assess scholarly impact.
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Third, given that any research study is part of an ecosystem, it is incumbent upon all stakeholders –– scholarly researchers, business school administrators, funding agencies, government, practicing managers, and journal editors –– to work together in a concerted way to encourage and reward responsible research and move beyond the limited approaches to conducting and disseminating management research that are currently used.
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What would these things look like in practice? On measurement, business schools could begin to look at the following metrics: the number of invites to highly visible business events; number of practitioner publications, including popular press books; media coverage in outlets that are viewed or read by a broad (non-academic as well as academic) audience; requests for time from industry or government agencies; number of presentations to practitioner events and communities; the amount of external funding received from well-known funding agencies such as the National Science or Kauffman Foundations; and partnerships with external stakeholders, such as local and state legislatures or other policy makers. Each of these metrics is a reflection that a management scholar’s research has helped or enlightened communities beyond academia.
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Business schools could also rely on new technologies to measure a professor’s impact. They might take into account the following: inclusion of work in digital libraries; number of downloads of scholarly articles; online engagement, both on social media and with fellow researchers on sites like academia.edu, and ResearchGate; mentions in Wikipedia; and discussions in news outlets, such as newspapers, blogs, and websites. Business schools could use web-based tools known as “altmetrics” to collect data on how often research is mentioned in these outlets. Assessing academics against these kinds of metrics or indicators would result in progress against the second change we are advocating for: more relevant and useful research.
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Unfortunately, scholars who have benefited from the way scholarly impact is traditionally assessed may resist seeing scholarship assessed more pluralistically. Moreover, even if individual scholars, their departments, or schools were to see value in this new way of assessing professors, it will be difficult for them to make changes when other institutions continue to evaluate scholars’ records using more traditional methods.
