Here is growing concern about the impact of publicly funded research. Scholars are routinely accused of pursuing their pet projects without considering the social or economic benefits of their work. In response, the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (Ref) included “impact” as a measure of the effect on the economy and society beyond academia.
This means that the measure of research quality is accompanied by a measure of “research relevance” – a trend that looks set to continue with the successor to the Ref in 2020. Despite the emphasis on impact case studies in the recent Ref, not everyone is convinced that this incentivises academics to produce relevant research.
The rightwing thinktank the Institute of Economics Affairs (IEA) published a report that recommends abolishing the Ref altogether. The authors of the report see the Ref as a waste of public resources because it funds research that has little or no palpable impact beyond academia. The report proposes that money should be distributed on a project-by-project basis by the UK Research Councils, rather than being centrally controlled and distributed by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce). The hope, for the report’s authors, is that researchers will turn towards the concerns of fee-paying students and external stakeholders.
The dark side of relevance
The IEA report mirrors a longstanding debate in the business school. Instead of producing innovative knowledge to help organisations develop and companies grow, business schools are said to encourage scholars to publish esoteric articles in highly ranked journals that no one – apart from university promotion committees – will ever read.
This has led to calls for management scholars to regain lost relevance by turning away from the diktats of research assessment exercises such as the Ref and towards practitioner-oriented forms of knowledge production and dissemination.
Business school scholars, in other words, should step down from the ivory tower and head straight for the corporate boardroom.
However, a recent study published in the British Journal of Management has raised concerns about the viability of the impact agenda in the business school.
If you're 'only a teacher', don't expect to be treated fairly by a business school
Anonymous academic
Read more
Focusing on a range of external activities such as consulting, coaching and executive education, the study found that business school scholars experience considerable tension when they engage with practitioners. At worst, the short-term demands of organisations – say, implementing a new leadership development programme – may come into conflict with the basic protocols of scholarship.
For example, one scholar reports that the companies she consults with want her to use personality questionnaires, even though she thinks they are, in methodological terms, “nonsense”. But companies don’t want to hear that, because for them it works, she says. “It feels that I then have to give up my scientific background to help them out.”
By demanding simplistic solutions to complicated problems, organisations may impose their own demands on scholars – often against their better judgment. The problem is that scholars are all too willing to accede to practitioner demands, for which they – and their home university – may receive significant remuneration.
This tension is articulated by another scholar, who feels “like a merchant” because he is paid to be “the nice face” of his university. He says he sometimes finds himself in front of corporate audiences saying things that in other circumstances he wouldn’t say.
The idea then of transferring knowledge from academia to organisations in a linear and unproblematic way is naive, if not misleading. The pursuit of relevance may undermine traditional academic values such as intellectual autonomy and scientific independence – a price that is arguably not worth paying.
The business school ought to be concerned with more than simply making organisations function better. What is more important – especially in light of endemic corporate scandals, financial misdealing and environmental irresponsibility – is to subject managerial ideology and practice to sustained critical analysis. This is a different but no less relevant task for business school scholars.
Abolishing the Ref is not a bad suggestion. But the report is off the mark when it embraces the free-market alternative. If the danger of research excellence is that scholarship becomes reduced to a publication game, the risk is that academics start to cater to their funders – and end up in cliche or even corruption.
· Nick Butler is a postdoctoral researcher at Lund University, Sweden.
· Sverre Spoelstra is an associate professor at the Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden.
· Helen Delaney is a lecturer at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Best Regards,
Educate, Empower, Elevate
Prof. Bholanath Dutta
Founder, Convener & President- MTC Global
An Apex Global Advisory Body in Management Education
0 comments:
Post a Comment