Whose Perspective Does Management School Research Take?

Management schools and departments spend a significant part of their resources on research conducted by their faculty and doctoral students. Published research is an important, sometimes dominant, criterion for evaluation of faculty for promotion and tenure. Organizations whose management is the subject of study in business schools are social entities in which many people participate for their own respective motives. In management research, the attention paid to the interests and perspectives of various classes of participants varies considerably. Shareholders and managers appear to get the lions share of this attention, with the interests of other employees, customers, vendors, government and the community receiving less attention in research literature.

There could be many reasons for this variation. It is possible that the challenges of better management of (privately owned) organizations lie in balancing the interests of shareholders and managers--the well-known agency problem--and the attention paid to this perspective in management literature is simply a reflection of the challenge.

This is a good possibility, but it does not help us understand the scant attention to the interests of government in collecting taxes, interest of the community in preserving its clean water and air, interest of customers in not getting mislead by products and advertising, etc. There is much research to learn the laws of consumer behavior, for example, so companies can sell more of what they make, but relatively little on seller behavior so consumers can buy only what is best for them. Similar statements could be made about other aspects of management school research such as accounting, finance, and organizational behavior. Perspective of managers and shareholders seem to have acquired a dominant share of attention in management research considered as a whole.

Whether management schools serve the society better with the dominance of this perspective is an open question which deserves additional debate and engagement in universities.

Population and Environment

In his September 11, 2013 Times of India article (reproduced on Yale Global) "A Syrian Lesson for India" Nayan Chanda traces the origins of the current civil war in Syria to multi-year draught that generated a large migration of from the affected areas to Syrian cities. India (and many other countries) are so close to the environmental "edge" that even the historically natural variations in climate are almost certain to put the socio-political-economic system under unbearable stress in not very distant future. Since any discussion of population is politically incorrect, I am not even sure what else India (or Pakistan or Bangladesh for that matter) can do to ameliorate this risk. Interestingly, an article by Ellis in September 13, 2013 New York Times is titled "Overpopulation is not the problem."

Of course, I would like to share Ellis's optimism, and think that at no stage of our existence shall we become bacteria in a petri dish. The critical statements in that article are

1. "Who knows what will be possible with the technologies of the future?"
2. "Our planet's human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits."

The first is a statement on uncertainty about the future "our ignorance presented as knowledge in a rhetorical form. I also hope that our ingenuity in devising social and technological solutions to our challenges will keep up with the population for ever. Unfortunately, history of rise and fall of human civilizations and their populations (Rome, Mesoamerica, etc.) does not encourage such optimism.

Second, co-determination of the human-carrying capacity by social, technological and environmental considerations does not mean that the last factor is irrelevant. He has not made a case that joint consideration of factors A, B, and C should lead us to drop C from the equation.

Several consecutive draughts in Syria did not enable the population to devise technological solutions to food shortage in short order. The social response was migration and war. What happens if the monsoons fail in India for two or three years in a row. Will the densely populated deltas of south and southeast Asia be able to find the "social and technological" solutions to the sea levels rising by 10-20 feet over the next century?

Perhaps Mr. Ellis's answer is yes. Neither the "sky is falling" environmentalism nor Panglossian  consumerism are unsustainable.

Why I Refuse to Rank Scholarly Journals

I was recently asked to submit my ranking of a journal in my field of research to a panel of deans who had been tasked by their association to decide which journals belong to various categories on the basis of research published in them. I wrote to them to explain why I am reluctant to do so.

I hope you will forgive me for this unsolicited submission and my attempt to suggest that, on balance, ranking of academic journals, when used for the purpose of evaluating scholarly contributions of individual members of faculty, does more harm than good. Research is about ideas, innovation, and discourse. Not surprisingly, it calls for constant questioning of what we are doing, and why. By the time some line of work acquires the status of orthodoxy on the basis of method, theory or perspective, it is hardly worth doing any more. Most of what is done for the purpose of promotion and tenure is not worth doing, and the world might as well be better off if the resources were devoted to teaching and other endeavors. For this reason, I think that continual injection of new experimental journals into any discipline is an essential feature of keeping it alive as a scholarly field.

By their definition, new journals take time to become widely recognized, perhaps not until they have developed their own special orthodoxy. For this reason, ever since I started getting requests from friends in British universities in the 1980s to rank academic journals in economics, finance, and accounting, I have refused to do so as a matter of principle. My rationale is that these journal ratings become substitutes for actual reading of scholarship, and hurt critical discourse by transferring the responsibility to read and form our own opinions about each piece of scholarship from each of us to editors and referees. Not surprisingly, this process has created journals whose sole purpose is to help people get promoted, and few people read them (except those who are looking to be promoted by the published authors). Even the most highly rated journals publish a lot of what I regard as trash. Unfortunately, journal rankings just promote and glorify that process.

In an ideal world, people will write when they have an idea they are excited about, publish it when the idea appears to be of interest to others also, and it will be accepted or rejected by the readers on its merits. Screening by journal ratings does incalculable harm to scholarship.

I do not expect to persuade you on how much damage your well-meaning effort may inflict on scholarly discourse. I hope you will encourage "rebellious" ideas in every discipline, not treating articles like a cut of lamb to be assessed on the basis of the store they bought it from.

During my visit to a university recently, I had a conversation with a young colleague next door who said that she keeps her papers secret until they are published for the fear of being rejected by A journals for having been "published" on the internet, or being scooped by others. Something is seriously wrong here. Whatever else our journal culture does, it is not devoted to promoting scholarly discourse. And that is a tragedy. I hope your Council will give its attention to this matter.