Months ago I commented about the relevance of academic research to practicing managers (see post here). This has been a topic of considerable interest among scholars over the past few years. It is now apparently of interest to members of the popular press. The Economist raises some interesting questions about the relevance of our research in an article that appears in the latest issue (Practically Irrelevant?). It certainly is worth a read.

To summarize some main points, they write:

LIKE other academic institutions, business schools are judged by the quality of the research carried out by their faculties. At the same time they mean to equip their students for the real world, however that is defined. Whether academic research actually produces anything that is useful to the practice of business, or even whether it is its job to do so, are questions that can provoke vigorous arguments on campus…

One of the main complaints is that the research is inaccessible to managers:

A paper in a 2006 issue of Strategy & Leadership commented that “research is not designed with managers’ needs in mind, nor is it communicated in the journals they read…For the most part it has become a self-referential closed system [irrelevant to] corporate performance.”

These are fair criticisms of the field and they are important issues to consider. However, the article goes on to make the following point:

The argument most often used by defenders of the traditional approach is that research tends to be “translated” into the business world, either by consultants or by teaching in MBA and non-degree executive programmes. But Kai Peters, the chief executive officer of Ashridge Business School in Britain, believes this argument doesn’t stack up. He says that research rarely surfaces in the classroom. Most professors, he says, teach standard practice—from a generic marketing book, for example—while spending their research time on something esoteric. “So how is it filtering into schools’ programmes?” he asks. “By osmosis?”

With this last point I must strongly disagree. I believe that we, as professors, do play an important role in bringing current research into the classroom. It is up to us to expose students to state-of-the art research, to discuss the important questions of the field, to synthesize the existing findings, to explain those findings in an accessible way, to impart received wisdom, to identify remaining gaps and unanswered questions, and to honestly acknowledge the shortcomings of our work. If we can do all these things, we (and our students) gain a better appreciation for the complexities of the real world. In fact, I believe so strongly in this charge that I feel that if we are not bringing research into the classroom, then we are failing our students. We owe them the best education possible, and it doesn’t mean spoon-feeding them “the answers”, but rather, engaging them in intellectually stimulating discourse and debate so that they can come to their own (informed) conclusions.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I absolutely believe that research ought to be rigorous. I also believe that business schools, and the research that comes out of them, ought to be relevant too managers. However, I think it’s too early to conclude that we are failing in our goals to be relevant.

Take a read of the Economist article and see what you think. I’d be interested to hear your opinion.

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