Business schools undoubtedly produce a significant amount of research, but is it undertaken in the right way to improve society? That’s the question posed by new research from Erasmus School of Economics.
The researchers cite previous press coverage arguing that the research produced by business schools was excessively focused on abstract and overly academic topics with little real application outside of universities themselves. They argue that there is some merit in this accusation, and that business schools often use the wrong metrics and incentives to judge their research.
“We show that business schools focus excessively on the quantity of research and insufficiently on other critical aspects such as the quality, rigor, relevance, and creativity of such research,” they say.
On the right track
The researchers surveyed 234 marketing professors from a number of business schools from 20 countries, before conducting in-depth interviews with 14 deans and eight external stakeholders.
The results suggest that the incentives used by business schools have a number of crucial flaws in them. For instance, they often use poor research metrics to assess the effectiveness of the research produced by faculty, which ends up harming the quality and relevance of the research.
They also believe that by producing research that is of less practical importance, it’s harming the teaching quality of the business school. This is compounded by the inadequate compensation awarded to faculty for conducting the research.
As such, the researchers argue that business schools need to work to recalibrate the incentives they use to encourage research. They propose three distinct steps to help them do this:
- Develop better research metrics – “Schools need to reduce the weight they place in low-effort metrics (such as the mere number of publications or citations) and increase the weight they place in effortful metrics such as awards, research creativity, literacy, and relevance to non-academic audiences,” the researchers say.
- Develop a commitment among researchers to actively contribute to the vitality of the school – These efforts should help to improve the alignment between the school and its faculty, especially in terms of compensation.
- Improve the practical application of research – While a number of deans thought they were making progress in this regard, there is clearly a lot more that could be done to make research accessible and applicable to the wider world.
Business schools can have a tremendous influence on the world around them, but the paper provides a reminder that this cannot be taken for granted.
