Why, What, and How of Rigour and Relevance in Management Research

International Public Management Journal, 2009

The research-practice gap has emerged as an acute problem in management scholars' internal professional debates. Evidence-based management (EBM) has been proposed as a remedy, and it is gaining adherents. This article offers a critical examination of the EBM proposal and its justification. The proposal is found to be poorly conceived and justified. Therefore, a search for a different response to the same concerns is in order. The direction of search is to understand how existing scholarly practices offer advice to actors ...

Reconsidering the rigour-relevance gap: the need for contextualised research in risk societies THE RIGOUR–RELEVANCE DEBATE In his 1993 presidential address to the assembled faithful of the Academy of Management Hambrick posed the question, 'What if the academy actually mattered?' (1994: 11). This rhetorical question set his esteemed colleagues, world leading management scholars, in the category of perhaps rigorous knowledge workers, but definitely not relevant to their community of practice. One might presume that when Hambrick, a giant of his era with a record of citations that is the envy of most scholars and a field of work that has been defined by his contribution for 25 years, we would take note and act. Three years later, Mowday (1997: 341) found it necessary to return to the theme in his presidential address referring to what has ultimately become a perennial challenge of being both rigorous and relevant management research. In 2002, Bartunek (2003: 203) had a dream for the academy where we work to make a difference and speak to tensions involving theory and practice. In 2005, Rousseau (2006) addressed the topic through the search for evidence based management to bridge the research-practice divide. While the language of the debate has modified in the post global financial crisis era, the core issue has remained. Tsui (2013), in her 2012 address on the need for compassion in business education, clearly relates the potential for business schools to do harm to the research-practice gap that has been widely discussed (Khurana, 2010; Pfeffer and Fong, 2002, 2004). The European debate on the issue has had equal longevity and coverage, with the British Academy of Management leading a search in 1995 for the academic beast that could leap such future challenges as Pettigrew's (2001) double hurdle. What emerged was a debate closely aligned with the call for a transition from Mode 1 to Mode 2 forms of Abstract: This paper addresses the debate on rigour and relevance in management research to identify barriers to progress and identify the challenges and opportunities in moving forward. We identify strong calls from both North American and European literatures for a move to close this gap. It has, however, been 20 years since Hambrick asked scholars 'What if the academy actually mattered?' during his Presidential address to the Academy of Management. Despite both the time and the consistency of calls, there has been only modest progress in closing this rigour-relevance gap. We argue that this is not because of any lack of willingness or capacity but is shaped by systemic issues. We find the narrative of the business school framed as either professional or social sciences a core issue. Each brings with them a tradition of different ontological perspectives and epistemological processes, protected by gatekeepers, which supports, even if unintentionally, the maintenance of the gap. We go on to discuss the challenge of management education and research in a postmodern context, the need to examine our conception of rigour, and to challenge the definition of management as a profession given its strategic win-lose orientation. We conclude with a discussion on the relationship between society and business and lay out the challenges ahead for richly contextualised scholarly work that may be defined as both rigorous and relevant.

Journal of Management Studies, 2009

In this paper we discuss, on the basis of system theory, the rigour–relevance gap in management research and the proposal to overcome it. From a system theory perspective, social systems are self-referential or autopoietic, which means that communication elements of one system, such as science, cannot be authentically integrated into communication of other systems, such as the system of a business organization. Social systems can only irritate – provoke – each other, i.e. alter conditions in such a way that other systems are forced to respond. Because of the differences between management science and practice it is impossible to assess relevance of research output within the system of science. On the basis of our analysis we show that neither action research nor Mode 2 research nor recent approaches to collaborative research can succeed in producing research that is rigorous as well as relevant. Researchers and practitioners cannot collaboratively produce research, they can only irritate each other. However, sometimes irritations or provocations turn out inspiring.

Over the last decade, there has been much debate in academic research circles bemoaning the fact that management practitioners are not using the academic research being produced in universities. These debates have focused on the research rigour and relevance debate and on the need for new forms of social organisation for the production of management knowledge encapsulating concerns about the structure of business schools, the nature of management education and the conduct of research. Yet, despite this debate and the clamour for increased relevance, the amount of funding that academics are attracting directly from business is continuing to decline. The purpose of this paper is to stimulate debate on these issues.

Effective Knowledge Management Systems in Modern Society, 2019

Recently, a number of academics and practitioners have questioned the relevance and practical impact of management research. This study, based on an analysis of interviews with 20 doctoral program graduates, demonstrates that such claims are not fully warranted. Instead, academic research reaches practitioners because graduates of doctoral business programs act as knowledge-transfer intermediaries that aggregate, summarize, communicate, and implement findings reported in academic publications. Demand for evidence-based knowledge in the practitioner's environment determines his or her probability of applying academic knowledge. However, not all academic knowledge is perceived as useful by practitioners, and limited access to academic literature is a major impediment to the application of scholarly findings in practice. The practitioners' connection with academia after graduation influences their probability of using academic literature. Academic journals also have the potenti...

2007

International Journal of Knowledge-Based Organizations, 2017

Scholars point out a fundamental difference between research in disciplines of management and natural sciences. Using stakeholder framework, in this paper, the authors first define domain of management research from practitioners' perspective. Then, they highlight contextual nature of management and argue that practitioners and researchers differ in terms of extent of generalisation they are interested in. The authors present a framework which links management research to practice and identify conceptual issue related to reliability and validity. Statistical techniques generally try to decipher a pattern. But innovation by definition amounts to breaking free from the pattern. A formula which led to success of one organisation at one point of time can be intentionally disrupted by managers in competing organisations. This is possible because human beings are endowed with three unique characteristics of cognition, judgment and intention. This explains limitations of management res...

Evidence based' management is a popular contemporary account of the relationship between research and practice in management studies. This paper critically examines the implications of this account from the perspective of Formalism: a narratological approach to critique that focuses on how narratives are made compelling, and hence powerful. Compelling narratives deploy devices that establish (i) credibility and (ii) defamiliarization. Using this approach the paper identifies and examines different ideological strands in the nascent literature on evidence based management: pragmatism, progress, systematization, technique, accumulation. These are the means by which advocates of evidence based approaches construct a compelling story about the value of this approach. Prior criticism of the evidence based approach has centred on epistemological and technical issues. The aim here is to use an aesthetic mode of criticism to highlight political and moral implications. These are important given the relationship between claims to knowledge and the use of power; and the interaction between management research, and management as practice.

Management, an undergraduate business program jointly operated by Reims Management School and Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. Previously he was on the Faculty of Wharton School and of Rotterdam School of Management, as well as high-tech entrepreneur, manager and management consultant to companies and other organizations in the United States, Latin America and Europe. He holds a Ph.D. in management from the Wharton School and a D.E.A. (advanced post-masters degree) in mathematics from the University of Paris at Orsay.

Journal of Management Studies, 2009

abstractThis paper develops an argument that leads to a vision of management research as a form of design science. Such an approach to research requires an inversion of the relationship between rigour and relevance. Giving primacy to the pursuit of rigour, as tends to be the current norm, de‐emphasizes the importance of relevance and leads to research that interests very few beyond the community of management scholars. We argue that we should re‐imagine relevance as a necessary condition for rigour and that this will lead to new forms of engagement with theory and practice that have the potential to create a new science of management.