crisis in management science
Teppo
[Update 2: Here's a November NPR segment on related matters --- Have Business Schools Strayed from Their Mission?]
Management and organization science appears to be in a crisis of sorts: here’s The Economist on the matter, here’s The New York Times, here’s a slew of articles/op-eds from the Financial Times. The questions that are being wrestled with include: Is management science relevant? Is it scientific? Is economics too influential on management research and practice? Have business schools lost their way? Are business schools creating self-interested monsters? How do we bridge the knowledge gap between management science and practice?
To further get you caught up on the key issues — this book by Rakesh Khurana carefully explicates the history and present (it appears, lackluster) state of the profession of management (a few additional posts on the book by Brayden), this paper by Stanford’s Bloom and LSE’s Van Reenen argues that management matters. The Academy of Management Journal also recently had a nice set of essays (scroll to the bottom of the page) addressing the research-practice gap. The AACSB, the main accrediting body of business schools, is also wrestling with these matters – see this very recent report on the impact and relevance of management research: Impact of Research.
The above Economist article summarizes the Khurana book as follows (an exaggeration of the book’s thesis, though it in part captures the general ethos):
“Khurana charts how management science declines from a serious intellectual endeavour to a slapdash set of potted theories.”
Ouch; that puts the discipline in rather bad light. It seems that most assessments of management science share the rather pessimistic sentiment. I am not really on-board with these indictments of the field, all of them anyway. But, that post will have to wait until a few impending research/writing/grading deadlines pass.
(The crisis has been brewing for a while, so, there’s much more: here or here is former orgtheory.net guest-blogger JC Spender on the matter, there’s this book by Mintzberg, this article by Pfeffer and Fong, this article by Ghoshal, and so forth.)
Update: I forgot that these issues came up a year and a half ago in this spirited debate on the cuttthroat culture of b-school.
it seems inarguable to me that one can either collect large amounts of data and get experience with it ala walmart or google or one can flap ones gums and engage in recurring orgies of consensus networking or fat pocket whale courting.
an mba program doesn’t access large amounts of data. that leaves it with orgies and courting. the more one accords status and prestige to the leadership graduates and their institutional credits, the less one listens to data and lets it speak when it doesn’t match what a leadership “knows.”
the work of listening to data is classic management not leadership. it takes well-planned experimentation and multiple views and conceptual approximation requiring judgment and routinized filtering to prioritize attention and train instinct. unfortunately, the number of people trained to seek consensus and court big fishes are far greater than the number trained to listen to data.
i’d imagine we should expect a book some day on how Bush really did get a Harvard MBA and it really did determine how he worked.
Tony
December 7, 2007 at 7:17 am
Mahoney and McGahan have a related article out in OS. They are, of course, believers. But they know that the field cannot remain static. They acknowledge the current critiques, recount earlier battles for legitimacy, and encourage the application of management science to the big issues of the day.
The other big debate is between Van de Ven/Johnson and McKelvey. McKelvey
McKelvey’s money quote goes like this
“To repeat, the problem is that what has
plugged up the food chain are findings about
averages. Management researchers need to
learn from earthquake science. It is the only
legitimate science studying extremes. California
has 16,000 “average” quakes per year. No
one cares. We design buildings for the “big one”
that will come some day. Managers don’t worry
about averages; they live in a world of extremes,
and they want more of the good ones and wonder
how to better avoid the bad ones.”
I think Anna Gradori is doing this kind of work. Can she see a way forward?
The field of strategic management within the evolving science of strategic organization. Strategic Organization Mahoney and McGahan 5 (1): 79.
Van de Ven, A.H., & Johnson, P. E. 2006. Knowledge for theory and practice. Academy of Management Review, 31(4): 802-821.
MCKELVEY, B. 2006. Response: Van de ven and Johnson’s” engaged scholarship”: Nice try, but… The Academy of Management Review, 31(4): 822-829.
Grandori, A. 2001. Neither hierarchy nor identity: Knowledge-governance mechanisms and the theory of the firm. Journal of Management and Governance, 5(3): 381-399.
Alison Kemper
December 7, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Alison: Your comment brings up some good issues. So, there’s quite a few things wrapped up into the ‘crisis’ (its severity will depend on what you read and who you are talking to):
1) There’s the relevance issue. Touched on in the AACSB report above, touched on in AMJ and AMR essays mentioned, etc. This also involves the ‘b-schools are creating monsters’ hypothesis.
2) There’s the translation issue. Related to the above, how much of what we do gets appropriately transferred, why or why not – close to point #1, but yet different (there’s a recent book on this – how consultants mangle findings and spin things the wrong way – but, can’t remember the title).
3) There’s the rigor issue. The rigor issue’s an interesting one, I know McKelvey argues that we in essence are wrong with the extant Gaussian approach (wrong to the point of most of our published papers being wrong), and Grandori (rightly, I might add) notes that we mis-specify matters in decision-making and rationality (though, I have not read the specific piece you are referring to above).
All of the above has in part been wrapped up into the same conversation.
tf
December 7, 2007 at 4:55 pm
There is so much more here than I can do justice in noting at the moment, but suffice it to say that this is one of the most useful and relevant posts I have come across in quite some time. The sweep of observations about the field, especially in the popular media, makes a good argument that a) there is a crisis; and b) that it would be worthwhile to have a robust dialogue about the nature and perceptions of that crisis. Thanks for putting this all together in one crisp post.
josephlogan
December 7, 2007 at 9:25 pm
It would be an overstatement to say that Khurana thinks management education has a crisis on its hands. Khurana’s argument is more subtle – business education has long been based on the idea that management should have a professional identity; yet, the history of business education suggests that it is very difficult to professionalize managers and we don’t seem to be getting any better in our professionalizing efforts.
brayden
December 7, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Brayden:
I see the nuance, but, chapter 7 (yes, I still have your copy ;) does seem to come down fairly hard on these issues; “lack of professionalization” in part is code for crisis (with commensurate citations to some of the above work, e.g., Ghoshal). Though, you are right, the sentiment is not nearly as strong as some of the other material cited above.
tf
December 7, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Brayden:
The below working paper will give you a further sense:
Herbert Gintis and Rakesh Khurana, Corporate Honesty and Business Education: A Behavioral Model. SSRN. Here’s the full paper off of Gintis’ site.
tf
December 7, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Would be the acme of foolishness to attempt a coherent comment on a book one hasn’t read, but my initial impression from Brayden’s observation is that there’s a clear mismatch between the means and ends of management education. I would think the real crisis in Khurana’s “lack of professionalization” to be our failure to adapt to address the difficulties mentioned above.
josephlogan
December 8, 2007 at 8:01 am
I think the key problem is that the business school turned inward for legitimacy rather than outward.
By this, I mean, the various reports of the 1950s and 1960s concluded that business schools had a very poor image in the university (as a trade school built on war stories) and that this could be remedied by becoming more rigorous (as Teppo mentions). Rigor, however, meant adopting the theories and methods from “senior” social sciences, such as economics, psychology, and sociology.
So far, so good. There are not too many grumbles from the other side of campus that we are not doing rigorous research. It seems the internal battle for legitimacy has been won (or at least reached a stalemate – business schools still have a harder time winning external grant money).
So what’s the problem? Khurana’s argument is that economic theory (in particular, agency theory) has dominated curriculums turning corporations into self-interested machines without a social conscience. This is the “you are what you research” line of argument. We research X therefore we believe X and teach X in the classroom leading to a practice of X in corporations. Maybe, but my BS meter is going off.
I think the larger problem is that raised by Mintzberg – that of relevance. The reality is that fewer and fewer business school professors have spent any time in the field, either as researchers or practitioners (I’d love to see some stats on this).
Professors are now heavily incentivized for rigor over relevance. Unfortunately, rigor often means studying questions that are amenable to the methods available (or legitimized) by the top journals. Thus, gaussian statistics are “rigorous”, case studies are much less acceptable. The pressure to publish multiple articles in top journals has led us away from the field of practice.
This would be all well and good if the increased rigor informed practice. Despite the clamor of those in the “evidence-based” camp (and the various special issues on relevance) I don’t think it does. And I don’t think it is a transmission issue. We have become data/method-driven rather than problem-driven. The standard research model is to find good secondary data, apply a fancy statistical model, pull theory off the shelf to explain the p<0.05 results then pretend the were your hypotheses in the first place.
What’s missing here? Arguably, the voice of the consumer. What problems or issues do managers want studied, understood, and solved? What don’t we understand about the difference between good and bad managers and how do we close the gap (this is McKelvey’s point I think).
In theory, rebalancing the incentives of business school academics is not hard. Reward (give tenure and promotion) for the writing of case studies, reward and encourage consulting and exec ed, reward book writing – all things that used to happen not so long ago. Heresy, I know. In practice, initiatives like these will be fiercely resisted by those who have specialized in rigor.
stevphel
December 8, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Saturday evening award for best blog post in a comment goes to stevphel. You nailed it.
josephlogan
December 8, 2007 at 10:07 pm
:-)
stevphel
December 8, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Your site Cool :)
I am very pleased with the service. Thank you for the extra 4 samples. When dealing with people so far away, and through the internet, I sometimes wonder if I will even receive anything for my money. I would not hesitate to use your services again or to recommend you to friends. Again, Thank You.
David Dunn
December 10, 2007 at 12:25 pm
[...] as the more recent financial crisis to greedy, unethical behavior by managers. As Teppo noted in a post last year, the finger of blame is also being pointed at business schools for failing to educate [...]
professionalizing management? « orgtheory.net
November 3, 2008 at 5:27 pm