IS RESEARCH IN THE IVORY TOWER 'FUZZY, IRRELEVANT, PRETENTIOUS'?B-schools stress scholarly papers, but a lot of what emerges has no value for the manager.
Richard R. West had just become dean of New York University's graduate school of business, and a small group of management faculty was in his office. The conversation shifted to the school's policies on promotion and tenure. "Could Peter Drucker get tenure here today?" West asked. The consensus was that Drucker, the most influential management guru of the past 40 years, wouldn't deserve tenure -- even though he had once been a tenured professor at the school. "He's a journalist, not a scholar," sniffed one professor. 'BANKRUPTCY.' West, a well-published academic himself, was shocked. Six years later, he's still amazed by what he considers the overemphasis placed on scholarly research at most business schools. After spending some time over the weekend with a recent issue of the Journal of Strategic Management, West found only one article, on corporate entrepreneurship, of any interest. "It's often crap," he says of academic writing in learned journals. "They say nothing in these articles, and they say it in a pretentious way. If I wasn't the dean of this school, I'd be writing a book on the bankruptcy of American management education." West is on one side of a hot debate in business-school circles over the hundreds of millions of dollars spent annually on research by B-school faculty. The critics say that professors are spending far too much time on fuzzy academic theories in narrowly defined disciplines at a time when American business is beset with a host of competitive problems. They argue that B-schools should address such issues as managing technology, investigating the causes of declining productivity, and enhancing knowledge of global marketing. A ease in point is the issue of quality. After gains by Japanese companies, American corporations finally began to pay attention to the quality-control concepts of guru W. Edwards Deming in the early 1980s. But even today, there's much skepticism in the B-school world over its importance. At a conference on quality sponsored by Xerox Corp. in August, B-school deans and faculty came together to discuss the issue. "There was a certain amount of cynicism there," says Robert E. Cannon, senior vice-president in charge of quality at Procter & Gamble Co. "They wondered if quality was a fad or not." Yet many deans insist that to expend all their energy on such topical projects would make B-schools far too vocational. "The right answer is balance," insists Thomas P. Gerrity, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "It's not one way or the other. Business schools can't lose sight of their fundamental intellectual foundations. It would he a tragic mistake to swing back to the other side of the pendulum." A. Michael Spence, dean of Stanford University's school of business, says flatly: "I don't think we're out of balance." SQUANDERED? It's an important issue, because B-school faculty today spend as much or more time on research than they do in the classroom. The Top 20 B- schools alone spend nearly $240 million a year on research, with the budgets ranging from a high of $40 million at Wharton to a low of $1 million at Dartmouth College's Amos Tuck School. The bulk of the money supports faculty time not dedicated to teaching. No one doubts that research is critical to the development of faculty and can add both excitement and relevance to classroom discussion. But West is not the only one to question its relevance to business professionals and government policymakers. Some B-school deans go so far as to say that well over half the resources devoted to research are squandered. "As much as 80% of management. research may be irrelevant," estimates Scott S. Cowen, dean of the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. "I wonder if the majority of it is of any significant value to executives in terms of influencing their daily actions, behaviors, or business practices." An informal BUSINESS WEEK survey confirms that big bucks are no assurance of either top-notch research or relevance. After asking the academic deans at a dozen top B-schools to name the leading journals read by executives, BUSINESS WEEK composed a simple index of research accessible to the professional manager: 
The survey found that Harvard business school is a bastion of research, producing far more insight and relevant information for executives than many other schools that have long-held reputations for traditional scholarship. Indeed, most of these leading institutions produce so little of professional relevance that Claremont Graduate School, whose business school has a relatively puny $850,000 research budget, makes the Top 10. It ranks far higher than the resource-rich schools at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, which spend 79 times and 54 times as much, respectively, every year on research. How can Claremont's B- school, with only 13 professors, rank so high? Largely because it's the professional home of the prolific Peter F. Drucker. SHORT SHRIFT? Scholarly research has been an imperative at the nation's graduate schools of business ever since the late 1950s, when exhaustive studies by the Ford and Carnegie Foundations stirred a major redirection in business education. At the time, business schools were serving up a largely vocational array of courses and they lacked academic legitimacy on the college campus. To gain respect, the schools lured business intellectuals to their faculties, redesigned their curriculums, and recruited far better students. Even critics agree that business-school education is much better now than it was during the early postwar years. But is teaching getting short shrift? When Donald P. Jacobs joined the faculty of the B-school at Northwestern University as an assistant professor of finance in 1957, he was required to teach nine courses a year. By the time he had become dean in 1975, the teaching load had shrunk to only six courses, to allow faculty more time for research. Today, the average is four courses a year. If a professor is editor of a journal or director of a research center, it's only three courses. "The demands have shifted from the classroom to research output," says Jacobs. The "publish or perish" mindset that evolved on the business campus, moreover, encouraged the kind of theoretical work common to other nonbusiness subjects in the university. One of the main reasons why so much of the research is esoteric is because the reward system within the universities is geared to the publication of faculty research in refereed journals which, critics maintain, have made obscurity the hallmark of the truly scholarly article. As many as 100 journals -- some of them barely read by the academics themselves -- now exist in the B-school world, as much to allow junior faculty to gain credits for promotion and tenure as for anything else. The papers are largely written to please an inner circle of academic experts who must approve an article before it can be published. Morris Holbrook of Columbia University has called the lengthy review process "a socially approved form of intellectual sadomasochism." Delays of up to two or three years are common because reviewers often demand pages of revisions. The tortuous process also encourages faculty to do research in certain areas deemed popular by the key journals. That increases a junior faculty member's chance of getting published, though it obviously discourages pioneering more innovative fields of study. The upshot is that too much horsepower is placed behind too few subjects. "What is really troubling is that anything that doesn't fit into the existing paradigms doesn't make it," says West. "So we have too many accounting profs studying agent theory." Asks Edward A. Fox, dean of Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School: "How many discounted-cash-flow models does the world need? The point is that a lot of what passes for research has no value." Often, critics say, the outcome is a trivialization of what is studied. Rather than advance a given field of study, many articles focus on complex methodologies of research or simply minor improvements on old ideas. "The result is something like knowledge creep rather than knowledge spurt," says Robert A. Garda, a director of McKinsey & Co. Compounding the problem is the failure of the vast majority of faculty research to take an integrated view of the problems facing business professionals. "We carve up business in small pieces -- marketing, finance, production, human behavior -- and that's not the real world of the businessperson," says Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, who directs the Center for Leadership at Emory University's B-school. "Research is often trivial because it's irrelevant in a world that doesn't see problems through narrow, functional lenses." LEFT BEHIND. Trivialization is also why, with the exception of finance and economics, consultants and other business observers have outstripped academia in developing useful concepts and analytical techniques for the real world of business. The award of a Nobel Prize in economics on Oct. 15 [1990] to Merton H. Miller of the University of Chicago's B-school for his work on the cost of finance and capital structure of corporations is a notable exception, and it occurs not surprisingly for work in finance. Harvard business school's Michael E. Porter, however, has lamented the small contribution made by academia in strategy, where his own work has found a strong following in business. "The initiative in research on strategy left academia for at least a decade," says Porter. "The new ideas were being developed in industry at Shell and General Electric as well as in the consulting firms, such as Arthur D. Little, Boston Consulting Group, and McKinsey." Academia's lack of interest in strategy, among other things, also explains why such names as Drucker, Deming, Thomas Peters, and Robert Waterman are more familiar to executives and managers than most academics. As B-schools seek more funds from the corporate world, the misguided research priorities of faculty are becoming more apparent to many executives. Consider the University of North Carolina's launch of a Center for Manufacturing Excellence two years ago. At an early meeting with the center's advisory board, which includes executives from such companies as Johnson & Johnson and Eastman Kodak Co., the faculty proudly presented different research projects for funding. Embarrassingly, the board rejected several of them. "They thought the ideas were irrelevant," says a B-school professor at the university. "Business people look at some of this as if it's gobbledygook." The faculty at Vanderbilt University's business school got a similar reception from the executives on its Operations Round Table, a research partnership that the school has formed with such companies as Digital Equipment Corp. and Northern Telecom Ltd. to study operations problems. Soon after the faculty began to expound its ideas, the managers set them straight. Says Joseph D. Blackburn, a professor of operations: "If not for our partnership, we would have kept on studying our scheduling algorithms and mathematical calculations." The Round Table has been working on how to shorten production cycles, new-product development, and customer-service cycle times. 'WHORING.' Although business schools, like medical colleges of a university, are so-called professional schools, business academics lack an equivalent of the New England Journal of Medicine -- an often-quoted publication that manages to be both scholarly and accessible to the professional. Indeed, most academics look askance at writing for the Harvard Business Review. "It's not quite whoring, but if it's given any value, it's seen as educational instead of scholarly, which is an unfortunate distinction," says John W. Rosenblum, dean of the University of Virginia's Darden School. Those who dare to write for a managerial audience are made to feel like second-class citizens in the academic culture. Peter M. Senge, director of the Organizational Learning Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, confesses that he felt "a little nervous" when his first management book, The Fifth Discipline, was published in August [1990]. "I figured some colleagues would say, 'Hey, you wrote this for managers, and it's not scholarly enough.' There are a lot of people who will say snide things about it behind my back." Senge can take some comfort, however, that such sniping these days at least is likely to set off a lively debate in the faculty lounge. |
Reprinted from: Business Week, October 29, 1990. Pages 62-66.
By John A. Byrne in New York