In most languages there is a phrase like ‘the children of cobblers have the worst shoes’ or ‘doctors don’t take their own medicine‘. Whichever the phrase, the message is that experts are either too busy or too expert to take their own advice and practice what they preach. Can we say the same about business schools not…
DetailsMore and more papers in management studies are badly written, use dubious methods (such as p-hacking) to achieve spuriously positive results, and avoid the really big issues facing our discipline and our world. Why is this? My new book offers some explanations and identifies some tentative solutions. Above all, the ‘publish or perish’ mantra is…
DetailsIn 2003, I published my first medical journal article, and it couldn’t have come at a better time for me. To explain, I need to revisit the 1980s when I teamed with my Texas A&M University colleagues A. Parasuraman and Valarie Zeithaml to conduct and publish the earliest research conceptualizing and measuring service quality. I…
DetailsContributing to a better world through better research A majority of scholars, academics and deans of business schools agree that it’s vital to create a new research ecosystem centred on credible and useful research. But so far, achievements have been scarce. That’s now changing. The discussion moved from the theoretical to the actual in July…
DetailsThe Community for Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM) has made significant progress and impacts since its establishment. There have been extensive discussions and studies on the urgency, goals, and possible actions in relation to RRBM at both individual business schools and management research community by and large. However, there seems to be a…
DetailsThe rise of the #metoo movement combined with regular media cases of sexism and discrimination underline that gender equality is far from being achieved. Yet while many inequalities persist, the pressure for equality is undimmed. Many push for equality from a moral or human rights perspective yet there is also a ‘business case’ for a…
DetailsThis is a reblog from AACSB Blog, with permission I just finished reading the recent BizEd article “Can B-Schools Rethink Research,” which poses questions I have been thinking about for several years: What does it mean to conduct responsible research in business? What is the role of impact factors and journal quality hierarchy? Is…
DetailsAll over the world today in every academic discipline there is concern about a decline in the average quality of articles published in academic journals. Because today a larger share of college professors must publish or perish, there has been an increasing demand for journals to publish in. This has led to a proliferation of…
DetailsRecently we were at a Humanistic Management conference where questions came up about why a truly important academic paper on an extremely important topic (in our view, anyway) had not gotten much uptake with scholars since its publication in 2015 and wide discussion at the 2016 AOM meeting. Further, it has received very little or…
DetailsLook around and business schools are making grand claims to be working responsibly, sustainability, ethically, for society and even for humanity. While the criticism levelled at business schools after the financial scandals of the early 2000s and the 2008 Financial Crisis lead to soul searching for the sector these can seem like quite ambitious claims. Yet…
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