Bridging the Relevance Gap: Aligning Stakeholders in the Future of Management Research

Introduction: the challenge of relevance

Today’s business world places a premium uponknowledge as a source of competitive advantage,creating the need, at the individual, firm and policylevel, to pay special attention to the developmentof the knowledge stocks of organizations, man-agers, professionals and employees in order toprepare them to cope successfully with the de-mands of the old and new economies. This createsthe need for institutional, cultural and organiza-tional shifts at the interface between business anduniversities, geared to understanding the chan-ging needs of individuals and firms and providingnew forms of organization to facilitate the swiftand effective flow of knowledge and people totheir most productive use.

The process necessary to achieve such a changeis likely to be a demanding one as universities andbusiness remain very different institutions, in termsof the ways in which they generate and manageknowledge and in terms of their differing motiv-ations and rationales for participating in and using

research. Closing the relevance gap requires thatthe different stakeholders involved in managementresearch creatively address issues of research con-tent, research process and research dissemination.

The issue of relevance raises fundamentalquestions about the nature and social role of theuniversity and the expectations of business ofuniversity research and education. Business isincreasingly concerned with relevance, while busi-ness and management researchers in universitiescling to a different view of knowledge. Businessand management researchers stand accused of alack of relevance to managerial practice and of toonarrow a discipline base. The Industry–AcademicLinks report (HEFCE, 1998) detailed some of thecurrent problems in creating a successful know-ledge flow between academics and practitioners:

• users believe that research can benefit thembut do not regard many research topics asfocusing upon key issues of relevance;

• some managers do not feel that research con-tributes directly to their managerial role. Their

British Journal of Management, Vol. 12, Special Issue, S3–S26 (2001)

© 2001 British Academy of Management

Bridging the Relevance Gap: Aligning Stakeholders in the

Future of Management Research

Ken Starkey and Paula Madan*Nottingham University Business School, Jubilee Campus, Nottingham NG8 1BB, UK and

*Electrolux Home Products Corporation N.V., Cullignalaan 2D, BE-1831 Diegem, Belgium

This report examines the relevance gap in management research. Its focus is the natureof knowledge created by research at the interface between business and academia in the context of major changes likely to affect the nature of demand for such knowledge.Management research has been accused of a lack of relevance to managerial practiceand of too narrow a discipline base. The report examines the conditions giving rise to thiscriticism, in the UK and elsewhere, and identifies an important strategic need to increasethe stakeholding of users in various aspects of the research and knowledge creation anddissemination process. The report concludes with recommendations concerning newforms of research partnership and research training that will address the relevance gap.However, bridging this gap does not only require changes in the academic mind-set.Managers and firms too need to rethink their involvement in the research process.

perceived need is for prescriptive statementsabout best practices and actionable advicerather than reflexive analysis;

• user communities lack awareness of the resultsof research. Management researchers alsolack systematic and effective methods ofdisseminating their findings to many of thesecommunities.

The issues here are encapsulated in a dialoguethat took place at the American Academy ofManagement Annual Conference in 1999 betweenStanford’s James March and Citigroup’s JohnReed. March (2000) criticized what he called the ‘misguided search for relevance rather thanknowledge’. He argued that the pursuit of aca-demic research which contributed to knowledgewas more important. March has had as muchimpact on our thinking about the nature oforganization and on the evolution of managementas a discipline as any scholar and he holds chairsin international management, political science,sociology and education at Stanford University!The key role of the university, according to hisperspective, ‘is not in trying to identify factorsaffecting organizational performance, or in tryingto develop managerial technology. It is in raisingfundamental issues and advancing knowledge aboutfundamental processes affecting management’.

March continues:

‘What in management research is important formanagement practice? If we look historically . . . itis not the passing fads of management gimmicks.It is not the numerous studies attempting to relateperformance to one thing or another. It is the basicideas that shape the discourse about management– ideas about conflict of interest, problems withinformation and incentives, bounded rationality,diffusion of legitimate forms, loose coupling,liability of newness, dynamic traps of adaptation,absorptive capacity and the like . . . the primaryusefulness of management research lies in thedevelopment of fundamental ideas that mightshape managerial thinking, not in the solution ofimmediate managerial problems.’

The philosophy of March’s approach is echoed by John Reed (2000) of Citigroup, himself an ex-tremely eminent and eloquent practising man-ager. He describes why he values the opportunityfor discussing research: ‘I look forward to theopportunity to get out of the day-to-day, to sitback and try to understand what is going on in the

research community. It allows me some breathingroom and gives me a sense of what it is that I havebeen spending the last 34 years doing’. For him,the crucial focus for management research doesconcern its integration with practice and it isaimed at a particular business need: ‘We now areat a point where understanding who humans are,how they respond to opportunities, and what theydream about is essential to business practice’.This form of research is strategic because itprovides a significant potential input into whatJohn Reed describes as the task of ‘improving theopportunity space for our enterprise’.

This dialogue between eminent researcher andeminent practitioner encapsulates the tensionsthat exist in the nature of the relationship betweenbusiness and academia and the key issues that needto be considered in the discussion of relevanceand knowledge creation. This is the context inwhich the relevance gap in management researchexists. In the main body of our report we discusshow we might navigate our way through thiscomplicated landscape in a way that makes morerelevant research possible. In this report we givea perspective from inside higher education (HE)in the UK and we are, at least implicitly, critical ofsome management research philosophy and prac-tice. However, we certainly do not believe thatthe problems lie only in HE. Users of researchalso have to educate themselves about the poten-tial benefits of closer research relationships withacademics. A key goal of these relationships, fromour perspective, is the development of forms of knowledge that help managers become betterreflective practitioners. Managers and academicsneed to understand the wisdom of Kurt Lewin’scomment that ‘There is nothing as practical as agood theory’ and appreciate that the way to im-prove practice is through critical reflection uponthe often unexamined mental models that informour actions. Managers and academics need toengage each other in a dialogue about the natureof knowledge and to educate each other to theirneeds in the joint development of a mutuallybeneficial research process.

Knowledge modes – forces for changeKnowledge modes

In their seminal work, The New Production ofKnowledge, Michael Gibbons and colleagues

S4 K. Starkey and P. Madan

argue that we are seeing a fundamental shift inthe ways in which knowledge is being produced,affecting not only what knowledge is producedbut also how it is produced. Gibbons et al. (1994)trace the development of this new form ofknowledge – what they call Mode 2 knowledge(M2K) – in the hard sciences, physics, chemistryand biology. Mode 1 knowledge [M1K] is what wetraditionally conceive of as the scientific approachto knowledge creation and is what universitieshave historically been concerned with – disciplin-ary, primarily cognitive, in the sense of moreconcerned with theory than practice, with how theworld works considered at a theoretical level.M2K is less concerned with discipline base –indeed it can be described as transdisciplinary –and is crucially concerned with knowledge as itworks in practice in the context of application.M2K aims, in brief, at relevance to practice. In the M1K approach it is conventional to speak of science and scientists, while the aspirations of M2K to relevance to practice make it morerelevant to speak of knowledge and practitioners.

In summary:

‘in Mode 1 problems are set and solved in a con-text governed by the largely academic interests ofa specific community. By contrast, Mode 2 know-ledge is carried out in a context of application.Mode 1 is disciplinary while Mode 2 is transdis-ciplinary. Mode 1 is characterised by homogeneity,mode 2 by heterogeneity. Organisationally, Mode1 is hierarchical and tends to preserve its form,while Mode 2 is more heterarchical and transient.Each employs a different type of quality control.In comparison with Mode 1, Mode 2 is moresocially accountable and reflexive. It includes awider, more temporary and heterogeneous set ofpractitioners, collaborating on a problem definedin a specific and localised context.’ (Gibbons et al.,1994, p. 3)

Arguably, the Mode 1 approach to research andknowledge production is no longer sustainable.Universities are the last bastions of M1K in aworld where greater accountability and the speedof change in relevant knowledge encourage anM2K approach. Public policy is increasingly gearedto national competitiveness and the generation of relevant knowledge. Technological change hasopened up vast new reservoirs of information and opportunities for knowledge creation that the old repositories of knowledge, libraries anduniversities, will struggle to contain. As a result

the very role of the university becomes problem-atic (Brown and Duguid, 2000).

Forces for change

There is a growing concern among managementacademics that Mode 1 knowledge is losing touchwith higher education’s stakeholders. We perceivefour main pressures for change bearing down onthe university management researcher:

1 The demand for more relevant knowledgefrom increasingly critical and sophisticatedstakeholders in higher education, both publicand private sector.

2 Increasing competition among universities forstudents and for lucrative post-experience edu-cation and training coupled with increasinglydemanding consumers.

3 Critical reflection among academics themselvesabout their role in an increasingly demandingand complex world.

4 Radical innovations in information and com-munication technologies.

These all reflect a need to re-examine the role ofthe academic and of university research itself in the knowledge production and diffusion process.

Stakeholders. Academics have historically beenprime agents in the generation of knowledgethrough research and its dissemination throughpublication of results and through teaching. Uni-versities are concerned with the communicationand accreditation of knowledge, through theireducational role. Among the pressures makingrelevance more relevant are questions of institu-tional mission. What is the business of businessand management schools? Is their primary pur-pose research and publication of research results?Is it developing our understanding of humanbehaviour in contexts important to business andsociety? Some authors, such as Argyris and Schon(1974), argue that the heart of education lies inchanging behaviour to make it more effective,and this is the underlying principle behind manyof the discussions currently taking place in theUK. If one accepts that research should have as a major concern changing behaviour – and thisfits with the M2K approach – then it raises im-portant questions about what kind of research isbest suited to do this, and how it is best dis-seminated.

Aligning Stakeholders in the Future of Management Research S5

If business schools’ research mission, and thustheir mandate to create knowledge, is increasinglyout of touch with the aspirations of stakeholdersand fund-providers because it is judged guilty of arelevance gap, then it raises critical issues of rolejustification and, ultimately, long-term survival.What will be the business school’s educationalmission in the future if its research mission is seenas increasingly irrelevant? Huff (2000, p. 290) seesmoves by US states, such as Colorado, to stress ateaching mission, as one possible future scenario:

‘It is easy for administrators or legislators toequate education with student contact hours. It isharder to calculate the educational and socialbenefits of abstract research. Thus, some schoolsare pressured to do less research and to pay moreattention to instruction.’

Under this scenario, universities’ primary missionwill be to maximize teaching effectiveness and –perhaps their only unique competence – to manageaccreditation, while relevant research increasinglybecomes the preserve of companies themselvesand of management consultancy firms. Knowledgeproduction has to be justified as a source of localor national competitive advantage and as a sourceof public good.

Increasing competition and more demandingconsumers. This factor interacts with the otherforces for change, although knowledge here isseen as a source of firm competitive advantageand needs to be considered in the context of busi-ness strategy.

Firms are interested in the application of know-ledge rather than knowledge for its own sake.‘What makes knowledge valuable to organizationsis ultimately the ability to make better decisionsand action taken on the basis of knowledge. Ifknowledge doesn’t improve decision making, thenwhat’s the point?’ (Davenport and Prusak, 1998).From this perspective we can view knowledge interms of a ‘knowledge chain’, akin to the valuechain in business, as shown in Figure 1.

Guiding principles are: that knowledge shouldinform action; and that action becomes knowableif we understand better the underlying principlesthat link cause and effect.

Managers tend to access university businessresearch primarily through the medium of teach-ing, with some knowledge transfer via other media,primarily the written word, although it has to beremembered that the evidence suggests that, on the whole, managers are not great readers ofacademic material, especially if not involved in anacademic course of study. (Here we recall thewords of the film-maker, Sam Goldwyn: ‘I readpart of it all the way through’.) Firms recruitundergraduates and MBAs who have been edu-cated by those doing the research, thus providingan opportunity for firms to internalize researchknowledge, assuming research is integrated intothis teaching, should they so desire. Firms are also exposed to research faculty on in-companyexecutive education and, less often, consultingassignments.

Porras (2000) suggests that in the next twentyyears the environmental demands placed onbusiness schools will change radically and that themost critical changes will take place in the ex-ecutive education market, the demand for whichwill accelerate dramatically. The evidence fromthe USA is that the market for business educationwill shift from an undergraduate and MBA focusto a concern with the education and developmentneeds of those who already have Masters-levelmanagement education. Currently in the USAthere are over 1.8 million MBAs. By the year 2020it is predicted that there will be over 3 million.Unless business schools respond to the challengesof developing knowledge relevant to this chan-ging customer base they run the risk of obsolescence,to be replaced by new providers, perhaps man-agement consulting firms or the burgeoning cor-porate university ‘movement’, that is perceived,by some clients, as better able to fill the relevancegap (Wind and Nueno, 1998).

When executives look for professional updatingand new skill development their needs are likelyto differ from those of MBAs who are looking, inthe main, for functional knowledge. Experiencedexecutives are more interested in concepts andideas that can help them make sense of and dealwith the problems they face in their day-to-daywork. They are also concerned with how to thinkabout an increasingly complex and dynamic future,


Figure 1. The knowledge chain

Theory Evidence/data

Knowledge

Decisionmaking

Effectiveaction

which does not conform very closely to theperspectives that inform the average MBAsyllabus. They are looking for the concepts behindbest practice and are, therefore, more concernedwith theory than the normal MBA student.

‘MBAs are looking primarily for best practices sothat when they leave school and get a job they can“hit the street running”. Executives are experi-enced enough to understand that best practicescome and go and that the only thing that reallylasts is the conceptual underpinnings to currentbest practice. This is what they really need andlook for.’ (Porras, 2000, p. 3)

An MBA teaches that a conceptual base formanagement exists but the flux of managementpractice in a continually changing environmentleads to the expectation that knowledge needs tobe periodically updated. This requires a know-ledge base that is continually being replenished.What the academic has to offer in this context is abalance of theory and practice but the correctbalance of these from a practitioner perspective is one that conforms more to M2K than M1K.‘From the pure world [of the university researcherin the social sciences] would come the use ofrigorous analytical research methodologies and adrive for theory to guide the research. From theapplied side would come topics that are of realinterest to managers, ones that they need insightson so that they can more effectively guide theirorganizations.’ The key role of the business schoolresearcher is to develop new insights. In the wordsof Michael Porter, ‘Consultants can bring thelaggards up to best practice but scholars should be determining the next best practice’ (Wind andNueno, 1998, p. 5).

In the absence of theory grounded in soundacademic research we have seen the proliferationof ‘pop’ management books, filling the businessshelves in bookshops and airports. In the view ofColin Crook, former Senior Technology Officerat Citicorp and Citibank, this proliferation hasoccurred to fill a vacuum caused by lack of anadequate response by universities to the thirst forrelevant knowledge. However this new literaturedoes not fill the gap either because popular theories,on the whole, lack rigour and an objective per-spective. ‘Facts are confused, data are missing, the integrity of the position is simply not there.What is emerging are transitory insights which are not valid for very long, along with an incredible

number of business fads without any academicwork that permits business people to assesswhether these fads are worthwhile or not’ (Windand Nueno, 1998, pp. 9–10).

When is university research at its best?

‘University research . . . is at its most effectivewhen it conducts research that the private sector isunable or unwilling to pursue. (Much earlyInternet research falls into this category.) . . .Conversely, it is at its weakest when it merelyduplicates research going on elsewhere.’ (Brownand Duguid, 2000, p. 236)

Of course, this raises major issues about the roleof the university. If we look at this from the per-spective of generic needs of learners for con-ditions that will foster a good learning experience,perhaps the most important thing learners needfrom higher education institutions is ‘access toauthentic communities of learning, interpretation,exploration, and knowledge creation’ (Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 232). If universities cannotprovide this, in new and attractive, higher value-added ways, then other providers are ready tomove into the resulting vacuum.

Management consultancies, particularly, areidentifying increasing opportunities in extendingtheir services into executive education, sometimeswith the collaboration of academics, particularlyin the area of action learning aligned with issuesof business strategy, a niche currently being ex-amined by McKinsey. Other consultancies such asMarakon and PA Consulting offer similar pro-grammes. Marakon offers an executive educationservice with Concours, an international consultancy.In the words of John Cooper, managing directorof the European Division of Concours, their com-petitive edge over business schools is that theycan draw together disparate groups of educationproviders in ways that business schools cannot,and a distinctive orientation towards relevanceand practice: ‘We can bring together businessleaders, a wide range of academics and consult-ants . . . We offer a taste of theory and practice’(Financial Times, 23 May, 2000). Marakon alsosees itself offering something distinctive, includ-ing an integrated interdisciplinary perspectivethat business schools cannot replicate. ‘We touchon many disciplines taught at business schools butwe provide a customised course in a practicalenvironment’, is how this is described by ScottGillis, Marakon’s managing partner.


Critical reflection among academics. Whethermanagement knowledge can ever conform to anatural science model is debatable (Cannella andPaetzold, 1994). Management in action is com-plex, cause and effect relationships difficult toestablish and the predictive validity of theory low.Skilful management practice involves intuition aswell as rational analysis and is as much of an artas a science, perhaps more so. This suggests thatresearchers need to engage more with the com-plexities of practice but this itself is problematicbecause we do not have, as yet, a systematic way of demonstrating or measuring the impactresearch has on practice. Tranfield and Starkey(1998), in a paper which reflects research policydebates in the British Academy of Management,examine the fragmented nature of the manage-ment community, spread across different disciplin-ary bases and embracing differing epistemologicalpositions. They argue that the key defining charac-teristic of management research should be itsapplied nature and that its central concern shouldbe ‘the general (engineering) problem of design’.They conclude by suggesting that a focus upon theMode 2 agenda for knowledge production willprovide the basis for the legitimization of UKmanagement research among broad groups ofstakeholders, while arguing that the problemsaddressed by management researchers ‘shouldgrow out of the interaction between the world ofpractice and the world of theory, rather than outof either one alone’ (Tranfield and Starkey, 1998,p. 353). They thus endorse a research policy basedupon the double hurdle of academic rigour andmanagerial relevance, embedded in both thesocial science canons of best practice and theworlds of policy and practice.

UK management research has been increas-ingly influenced by US research standards andnorms. For example, this is reflected in whatseems an almost irresistible trend to apply a USyardstick to the assessment of research quality, in the tendency to view publication in leading US management journals as synonymous withresearch excellence. But American academicsthemselves are questioning their own researchnorms. For example, Don Hambrick (1994) madea now famous presidential address to the AmericanAcademy of Management with the challengingtitle of ‘What if the Academy actually mattered?’,the sub-text for which was ‘What if we wererelevant?’.

In her own American Academy presidentialaddress in 1999, Anne Huff was of the opinionthat this question of relevance has itself becomeincreasingly relevant. Others are more chal-lenging about the weaknesses of Mode 1 research.Porter and McKibbin (1988) accuse businessschools of a number of failings:

• Quantity has become more important thanquality.

• The intended audience of most research is theacademic community rather than the dualcommunity of scholars and practitioners.

• As a result there has been a proliferation ofarcane, trivial and irrelevant research.

Leavitt (1996) charges most researchers withdoing research for the wrong reasons of approvaland ambition rather than the right reasons ofexcitement and challenge.

This faces academics with a dilemma: do theycling to the values of academic fundamentalismand the notion of pure research? Or do theyembrace a more practitioner-focused perspectiveand face the danger of conceptual and theoreticaldrift due to the influence of political and fundingpressures. Huff (2000, p. 293) captures thedilemma succinctly: ‘These observations are madewith reluctance. On the one hand, almost all ofmy work has taken place in the Mode 1 tradition.I do not think the end of that tradition is immi-nent, but I am not happy to remain in a Mode 1professional school of decreasing interest andvalue to the organizations we serve. Conveyinginformation produced by others or facilitatingstudents producing their own knowledge does not require a PhD. Becoming a marginal player in Mode 2 efforts feels like poorly paidconsulting’.

Innovation in information and communicationtechnologies. If we can conceptualize knowledgein terms of a knowledge chain, this suggests thatthe flow of knowledge through this chain ofcreation and dissemination is an important issue.We find it useful to think of the flow of knowledgein the following way:

Experts apply their expertise to knowledgegeneration.

↓Experts apply theories that are developed,reinforced or refuted (academics are key


players in theory development and knowledgetesting).

↓Intermediaries search among the knowledgegenerated by experts for ideas and facts suitable

for dissemination and use.↓

Learning takes place through the process ofdissemination and communication.

↓Managers apply this learning in decision-

making and action (or choose inaction).↑

Some commentators predict radical changes inthe flow of knowledge that will reflect the majorchanges currently taking place in the world ofinformation and communication technologies. Someof these, Peter Drucker among them, predict themarginalization and even the imminent death ofuniversities as we know them, as we move into aradically different information age.

Certainly, information is far more easily avail-able – most obviously via the World Wide Web –in a dot.com world. But this creates two relatedproblems:

• information overload;• and how to sift the increasing volume of in-

formation to generate better relevant knowledge.

Technology has been seen by some as the answerwith the development of increasingly expert sys-tems and sophisticated software agents tailored to individual and organizational needs. IT-basedlearning offers an unparalleled access to new in-formation and opportunities for self-pacing learn-ing, differentiated according to individual, groupand organizational need (Tomorrow Project, 2000).But an emphasis upon electronic mediation aloneignores the social aspects of learning. IT high-lights the importance of knowledge mediationand of the role of knowledge mediators, a roletraditionally at the heart of the research univer-sity’s practice.

Knowledge development and knowledgedisseminationKnowledge generation and dissemination

How do companies access information and developand share knowledge? This is an area of hugecurrent concern in both research and practice, as

seen in the rapidly growing volume of literatureon the learning organization and knowledge man-agement. It seems to us that there are three majorareas for discussion here:

How are practitioners to be made aware thatsuch relevant research does exist? At present thereare no clear models of dissemination for research.Here we are thinking of the case of a firm thatrequires a view of what constitutes most relevantknowledge in a field. Where do they go for thisknowledge? There are practitioner-oriented pub-lications, such as Financial Times and HarvardBusiness Review and these frequently provide afirst port of call. However, they provide neither a‘systematic’ perspective of what is available norone of its inherent value. Frequently the workreported in such publications is managementconsultancy-based and while it may have a strongknowledge base, its value is sometimes difficult tojudge and the point of publication is often a formof self-marketing.

A recent example demonstrates the possiblyproblematic nature of this form of publication inthe case of the consultancy firm that was foundby Business Week (August 7, 1998) to havesystematically manipulated The New York TimesBooks Bestseller list by itself buying a largequantity of a book written by two of its con-sultants to push the book up the bestseller listand thus to gain publicity and business for thefirm involved. Thousands of copies of the bookin question were discovered gathering dust in atrailer park.

This suggests the need for intermediary formsof organization that can act as honest knowledgebrokers, archiving relevant research and advisingcompanies on how to access the most relevantknowledge stocks. Such organizations might bebased in or linked to a university business library,or they might be stand-alone higher educationenterprises, spin-offs from HE institutions butstill linked to them, for example, in a science park,in joint ventures between an HE body/group and a firm (for example, a telco or an IT firm), orbetween an HE unit and a body representingemployers and practitioners.

How is more relevant research to be generated?This is now discussed in terms of Mode 2 researchwith managers and organizations more closelyinvolved in the framing of research. This dependsupon academics sensitive to the needs of prac-titioners and skilled in developing these kinds of


research relationship and on firms who are con-vinced of the value of this kind of research.

How is such research to be disseminated? In theMode 2 model, access takes place as an integralpart of the joint involvement of researchers andreflective practitioners in the research process.However, this form of research will often/normallytend to take place in closed networks. For example,The Financial Services Research Forum at theUniversity of Nottingham has 16 member financial-services companies who negotiate a researchprogramme with the academics involved. Currently,we are researching strategy, marketing and edu-cation issues in financial services. However, thefeedback of the research is to the companies andthe knowledge generated is the property of thefirms involved, although it is also used to informacademic papers. Mode 2 research does not,therefore, necessarily create knowledge as apublic good, if the companies involved see it onlyas contributing to their competitive advantage.And, of course, a primary motivation for gettinginvolved in such research networks in the firstplace is to commission research that mightcontribute to competitive advantage.

Double challenge of relevance

In its strategy ‘collaborate to compete’, the UKGovernment recognizes the need to create aworld-class research base that is able to translateits knowledge production into commercial suc-cess for the UK. It suggests that the establishmentof networks which link universities with the usersof research, including business and industry,charities, government and the general public, willlead to its practical application, encouraging abroader input to the establishment of the researchagenda and to the development of a genuineknowledge community.

The Industry–Academic Links report (HEFCE,1998) highlights some of the government meas-ures to promote higher education institutions(HEIs)–firms linkages: for example, the concept of ring-fencing industry–academic links in areasof research deemed to be of particular relevance to industry. Manifestations of this can be seenthrough participation by UK HEIs and industryin the European Union’s (EU) Framework Pro-grammes. A broader effort to drive academicresearch towards support for competitiveness canbe observed through the Department of Trade

and Industry Foresight Programme, redefinitionof the Research Councils’ missions and the creationof the University Challenge Fund, which directlyaddresses the development of the academic–industry relationship.

Key studies focusing on the process of know-ledge production have also drawn attention tothese existing links and to the emergence of newtypes of relationships (Gibbons et al., 1994). Theyhave chartered the developing relationship betweenHEIs, industry and government in terms of a‘triple helix’ which takes into account the ex-panding role of the knowledge sector in relationto the political and economic infrastructure ofsociety (Leydesdorff and Etzkowitz, 1996). Thenecessary cultural shift comes in terms of beingable to understand the needs of the firms andprovide an interface that allows the swift andeffective flow of knowledge and people to theirmost productive use.

Gibbons et al. call this the shift from Mode 1 toMode 2 in Knowledge Production. Traditionalknowledge production systems (Mode 1) werebased on a clear demarcation between the publicand private sectors. Universities were independ-ent, discipline-based providers of basic educationand skills to students. They carried out research,which they believed was in the long-term publicinterest of adding to the body of knowledgewithin a particular discipline. Much of this know-ledge was produced with the intention that itshould be used by other academics. Quality wasscrutinized and controlled within well-definedframeworks such as peer review of research pro-posals and refereed journal articles. Consultantsand other organizations provided knowledge toprivate organizations and government.

Within the emerging context of Mode 2, dis-tinctions between public and private knowledgeproduction have become blurred. Universities are involved in more consultancy and industry has become a significant participant in scientificresearch and training. Knowledge production has shifted towards interdisciplinary research inthe context of application, problem-solving andgreater collaboration. As Gibbons et al. (1994)emphasize, the Mode 2 knowledge-productionsystem brings together the ‘supply side of know-ledge’, with the ‘demand side’, with universitiesbeing part of the former and businesses part ofthe latter. In management research, as Tranfieldand Starkey (1998) suggest, such a system would


depend for its effectiveness on a rapid interplaybetween management theory and practice, withacademics and managers committed to learningfrom one another, a virtuous circle of academicslearning from managers, codifying informationinto blueprints for managerial practice, and man-agers learning from academics, developing andapplying practically-derived theories. One of theoutcomes of such an approach will be that, as thekind and quality of outputs become more varied,they become more difficult to measure.

Whilst Mode 2 brings with it new practices foracademics and industrialists, universities andfirms remain very different institutions in terms of the ways in which they generate and manageknowledge. A clear distinction between the know-ledge production of universities and firms can be observed in several aspects. University know-ledge is based on a wide range of disciplines andthe existence of few interdisciplinary centres ofexcellence. Industry knowledge requires a dif-ferent combination of specialized and generalistknowledge which is used in a wide range of pro-jects, problems are not discipline-based and thereis a need to create and dismantle interdisciplinaryteams quickly. For firms the very notion of learn-ing can be problematic if it means challengingaccepted modes of practice. In universities, thedevelopment of path-breaking new knowledgetakes a long time, is produced for the public goodand the emphasis on new learning, albeit in par-ticular paradigms, is strong. In industry, problemsneed to be solved immediately, knowledge isconsumed for private profit and the learning is weak. Knowledge produced by universities isusually rigorously measured and managed and isof high quality, whereas in industry the quality ofinformation received may vary widely, and firmsare bombarded with information which is difficultto assess.

Moreover, motivations of individual researchersand practitioners differ, as does the rationale forparticipating in research by universities and firms.For example, researchers at universities are oftendriven to continue their work because it providesa sense of challenge and they like to work onproblems of their own choice and which interestthem, making ‘fundamental’ discoveries abouthowpeople and things work. In comparison, prac-titioners working in industry often have to solveproblems not of their own choosing but out of necessity, and work towards solutions that

permit pragmatic ‘muddling through’ and with thebottom-line profitability of their companies asource of control and discipline (Derrington, 1999).

There are, of course, excellent examples ofindustry–university research collaboration butthese are perhaps more prevalent in the sciencesthan in the social sciences. The Industry–Academic Links report (HEFCE, 1998) providesa comprehensive analysis of the motivations andbarriers to the establishment of consultancy andresearch links between academe and industry.The study collected information about the aca-demic years 1995–96 and 1996–97 and included alluniversities and higher education colleges in theUK. In its findings the report points out that, inrelation to motivations, higher education institu-tions (HEIs) rated access to industrial funding as the main motivating factor. The next mostimportant factor was that the collaboration withindustry provided an exploitation outlet forconsultancy and research capabilities in the realworld as well as providing an outlet for researchresults. Positive examples of collaboration high-lighted the existence of mutual trust, goodpersonal relationships, the benefit of a long-termrelationship and mutual benefit from the work.The successful links also had in common flexi-bility, rapid response and timely delivery togetherwith project-management skills.

The report also examined barriers to HE–business links, among which the most importantfactor noted by HEIs was differences in theresearch objectives between the academics andpotential industry sponsors. There was also a lackof incentives for academics to pursue consultancyand such ‘quasi’-research was often not per-ceived, by academics, as interesting for academicsto work on. Moreover, working with industry onresearch projects had no influence on institutionalbaseline funding and lacked influence in academicpromotions. Finally, HEIs were not being seen as reliable partners for research by industry. The latter was a frequently cited problem inmanaging research and consultancy links. Thiswas manifested in various ways, most commonlyin terms of adherence to deadlines, deficiencies in response time caused by HEI procedures,reporting deficiencies and lack of professionalcontracts. From the perspective of the HEresearch providers, there is a perceived problemthat commissioners of research are not preparedto bear the full costs of research and that, as a


result, research projects’ full costs are borne bythe providers of the research service (The Higher,19 May 2000).

This notion that managers cannot derivepractical benefit from the knowledge generatedby academic research has been a topic ofcontinued interest, often appearing under the title of ‘rigour versus relevance’ (e.g. Benbasatand Zmud, 1999; Davenport and Markus, 1999;Mowday, 1997). There is, however, a considerableamount of research which has found that prac-tising managers intuitively draw upon complextheoretical ideas in their day-to-day lives, eventhough these may not be formal management theories(Watson, 1994). As Watson argues, managers areessentially practical theorists.

In the new, more broadly ‘social’ production ofknowledge there is constant pressure ‘to balanceinvolvement and distance with user interests’ andto face the challenges for management researchof the ‘double hurdles of scholarly quality andrelevance’ (Pettigrew, 1997). Management re-search is thus facing a double challenge: it must beof high academic quality and of high relevance tousers. Relevant research will need to provideanalyses, insight and advice on problems or issuesof concern to user communities; balance the in-herent longevity of the research process with theneed for rapid change in business and society andbuild on close liaison with users, with its resultsbeing communicated to users through accessiblemedia and in a language that they can understand.Authors who strive to craft relevant articles forpractitioners need to focus on the concerns of prac-tice, provide real value to professionals and applya pragmatic rather than academic tone. Ideally,they should also describe how the ideas discussedor actions suggested would be implemented inpractice, allowing for contextual differences thatare important to different readership communities.

Academics need to consider carefully theaccessibility of their work and their ‘style’ ofwriting (Van Maanen, 1995). This is not a problempeculiar to management. Accounting researchers,too, have considered how to make their workmore relevant to practice and have concluded thatthey need to make it more accessible. Accountingpractitioners do not understand contemporaryacademic accounting research;

‘Because they do not understand the mathematicsand statistics that characterise most contemporary

research, many articles published in academicresearch journals today might as well be written inGreek. Until the next generation of practitionersget research training, ways will need to be foundfor researchers to communicate with the currentgeneration of practitioners.’ (Leisenring and Todd,1994, p. 74)

Efforts suggested to improve the communicationof research results include more comprehensibleabstracts at the beginning of articles or, moreradical, more attention being given to ‘profes-sional adaptation’ sections in journals.

Relationships between accounting and financeacademics and the business community arerelatively strong (Schmotter, 1998). In other man-agement areas, such as organizations, the links aremore tenuous, although much of the popularwork of authors such as Tom Peters has its originsin models developed in models of academia. InPeters’ case, the 7-S model of organization thatinforms the analysis of In Search of Excellence(Peters and Waterman, 1982) arose out ofcollaboration with Richard Pascale and betweenMcKinsey and Stanford’s business faculty.

The US Academy of Management journals,such as the Academy of Management Review, nowplace more emphasis on the relevance of researchfor practice in conclusions to articles. The Academyalso has a special journal for practitioners, theAcademy of Management Executive, although thisdoes suggest some kind of two-tier knowledgesystem with a domain exclusive to academicsreserved for the Review. This raises the questionof what forms of writing might bridge the gapbetween the domains of theory and practicerather than reinforce it.

One can see this gap writ large in the area ofstrategic management. The Strategic ManagementJournal (SMJ), the leading academic journal inthe field, has pioneered articles on and developedwhat is now emerging as a dominant paradigm instrategy, the resource-based view of the firm. Thisperspective had its origins in the pioneering workof Edith Penrose and has been developed instrategy in pioneering SMJ articles by Wernerfelt,and Prahalad and Bettis. But SMJ has becomeincreasingly technical and ‘divorced’ from practice.Indeed, many of its articles, with their emphasison the minutiae of strategy content, are difficult,even for academics in the field of strategy, tounderstand. Some pioneers in the field criticizethe way in which the journal has been colonized


by mathematics at the expense of relevance, andbemoan the fact that SMJ seems to be treadingthe same ‘developmental’ path as the Journal ofFinance, soon to be virtually inaccessible exceptto an élite group of researchers.

The strategy adopted by leading strategyresearchers – with notable exceptions such asHenry Mintzberg, who has mounted a heroicrearguard action against this specialization trendand the dominance of technique at the expense of relevance – has been to write their technicalarticles for the academic journals while writingmore popular and accessible articles for prac-titioner journals, primarily the Harvard BusinessReview (HBR), or in books. Thus the leadingstrategy ‘gurus’ of the moment, Gary Hamel andC. K. Prahalad grew to prominence with keyarticles on strategic intent and core competencein HBR, ideas which have their origins in thetheory of the resource-based view of the firm. Inorganization theory, Gareth Morgan developedthe theory of the importance of metaphor inorganizational life in academic articles and aninfluential book. He then reworked the book in an Executive Edition specifically tailored forthe practising manager (Morgan, 1998).

Development of knowledge networks

The conduct of research in this context ofapplication as well as its distributed nature meansthat contemporary science cannot remain easilywithin the confines of university departments oracademic centres as currently defined. Gibbons et al. (1994) suggest that this is already leading, insome areas, to the emergence of a host of newinstitutional arrangements linking government,industry, universities and private consultancygroups in different ways. The formation of theseknowledge networks will ultimately provide analignment of theory and practice, also aligning the needs of researchers and practitioners. Theessence of the ‘Mode 2’ approach to research ad-vocated by Gibbons and colleagues is that there is aneed to increase the stakeholding that users have atvarious stages of the research process. The scope ofthe engagement should be determined by know-ledge networks involving practitioners from thebeginning of the process. These networks are thenresponsible for the creation of a ‘user strategy’ anddissemination of research findings takes place as anintegral part of the actual research process.

The Science Policy Research Unit (1995) pointsout that university-based scientists have lost theirmonopoly supplier position as knowledge workers.The data points to, amongst other things, the crucialrole of networking in the new social production ofknowledge. Being part of a network, and thus in a position to be able to effectively exploit theknowledge that circulates in a network, hasbecome possibly as valuable as playing the role ofa new knowledge producer who works auto-nomously. There is a clear recognition that knowl-edge derives not just from individual thought but from collective processes of networking,negotiation, and interpersonal communicationand influence (Dodgson, 1993).

A key theme of recent debates among manage-ment researchers has been the need for academicsto build partnerships between themselves anduser communities as a stepping stone to meetingthe double challenge of scholarly quality and rele-vance (Economic and Social Research Council,1994). The formation of knowledge networkswould ultimately provide an alignment of theoryand practice, based upon a closer integration of researcher and practitioner needs. From hisexperience of the network form, Pettigrew (1997,p. 294) suggests that ‘partnership with users doesnot need to entail co-optation by users’. What thebest academic research offers is a critical exam-ination of, and a consideration of, how to transcendcurrent beliefs and assumptions but to make thispossible academics need to develop the capacity to‘break out’ of their own limiting ‘scholarly routines’.

Some existing industry–academic links arecharacterized by new types of knowledge networks.These have resulted from four main sources: first,informal contacts and spin-outs from universitydepartments; second, contract and collaborativeresearch performed by universities on behalf ofthe industry; third, as a result of property-led ini-tiatives in the form of science parks; and fourth,via the commercial exploitation of universityresearch through the management and licensingof intellectual property rights.

There already exist examples of new forms oforganization dedicated to closing the relevancegap. Wharton’s Forum on Electronic Commerceand the MSI (Marketing Science Institute) forumof partnership interaction provide interesting ex-amples of effective knowledge networks establishedwith this intention. The Wharton Forum drawstogether executives and academic researchers


to examine emerging developments in electroniccommerce. The work offers insights for industryparticipants and helps keep researchers focusedon critical industry issues:

‘MSI (Marketing Science Institute) forum ofpartnership interaction delivers “relevance withrigor” by drawing together researchers in the field and senior executives. As Prof. Philip Kotlerdescribes it, the MSI is a “mutual educationsociety”. The MSI joins 2,000 executives in 60global companies with 2,000 academic researchersin marketing, organizational behaviour, informa-tion systems and other fields. It establishes aresearch agenda and then provides funding forresearch projects related to that agenda. Everytwo years, research priorities are identified througha series of discussions around the world, culmin-ating in a ballot of members. These urgent needsof business are then communicated to researchersalong with offers of funding to pursue them.Research results are published and disseminatedquickly to members through print publicationsand a web site.’ (Wind and Nueno, 1998)

The success of the above network forms offers a valuable model of how to create more usefulknowledge outcomes by actively involvingpractitioners and their representatives, which willinvolve the establishment of a range of similartypes of networks. The existence of such networksdemonstrates one possible form of academic–practitioner interface. It also throws into starkrelief the limitations of (the majority of) academicinstitutions, where conditions for the develop-ment of these forms of knowledge production donot yet exist. To create these conditions a series of changes/issues need to be initiated/consideredby leaders of academic institutions, governmentinstitutions and business organizations.

Research training

The academic landscape

Commentators are currently predicting seismicchanges in the business world, even a new eco-nomic era (Hitt, 1998). Although they argueabout the detail, analysts do seem to agree that weare entering a new competitive landscape, drivenby the forces of globalization and technologicalrevolution and that, to survive in this new land-scape, firms must strive to develop their corecompetencies (Hamel and Prahalad, 1995) while

also cultivating the strategic flexibility necessaryto adapt to these challenging and unpredictabletimes. In this context, superior management skillsrequire new ways (‘non-linear’) of learning andthinking and an openness to new managerial mind-sets geared to innovation in thought and action.

The new market requirements clearly affect thedemand for the types of knowledge required tomanage in this dynamic environment, influencingboth the content of what business schools teachand the process of how managers are taught. Ifchange is increasingly the norm in business thenwe should also expect change to have a growingimpact upon the production of knowledge, uponthe type of research conducted and, particularly,upon the nature of the research process itself.Solving the complex problems likely to impactupon twenty-first century organizations will require ‘out-of-the box’ thinking concerning re-search problems and innovative forms of researchdesign.

As the external environment of businessschools changes, the demands placed on businessschools will evolve to be very different from theones currently faced. At their inception, businessschools flourished as the agents of the codifica-tion of management knowledge and its embodi-ment in curricula for business courses, primarilythe MBA. We might well come to look upon the1980s as the high point of business-school edu-cation. Then, organizations looked to universitybusiness schools as the main suppliers of whatthey wanted to consume in management andexecutive education. Universities were the keyplayers in this market as the source of much of thecorporations’ intellectual capital in the form ofMBA and executive management educationcourses. Through the 1990s, however, we haveseen a growing criticism of business education.Business schools have been criticized for weak-nesses in research, primarily a lack of relevance,and for outmoded curricula that do not speak tothe changing needs of business.

The following titles are powerful indicators ofwhat was judged to be going wrong:

• ‘Where the schools aren’t doing their home-work: Critics say they churn out MBAs lackingleadership skills and operations know-how’(Business Week, 1988).

• ‘Business Schools: Striving to meet CustomerDemand’; the article starts with the statement


that ‘Business Schools have long been criticizedfor not addressing the needs of today’s globalcompetitive business environment’ (Manage-ment Review, 1992).

• ‘The Trouble with MBAs’ addresses thequestion ‘Who needs managers who have justspent two years with such an out-of-datecrowd?’ (Fortune, 1991).

A host of management writers have reinforcedthese kinds of criticism. For example, Davis andBotkin (1996, pp. 90–91) suggest that businessschools have not kept pace with the dramaticchange of corporate organizations and theirenvironment.

‘Students still come to classes to learn, the classesare still sixty, seventy-five or ninety minutes long,and courses are still offered in semesters, tri-mesters, or quarters. Instructors still stand in frontof the room and students sit in rows that, at most,have been bent from straight lines into a horse-shoe shape for case discussions. Typical classroomtechnology is still hardly beyond what it was threeand four decades ago. Computers are usedextensively, but so are pencils. Indeed, the processand products of business school education havechanged as little as the process and products ofany kind of school education, whereas businessitself has gone through revolutions.’

As a reaction to the criticisms of business schoolsand a growing recognition of the potential im-portance of corporate education, over 1400 organ-izations in America have internalized educationactivities, mainly by developing self-managing‘corporate universities’. Large enterprises haveemerged from small beginnings. Motorola Univer-sity, for example, began with a $2 million budgetand three staff members. In 1998 it administereda $120 million budget and operated its ownCenter for Continuing Education at Motorola’sheadquarters. The university also runs satellitecampuses in 14 cities in the United States,Europe, Asia and Latin America. McDonald’sHamburger University began in the basement ofan outlet and by 1998 it was providing trainingprogrammes in 91 countries. One of the mostsuccessful of this new breed of organization isGeneral Electric’s Crotonville, a key measure ofwhose success is GE’s ability to develop its ownechelon of successful top managers in-house(Tichy and Sherman, 1993).

What is under fire is the traditional model ofeducation and business, and management edu-cation is squarely in the firing line:

‘Everything that is wrong with training can bestated in four words: It’s just like school . . . Schoolisn’t really about learning; it’s about short-termmemorisation of meaningless information thatnever comes up later in life. The school model wasnever intended to help people acquire practicalskills. It is intended to satisfy observers thatknowledge is being acquired (for short periods oftime).’ (Schank, 1982)

Leading corporate universities are challengingwhat they see as outmoded models of education.Corporations such as Hewlett-Packard started byabolishing classroom-style education. Other com-panies have reshaped their corporate universitiesinto virtual universities (clicks rather than mortar).Federal Express, for example, spends 5% of itspayroll annually on educating its 40 000 couriersand service agents. Every six months, using inter-active videodisks (IVDs), employees receive sixhours of training.

This shift away from classroom-based trainingtowards computer-based training has also beenanticipated in the responses to a US survey,entitled ‘Workforce Education: Corporate Train-ing and Learning at America’s Companies’,published in 1988 by the Annenberg Center forCommunication at the University of SouthernCalifornia and conducted with 202 senior man-agers responsible for corporate education andtraining in companies with annual revenue greaterthan $1 billion. According to the survey respond-ents, classroom training is expected to decreaseby 16%, accounting for only 40% of all hoursspent in training, and computer-mediated trainingis expected to double, from 16% to 33% ofavailable hours. The survey also highlighted as atrend that, as technology becomes more advancedand accessible, companies expect to see more out-side developers offering courses in multimedia-based training (MBT) distance learning formats.

The findings suggest that the respondentswould be more inclined to partner with an outsidetraining provider if the provider offered course inan MBT training format. Some outside de-velopers are already offering this kind of course.For example, Duke University’s Fuqua School ofBusiness offers an on-line MBA through itsGlobal Executive MBA programme (GEMBA).


GEMBA students spend 30 hours a week on-line,attending CD-ROM video lectures and down-loading supplemental programmes and interactivestudy aids. Distance learning is also widely avail-able for MBAs, across a range of more industry-specific subjects. The University of Ulster, forexample, provides a postgraduate Certificate inManagement for Shorts, the Aircraft Company.The course consists of one and two-day workshopsand half-day meetings over 12 to 18 months, with work-based learning focused on companyrequirements. Multimedia-based and distancelearning training is thus capturing the attention ofmany corporate managers, for its speed and long-term savings. And new forms of distance tech-nology media facilitate access to a global networkof research sites, although we lack any clear ideaas yet of how to map this environment and bestprofit from it.

Apart from having industrial membership on their course advisory boards, the main trendamong those offering masters courses aimed atindustry has been towards modularization andpart-time registration. The Executive MBA, where-in courses are designed around the core MBAsyllabus, with some tailoring to the needs ofcorporate clients, is something of a growth market.Warwick Business School, for example, has a verysuccessful MBA collaboration with AndersenConsulting. A successful example of tailoring acourse to the needs of more than one company is a consortium MBA offered at Heriot-WattUniversity to employees of the Bank of Scotland,Hewlett Packard, ScottishPower and the NHS.The MBA takes two to three years part-time,offered in five-day modules with 20 people eachyear. There have been a number of such develop-ments. As intellectual capital becomes moreimportant to corporate (and political) agendas,we may well find that corporations are morewilling to get involved in academia.

Business executives may thus become more ofa driving force for educational reform in businessschools. They have advanced notice of the know-ledge, skills and abilities that marketable studentsmust offer to employees. The educational prioritiesof the business community can thus accelerateadvancements in universities, allowing executivesto become instigators of innovation in education.However, for changes to happen, the processmust evolve as a cooperative activity, geared tothe needs of both partners.

According to the former US Academy ofManagement President, Anne Huff:

‘As business schools and their stakeholders beginto work more closely, each must inform the other, and expect their own views to change.Transformation of current practices requires thatoutsiders learn more about education and researchin university settings, just as faculty and businessschool administrators must learn more about theneeds and current experience of the communitiesthey serve, Successful reforms call for ongoinggive and take, in which new practices are mutuallygenerated, tested and revised.’

One way forward may be the joint appointmentof staff by business organizations and businessschools. There is a long history of firms fundingendowed professorships in universities. In an agethat places increased emphasis upon shareholdervalue, organizations will be looking more carefullyat their returns from this kind of ‘investment’. Inthe USA we now have examples of educationalappointments made jointly by commercial com-panies and business schools. For example, Dardenbusiness school at the University of Darden hasjointly appointed a professor with United Tech-nologies (UTC) who is both a professor of busi-ness administration at Darden and vice-presidentand chief learning officer at UTC (FinancialTimes, 23 May 2000).

Business education reform

A key function of a university business school isthe creation and dissemination of knowledgethrough publication and teaching. However, uni-versities stand accused of an unreflective approachto their own practices. Ashton (1995) appliesorganizational learning concepts to UK businessschools and their university context, and identi-fies weaknesses such as poor information andcommunication systems and a general lack oforganizational flexibility. Given the exigencies of the global business environment and the newemphasis in organizations and societies upon theimportance of the knowledge economy, seniorexecutives have been increasingly critical of graduateand post-graduate business education with regardto students’ preparation in terms of communicationskills, critical thinking skills (Brookfield, 1987) andmore general developmental issues such as levelsof emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1995).


Business schools also need to respond to intensepressures from their own competitive environ-ments. Core programmes such as the MBA arenow being offered by an increasing number ofschools, making the MBA a generic qualificationand almost a commodity brand with, on thewhole, little differentiation in terms of content,philosophy or customization to particular con-texts. The application of new technology by non-traditional universities also has the potential toredefine some segments of the higher education‘industry’. The University of Phoenix is a leaderin this area. It is Internet-based, has over 56 000students enrolled and revenues in excess of $283million.

In this period of transition to a knowledge-based society – based upon what Handy (1995)argues is a three ‘I’ economy of information,intelligence and ideas – universities, and perhapsbusiness schools most of all, are faced with a needto rethink their role in preparing the professionalsrequired by this new economy. Issues of coursedelivery become as important as issues of contentin helping managers develop new skills. To dothis business schools will need to break awayfrom traditional, compartmentalized learningand teaching. Novel problems arise, giving riseto a debate about how to develop the criticalreflection, strategic vision and flexible andadaptable mindsets required by the manager of today and the leader of the future. We brieflyexamine below some of the challenges facingtraditional business education mindsets in relationto the MBA.

1. The delivery of updated course content. Towhat extent is the rethinking of curriculalinked to new perspectives on knowledge?One way forward is to extend the traditionalsyllabus. The Open University BusinessSchool has included in its MBA curriculum acourse on knowledge management. The coursetook three years to develop and is based on five years of research funded by ESRC,Design Council and others, undertaken inclose partnership with industry. The learningmodel fits current thinking about knowledgecreated in practice. Students use state-of-the-art technologies and then reflect on theprocess of communication as one of know-ledge sharing. Topics covered include: com-munication, the cost of knowledge, managing

knowledge, extra-organizational knowledgeprocesses, intellectual capital, intellectualproperty rights, brands as an application ofknowledge management, innovation, know-ledge technologies and knowledge managementin practice.

2. Integrating knowledge across the curriculum.Here the emphasis is upon the development ofoutcome-based curricula, using, but in a novelway, case-study methodology. By designingcase studies that intersect the entire curriculum,with faculty members approaching the samecase from the perspective of different indi-vidual specialities, students are encouraged tothink creatively and integratively, to analysedata from a variety of perspectives and tosynthesize new problem-oriented responses.Rather than the traditional methodology ofdepending on a given case to teach a specificconcept or identify a given problem, it isimportant that students develop their ownjudgement as to what combination of know-ledge is best suited to interpret a particular caseand what are the implications for managerialaction.

3. Cognitive and emotional intelligence. Curriculumdevelopment can also be linked to alternativeteaching methods, such as the reflecting team(Griffith, 1999). The latter places students andclients in situations which might catalyze thedevelopment of more sophisticated models of cognitive and emotional intelligence. It alsoallows students not only to learn about con-tent but also about processes, and to criticallyreflect upon both. This fits with an importanttrend in management development. When itcomes to improving organizational effective-ness, managers, scholars and practitioners are beginning to emphasize the importance ofmanagers’ emotional intelligence (Cooper,1997; Harrison, 1997; Goleman, 1995). If thetask of business schools is to help in develop-ing the managers of the future, then they needto provide an environment where studentspursue the experiential learning that can then develop any or all of the five key basicdimensions of this form of intelligence: (1) self-awareness, (2) self-regulation, (3) motiv-ation, (4) empathy and (5) social skills.

But perhaps the main area and engine of changewill lie outside MBA activity. Answering the


question, ‘What do Business Schools need to looklike in the Future?’, Porras (2000), suggests that‘The critical difference will occur in executiveeducation’ and that the ‘explosion in numbers of those graduating with an MBA’ will create ‘a thirst for continuing education as part of alifelong learning process’. The impact of thisdramatic increase in business-educated managerswill be felt mainly, as Porras suggests, in the needfor business schools to respond effectively to thenew demands of an increasingly sophisticateduser-group. As a result, business school facultieswill need to develop new research and teachingapproaches. The emphasis on lifelong learningactivities will mean that a different type ofresearch is required to drive the teaching neededby executives involved in lifelong learning at busi-ness schools. Also a different kind of academicwill need to be developed, whose research andteaching interests differ from those of currentfaculty, and who will be able to conduct ‘pureresearch with a problem solving focus as well asapplied research with an analytical focus – call itbridging research, research that equally combinesthe pure and applied approaches’.

Porras’s views of a future shift in educationaldemands, combined with the need to changeresearch and teaching practices, reflect a growingsense of concern among executives and somescholars who sense that, in today’s age of in-creasingly rapid change, modes of education andtraining, and the research that informs these, willneed to find new ways of genuinely augmentingindividual and organizational knowledge.

As corporate education aims to become an in-tegral part of the company’s everyday functioningin providing the groundwork for more effectiveknowledge management (both generation anddissemination), corporations will need to provideample opportunities for individuals to share whatthey have learned, and faculties will need to moveaway from the traditional education model thatprivileges knowledge creation as the preserve ofacademic experts and assumes a one-way flow ofknowledge from such experts to students. Organ-izations are experimenting with a new paradigmof the learning organization, an ‘organization thatis continually expanding its capacity to create itsfuture’ through its learning (Senge, 1990, p. 14).Future education programmes in management, bethey for MBAs, executive MBAs, graduate train-ing, post-experience training and development

and even research training will need to beresearched, designed and provided with this kindof organization in mind.

The challenge of interdisciplinarity

There is an emerging view that researchersaddressing the complex problems of the modernworld need to collaborate more frequently todraw upon the knowledge, skills and techniquesof a range of disciplines. An ideal often referredto in this connection is interdisciplinarity. GordonConway, Vice-Chancellor of the University ofSussex, when chairing an international panel toproduce a vision and strategy for feeding theworld in the twenty-first century, captured theessence of interdisciplinarity as follows.

‘Interdisciplinarity is a radically different approachthat combines two or more disciplines to producean outcome that is more than the simple sum ofthe parts. At its best, and most creative, inter-disciplinarity produces transcendent insights thatwere previously not perceived by the individualdisciplines working alone . . . In research theresult is a discovery at the frontiers of worldknowledge; for an individual student, it is a set ofinsights of greater significance to their personaland intellectual development . . . The world aroundus is becoming increasingly complex and com-petitive, and our success [i.e. the future success ofuniversities] will be determined, in large measure,by our interdisciplinary skills, The argument isthree-fold:

First, many of the practical challenges of the futureare inherently interdisciplinary, and we will fail ifthey are tackled piecemeal. They range frommanufacturing systems in engineering, which re-quire the integration of a number of engineeringand management disciplines, to the tackling ofpoverty and the problems of the environment thatrequire insights drawn from across the social andnatural sciences.

Second, because so much is unpredictable, we needgreater flexibility among individuals and institutions. . . To realise this goal students, while benefitingfrom the rigour of disciplinary study, also need toacquire “transferable intellectual skills” definedby Professor Donald Winch as a “Knowledge ofunderlying intellectual principles that are capableof being applied outside their original point ofencounter, an ability to analyse complex issuesinvolving both facts and values, and the capacity


to draw on disparate sources of information tosolve practical problems”.

And third, in an increasingly multicultural world,we need insights derived from across the humanitiesand social sciences that will enable us to liveproductively and harmoniously in a society wheredifferent religions and cultural practices andbeliefs are constantly impinging on one another.’(Professor Gordon Conway, address to UniversityCourt, 1995)

As a mode of research, interdisciplinarity extendsthe boundaries of academic knowledge, enablingcomplex practical problems to be solved andfoments the creation of networks of experts.However, the organizational structure of mostinstitutions of higher education has historicallyfavoured a more monodisciplinary research cul-ture. The reasons for this seem to lie in the primeresponsibilities of higher education for traininghighly-qualified specialists in established researchareas. The pursuit of interdisciplinary collabor-ation is, therefore, a challenging and problematicissue. Choices of both topic and mode of researchare often personal choices made by individualresearchers rather than strategically oriented bythe demands of new modes of knowledge. Theseindividual decisions are influenced by factors re-lated to personal benefit, such as career progres-sion which, for academics, is heavily influenced bypublication in what are essentially single-disciplinejournals. Other factors, such as the method offunding and assessment also have a major weighton individual decisions and, as the Interdisciplin-ary Research report produced by the ScottishHigher Education Funding Council (1997) suggests,the competitive Research Assessment Exercise(RAE) may be having ‘a negative biasing effectagainst interdisciplinary research’. However, otherinitiatives, such as the Foresight Programme, are encouraging the crossing of disciplinaryboundaries to achieve novel and relevant insights.In the words of John Sizer, Chief Executive of the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council,‘such crossings can challenge and be challengedby the structures in which the researchers oper-ate. Adapting their organisations and structuresto support the vigour and flexibility of developinginterdisciplinary links is one of the most difficultchallenges facing research institutions.’

Individual universities have pioneered interdis-ciplinary research initiatives, either on their own

or in collaboration. For example, departments ofeconomics, management and pharmacology at theUniversities of St Andrews and Dundee, havecollaborated in the establishment of the Pharma-coeconomics Research Centre (PERC).

‘The objective of Pharmacoeconomics is to pro-vide a menu of choice for the decision-makers andto rationalise the utilisation of scarce healthcareresources. From this single point of view, thesubject matter of Pharmacoeconomics research isno different from other branches of economics.However Pharmacoeconomics is an interdisciplin-ary area which requires the expertise of heatheconomists and medical practitioners, as well ascolleagues from other sciences. It therefore incor-porates a range of disciplines, and lies on theboundary of medical and social sciences. PERC isuniquely situated at the interface of academia,industry and government, producing vigorousresearch, and assisting policy makers at local,national and international levels.’ (HEFCE, 1998,p. 60)

The UK research funding councils are alsoaddressing the issue of interdisciplinarity and its implications for new forms of knowledge. The Engineering and Physical Sciences ResearchCouncil (EPSRC) is seeking to promote ground-breaking interdisciplinary research, for example,at the overlap between disciplines such as chem-istry and materials and process engineering, andbetween engineering production managementand research into the management of changeprocesses. ‘In the centre of each discipline, theexistence of disciplinary specialists means thatthey can take a primary role in initiating projects.Work may be needed in the overlapping territory,but there may be no research community there.EPSRC would set up a managed programme tobring such a research community into being ifnecessary’ (HEFCE, 1998).

One should not underestimate the challenge of interdisciplinarity which is ‘a very difficult, if not perilous, enterprise’ (Kristeva, 1998, pp. 5–6). The perils relate to both organizationalpolitics and the interdisciplinary research pro-cess itself. Interdisciplinarity provokes anxiety inthose who feel the integrity of their discipline isbeing called into question, and in those who feelthey may be putting careers on the line in pursuitof new knowledge paradigms. The latter issue isparticularly problematic for those in the earlystages of their careers and, later, as careers


progress, it may be too late for leopards to changetheir spots.

Kristeva (1998, pp. 6–7) reflects on her ownexperience of pioneering work at the Universityof Paris VII in establishing L’Institut du Vivant/The Insititute of the Living, where the intellectualgoal was to approach the human being ‘in itscomplexities across the disciplines’:

‘Interdisciplinarity is always a site where expres-sions of resistance are latent. Many academics arelocked within the specificity of their field; that is afact. Even if they demonstrate or manifest a desireto work with other disciplines, more often thannot it turns out that, in fact, the work undertakenfails to break new ground. Thus, the first obstacleis often linked to individual competencies coupledwith a tendency to jealously protect one’s owndomain. Specialists are often too protective oftheir own prerogatives, do not actually work with other colleagues, and therefore do not teachtheir students to construct a diagonal axis in theirmethodology. As for dangerous aspects, you willfind that some people think their specialisation isinterdisciplinarity itself, which is tantamount tosaying that they have a limited amount of know-ledge of various domains, and only fragmentarycompetencies! This gives interdisciplinarity a verycaricatural image, and altogether reduces its scopeas a project.’

The latter is a crucial point. It suggests that whenwe define management research as essentiallyinterdisciplinary we are doomed to problems oflegitimacy vis à vis other disciplines. Perhaps, then,the quest for interdisciplinarity per se in man-agement research is doomed to failure because to characterize such research as interdisciplinarysuggests that it is, at best, only a pale shadow ofthe best that can be achieved in the other dis-ciplines that contribute to its interdisciplinaryfocus. There are at least three implications here.First, truly interdisciplinary research that tran-scends disciplinary origins can only come from a team effort. Second, to develop an individualinterdisciplinary researcher requires far more timethan in single disciplines. The third possibility is that the notion of interdisciplinarity providesthe wrong focus. If we are seeking new forms ofknowledge perhaps it is better to set out from thestarting point of problem definition, the problemin practice (the Mode 2 route) and construct anddevelop individuals and teams of researchers up

to the limits required by particular problem def-inition. From this perspective, it is the problemthat defines requisite knowledge not the discipline.And in this way management research can legiti-mately aspire to the status of a discipline in itsown right.

Gibbons et al. (1994, p. 27) discuss this issue interms of ‘transdisciplinarity’:

‘Transdisciplinarity is the privileged form ofknowledge production in Mode 2. It correspondsto a movement beyond disciplinary structures inthe constitution of the intellectual agenda, in themanner in which resources are deployed, and in the ways in which research is organised, resultscommunicated and the outcome evaluated . . . Inthe production of transdisciplinary knowledge, theintellectual agenda is not set within a particulardiscipline, nor is it fixed by merely juxtaposingprofessional interests of particular specialists insome loose fashion leaving to others the task ofintegration at a later stage. Integration is notprovided by disciplinary structures – in that regardthe knowledge process is not interdisciplinary, itcuts across disciplines – but is envisaged and pro-vided from the outset in the context of usage, orapplication . . . Working in an application contextcreates pressures to draw upon a diverse array of knowledge resources and to configure themaccording to the problem in hand.’

ConclusionEnhancing knowledge production capacity

We suggest seven primary areas of change forconsideration and debate.

1. Restructuring of academic institutions toimprove knowledge exchange and dissemination.An important element in knowledge exchange isthe ability of users to absorb the knowledge beingtransferred. This depends on their educationalbackground and experience and the nature of thenetworks and institutions and media with whichthey have regular contact. If management scholarsare to be enabled to influence and even to shapethe world of management they need to under-stand how they can influence the creation of abetter management knowledge industry and howthey can play a more important role in it thanthey do currently.

Better-educated knowledge consumers demandbetter management knowledge. Researchers can


intervene in the knowledge chain in a variety ofways. Through education – it is a core academicrole to educate students to be more discerning intheir consumption of management knowledge onmanagement degree programmes, undergraduateand postgraduate. Academics are also involved in educating other key actors in the ‘knowledgeindustry’, for example, those who act as internalchange agents in organizations and others such asmanagement consultants who are hired by com-panies to effect change.

To enhance the dissemination of results, avariety of channels need to be used. For example,scholars could be sponsored in order to increasecontacts with knowledge consumers other thanstudents. Formal positions for academia could becreated to develop knowledge brokers – manage-ment scholars able to translate scholarly rhetoricinto rhetoric fit for public consumption. Otherpossibilities involve forming alliances with mass-media editors and other management-fashionsetters. Entrepreneurs and managers in smallbusinesses present a particular challenge and herethe better dissemination of research results maybe obtained via the use of intermediaries such asconsultants, small business advisers, Chambers of Commerce, trade associations, governmentsponsored bodies such as TECs and publicawareness initiatives such as the DTI’s ‘Managingin the Nineties’.

2. Creation of problem/topic on-going researchforums and networks. Business schools need toreshape their departments to counter the inertiaof functional structures and to create solid links to industry practice. Departments might need tobe reshuffled and ongoing research forums andnetworks need to be established on a school-widebasis in order to galvanize knowledge-sharing,learning and change among academics and prac-titioners. Cross-disciplinary work that could occuramong academics does not because researchers in one functional area are unaware of currentdevelopments in other areas. Although thesenetworks and forums may be informal, they needto be installed and nurtured by the organization.This requires firm leadership in business schools.

3. Creation of a new system of incentives andnew roles. For scholars to be willing to developmore demanding knowledge-production processes,the creation of a new incentive structure is a veryimportant driver. Ways to align incentives withresearch relevance could be achieved by pro-

viding funding and tying promotions and careertracks to impact and relevance and by organizingand rewarding projects where researchers andusers are co-producers. Combining knowledgeproduction with use will demand cognitive andsocial skills of a high order from the managementresearch community. One might also consider the more formal incorporation of practitioner per-spectives into business schools through the creationof boundary-spanning roles that more closelyalign academia and business, for example in theform of US- or French-style Adjunct Professor roles,filled by managers who are themselves ‘reflectivepractitioners’.

4. Creation of new measures of academic impact.We lack any convincing way of assessing in some credible, systematic manner the impact thatresearch has on practice. A credible measure ofrelevance is needed to provide a counterweight topressure to use purely academic criteria to evalu-ate academic performance. The Industry–AcademicLinks survey (HEFCE, 1998) highlighted that anumber of senior academics felt that the currentResearch Assessment Exercise (RAE), used tomeasure research productivity and allocate researchfunding using a 5-point rating system, acts as adistinct disincentive to maintaining and strength-ening industry–academic links because of its lack of incentives for pursuing applied research.A practical issue raised in the report was thecontinued lack of suitable indicators of researchexcellence, apart from publications, which couldcope adequately with capturing the academicmerit of activities closely linked with industry, butwhich had few outputs associated with publica-tions. To unravel the problem, the Scottish HigherEducation Funding Council (1997, 2000) pro-posed the widening of the definition of excellencein research and new forms of measure. They alsosuggest a test for the relevance of research withthe inclusion of a positive weighting for externally-generated research income in the main RAEmeasures.

5. Establishment of cross-disciplinary, impact-focused and time-relevant associations and journals.Two measures suggest themselves here: createorganizations (MSI provides one possible modelfor emulation) that bring together academicresearchers and executives to examine broad,cross-disciplinary challenges facing businesses; andcreate new journals, with the necessary rigour to achieve academic respect, that address issues


that are cross-disciplinary and reflect the majorconcerns of practitioners.

6. Increase knowledge pace and flow. There isalso a need to increase the pace of academicresearch and its dissemination. By the time mostacademic research ‘flows’ through the review andpublication process the phenomenon it examinesmay no longer exist. It is not uncommon for topjournals to require a two-year editorial processbetween submission and publication. Academiamust find ways of tightening its own productdevelopment cycles, without sacrificing rigour, toensure it offers perspectives relevant to the real-time challenges of business.

7. Creation of an independent ManagementResearch Forum/Council? The aim of such a bodywould be to generate debate about priorities in management research and methodologies for‘user strategy’ proposals and to encourage newcentres of excellence and sustain current ones. Weremain uncertain about the viability of a stand-alone management research council but do feelthere is a need to address, at the very least, thering-fencing of research funding dedicated tomanagement research, given what many perceive asits current under-funding. To develop more flexibleand versatile forms of relevant knowledge thefollowing issues would need to be addressed:

• the interdisciplinary dynamics shaping theboundaries and development of the manage-ment field;

• the optimal method for interfacing theoreticaland practical concerns – how theoretical andoperational needs are to be aligned;

• the best strategies for the communication anddistribution of knowledge according to contextsorganized according to different institutionallogics of action;

• new ways of evaluating knowledge applicableto the short-term needs of practice and thelonger-term needs of theory development.

Expanding priorities in the mainstream funding of research. The potential ability of research to meet the needs of society on a long-term basishas not been a major specific objective within the RAE. As the SHEFCE ‘Knowledge Age’consultation paper highlights, there may in futurebe a need to prioritize the mainstream funding ofresearch to make it both more timely and morelong-reaching. ‘It is important to ensure that thereis appropriate balance of funding between high

quality, relevant research and research whosepotential future relevance can only be dimlyperceived at present.’

A common theme running through these sug-gestions is that of the importance of the ‘bridg-ing’ role and the task of intermediation in thecreation and dissemination of knowledge. Dis-cussion of new modes of knowledge production,interdisciplinarity and relevance tend to focusupon the role of the academic in knowledgecreation through research. The other side of thecoin of knowledge creation is knowledge dis-semination. It is our contention that academicsneed seriously to reconsider their role in theknowledge chain both as creators of knowledgeand as disseminators.

Academics have a key role to play as knowledgebrokers, both in terms of the kind of networks ofcommunication and discussion of research inwhich they operate and, crucially, as teachers/educators, a role that, in the discussion of re-search effectiveness, has tended to be somewhatdevalued. Teaching is perhaps the main dissem-ination route for research, assuming, of course,that teaching is informed by research. Teaching inresearch-led universities must be responsive tothe latest developments in both theory and prac-tice. In knowledge-oriented firms we are seeingthe development of expert consultant roles, themain function of which is to work as full-timecollators and disseminators of knowledge for a network (Dixon, 2000; Starkey, Barnatt andTempest, 2000). We suggest that academics – asteachers and in their other roles – as links betweenvarious knowledge networks, should embrace as a critical task the knowledge collation and dis-semination role.

The theory of knowledge brokering is beingused to explain business innovation. Hargadon(1998) analyses firms that act as knowledgebrokers. These typically function as consultants oras groups within a large organization that, ratherthan producing breakthrough knowledge them-selves, innovate by creating and disseminatingknowledge about how to combine existing tech-nologies in ways that result in dramatic synergy. Asand when universities take this role as seriouslyas the research that creates knowledge, they willalso have to consider new forms of network part-nership, for example with consultancies, think-tanks and even media companies that providepotential access to radically different modes of


dissemination, and the creation of new forms ofknowledge about how to manage knowledge.

Experimenting with new forms of managementeducation: a vehicle for fundamental change

It is a contention of this report that changescurrently underway in their external environmentwill require that business schools engage in afundamental rethinking of existing structures andprocesses. As we approach the end of the reportwe present an example of a management edu-cation initiative that seems to us to provide foodfor thought about where such a rethink mightlead and how more relevant knowledge might becreated.

FENIX is a Swedish research and developmentorganization that integrates knowledge creationthrough academic research and business creationthrough innovative management. The organiz-ation itself is a collaboration between StockholmSchool of Economics, Chalmers University ofTechnology, The Institute for Management Inno-vation and Technology, Astra Zeneca, Telia,Ericsson and Volvo, founded in 1997 with the goalof overcoming traditional dichotomies betweenacademia and industry ‘through the developmentof knowledge that is of practical relevance’. It isfunded by a mix of capital from researchfoundations, companies and universities. Althoughbased in Sweden, it draws on the skills of aninternational visiting faculty. Its mission is to findand create new system opportunities at theinterface between universities and companies intheir social context.

FENIX has two main areas of activity: researchand education. The research is based upon anaction-research paradigm and involves practicalinterventions in organizations. Research is con-centrated upon creating knowledge in cooperationwith the companies that serve as research sites. It has research groups in areas such as strategicknowledge, academy–industry linkages, managinginnovation and consulting in knowledge manage-ment and development. The organization runs aMasters course in Business Creation and, mostrelevant to this report, an Executive PhD pro-gramme, drawing doctoral students from the fourpartner companies. The PhD candidates, therefore,have a ‘company role’ and a ‘researcher role’. Aspart of their doctoral study, the executive studentshave to write papers (four in total) for academic

publication and attend conferences such asEGOS in Europe and the American Academy ofManagement Annual Conference. The know-ledge gained during the doctoral programme isput into practice in the participants’ companiesthrough, for example, reverse mentoring and it is a guiding principle of the students’ develop-ment as doctoral candidates that participantsreinterpret their roles in the company in order toensure that the results from the research and theother aspects of the programme (taught courses,research skills, thesis preparation etc) are con-tinuously being ‘recycled’ into the organizationsinvolved.

The ultimate goal of the Executive PhDprogramme – with its focus upon the managementand organization of business and knowledgedevelopment – is to provide an education fortomorrow’s leaders of industry. The participantscomplete the programme in four years whileworking half time within their host organizations.It is the ambition of the programme that theresults produced by participants in their researchwill provide the foundation for improvement and‘renewal’ processes in participating organizations.The programme is:

‘more academic and reflective in its orientationthan existing management education programmesand more focused on practically applicableknowledge than traditional research education.[It] provides an interdisciplinary environment forindustry and the academic world in order toachieve research results that provide knowledge,which is both scientifically valuable in itself and at the same time practically useful.’ (FENIX,1999)

FENIX thus intends to contribute in a funda-mental way, both practically and philosophically,in pioneering a new innovative approach toexecutive education, to a renewal of researcheducation programmes by producing executivedoctorates that satisfy the needs of industry. The demands of the programme are comparableto the demands imposed by traditional researchprogrammes. However, it is a key focus of theprogramme that knowledge creation is bothrelevant and timely. ‘Executive doctorates shouldcontinuously bring into and use their knowledgein their own company [and] the base organisationshould not need to wait years for a return on itsinvestment.’


Parting thoughts

The goals of the FENIX Executive PhD pro-gramme can be summarized as follows:

• On completion of the programme, participantswill be able to function as leaders for complexand innovative businesses.

• Executive doctoral candidates will function as a link between the academic world andindustrial life. They will be able to transformand understand the logic of both systems.

• The results achieved through research in theprogramme will influence renewal processesin partner companies and in participating aca-demic environments.

These seem to us exemplary aspirations for man-agement researchers and for managers them-selves. We are entering a period during which itwould be dangerous to assume that the market formanagement knowledge will not change markedly.It is vital for scholars to reflect upon these changes,because their very role in this market is at stake.Managers also need to reflect critically upon theirown knowledge base, its origins and how it is bestupdated.

In a knowledge economy, management know-ledge becomes an increasingly sought-after andlucrative commodity, commanding a premium pricefor those who can collect or create and deliverknowledge in innovative and effective ways. Con-sequently, this is an increasingly attractive marketto enter and barriers to entry are not as strong asincumbents, primarily the universities, think. Oneconvincing scenario for the future is of a broadvariety of management knowledge suppliers flood-ing the management knowledge market. Thesenew suppliers will include:

‘both a broader variety of consultants, prac-titioners, in-company universities, business mediaorganisations, consultant journals, business schools,as well as new and as yet unknown knowledgeentrepreneurs . . . competing increasingly effect-ively to create and disseminate knowledge to anever-growing number of management knowledgeconsumers . . . [disseminating] knowledge througha growing and broader array of channels andmodalities, many of which are being opened up bythe unprecedented opportunities for knowledgetransfer created by the current incarnation of theWorld Wide Web and what it might evolve into.’(Abrahamson and Eisenman, 2001)

Recent research indicates that managementscholars already lag behind rather than lead otherknowledge entrepreneurs, both in when theyintroduce new knowledge (Abrahamson andFairchild, 1999) and in what knowledge theyintroduce (Barley, Meyer and Gash, 1988).

Unfortunately, knowledge entrepreneurship istoo often associated with fads and fashions, someof which – such as the fetish of downsizing – arepatently destructive in their consequences (Sennett,1998). This is a time when ‘careful, impactful,value-driven scholarship capable of advancingand balancing the interests of all organizationalstakeholders’ needs to be at a premium(Abrahamson and Eisenman, 2001). A key taskfor academics and managers is to maximizeinteractions in which they can discuss and pursuecommon interests. Academics need to convincepractitioners that they can help in building boththe knowledge base and the learning capacity ofthe organization. Practitioners need to be morereflexive about their own learning and the effects(potential and actual) of their existing knowledgebase and mindsets.

The philosophy of pragmatism teaches thatlearning is less than half complete if it does notenhance our capacity to take action. The sixteenth-century philosopher Montaigne distinguishedbetween two categories of knowledge – learningand wisdom. In the category of learning, he placedsubjects such as logic, etymology, grammar, Latinand Greek. Learning would now encompass otherforms of disciplinary knowledge. In the categoryof wisdom, Montaigne placed ‘a far broader, moreelusive and more valuable kind of knowledge,everything that could help a person to live well,by which Montaigne meant, help them to livehappily and morally’ (De Botton, 2000, p. 153).

We began this report with a debate between aneminent researcher and an eminent practitioner,James March and John Reed. Let us finish withanother of March’s wise observations about whatmanagers might hope to learn from businessschools (Schmotter, 1998) – ‘to deepen an intel-lectual understanding of the relation betweenactivities in business and the major issues ofhuman existence’.

References

Abrahamson, E. and M. Eisenman (2001). ‘Why Man-agement Scholars Must Intervene Strategically in the


Management Knowledge Market’, Human Relations, 54, 1,67–76.

Abrahamson, E. and G. Fairchild (1999). ‘ManagementFashion: Life Cycle, Triggers and Collective Learning Pro-cesses’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44, pp. 208–740.

Argyris, C. and D. A. Schon (1974). Theory in Practice. Jossey-Bass, San-Francisco.

Ashton, D. (1995). ‘Business Schools as Learning Companies’.In: J. Burgoyne, M. Pedler and T. Boydell (eds), Towards theLearning Company: Concepts and Practices. McGraw-Hill,London.

Barley, S., G. W. Meyer and D. C. Gash (1988). ‘Cultures ofCulture: Academics, Practitioners and the Pragmatics ofNormative Control’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 33,pp. 24–60.

Benbasat, I. and R. Zmud (1999). ‘Empirical Research inInformation Systems: The Practice of Relevance’, MISQuarterly; 2(I), pp. 3–16.

Brookfield, S. D. (1987). Developing Critical Thinkers. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

Brown, J. S. and P. Duguid (2000). The Social Life ofInformation. Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Cannella, A. A. and R. L. Paetzold (1994). ‘Pfeffer’s Barriersto the Advance of Organizational Science’, Academy ofManagement Review, 19, pp. 331–341.

Cooper, R. K. (1997). ‘Applying Emotional Intelligence in theWork Place’, Training and Development, 51, pp. 31–38.

Davenport, T. H. and C. Prusak (1998). Working Knowledge.Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Davenport, T. and M. Markus (1999). ‘Rigor vs. RelevanceRevisited: Response to Benbasat and Zmud’, MISQuarterly, 23, pp. 19–23.

Davis, S. and J. Botkin (1996). The Monster Under the Bed.Simon & Schuster, London.

De Botton, A. (2000). The Consolations of Philosophy.Pantheon, New York.

Derrington, A. (1999). ‘Why Scientists are Driven by the FunFactor’, Financial Times, 29 April, p. 21.

Dixon, N. (2000). Common Knowledge. Harvard BusinessSchool Press, Boston.

Dodgson, M. (1993). ‘Learning, Trust and TechnologicalCollaboration’, Human Relations, 46, pp. 77–94.

Economic and Social Research Council (1994). BuildingPartnerships. Enhancing the Quality of Management Research.The Report of the Commission on Management Research.

FENIX (1999). Annual Report.Gibbons, M., L. Limoges, H. Nowotny, S. Schwartman, P. Scott

and M. Trow (1994). The New Production of Knowledge.The Dynamics of Science and Research in ContemporarySocieties. Sage, London.

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books,New York.

Griffith, A. (1999). ‘The Reflecting Team as an Alternative Case Teaching Model: A Narrative, ConversationalApproach’, Management Learning, 30, pp. 343–362.

Hambrick, D. A. (1994). ‘1993 Presidential Address: What ifthe Academy Actually Mattered?’, Academy of Manage-ment Review, 19, pp. 11–16.

Hamel, G. and C. K. Prahalad (1995). Competing for theFuture. Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Handy, C. (1995). The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of theFuture. Hutchinson, London.

Hargadon, A. B. (1998). ‘Firms as Knowledge Brokers: Lessonsin Pursuing Continuous Innovation’, California ManagementReview, 40, pp. 209–227.

Harrison, R. (1997). ‘Why Your Firm Needs EmotionalIntelligence’, People Management, 3, p. 41.

HEFCE [Higher Education Funding Council for England](1998). Industry-Academic Links in the UK. HEFCE ref. 98/70.

Hitt, M. (1998). ‘Twenty-first Century Organizations: BusinessFirms, Business Schools and the Academy’, Academy ofManagement Review, 23, pp. 218–224.

Howell, F. (2000). ‘Action Learning and Action Research inManagement Education and Development – A Case Study’,International Journal of Action Learning, 1, pp. 1–10.

Huff, A. (2000). ‘Presidential Address: Changes in Organ-izational Knowledge Production’, Academy of ManagementReview, 25, pp. 288–293.

Kristeva, J. (1998). ‘Institutional InterDisciplinarity in Theoryand in Practice’, de-, dis-. ex, 2, pp. 1–21.

Leavitt, H. J. (1996). ‘The Old Days, Hot Groups and Managers’Lib’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 41, pp. 288–300.

Leisenring, J. J. and J. L. Todd (1994). ‘Accounting Research:On the Relevance of Research to Practice’, AccountingHorizons, 8(4), pp. 74–81.

Leydesdorff, A. and J. Etzkowitz (1996). ‘Emergence of aTriple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations’,Science and Public Policy, 23, pp. 279–286.

March, J. (2000). ‘Citigroup’s John Reed and Stanford’s JamesMarch on Management Research and Practice’, Academy ofManagement Executive, 14, pp. 52–64.

Morgan, G. (1998). Images of Organization. Executive Edition.Sage, Thousand Oaks.

Mowday, R. T. (1997). ‘Reaffirming our Scholarly Values’,Academy of Management Review, 22, pp. 335–345.

Office of Science and Technology (1995). Progress throughPartnership: Report of the Technology Foresight SteeringGroup. HMSO, London.

Peters, T. and R. H. Waterman Jr (1982). In Search ofExcellence. Harper & Row, New York.

Pettigrew, A. (1997). ‘The Double Hurdles for ManagementResearch’, Advancement in Organisational Behaviour.Essays in Honour of Derek S. Pugh, pp. 277–296. Ashgate,Aldershot.

Porras, J. I. (2000). ‘The Business School of the Future: SomePersonal Reflections’, Academy of Management. Organiza-tion Development and Change Division Newsletter, Winter,pp. 1–5.

Porter, L. W. and L. E. McKibbin (1988). ManagementEducation and Development. McGraw-Hill, New York.

Reed, J. (2000). ‘Citigroup’s John Reed and Stanford’s JamesMarch on Management Research and Practice’, Academy ofManagement Executive, 14, pp. 52–64.

Schank, R. (1982). Dynamic Memory: a theory of remindingand learning in computers and people. Cambridge Univer-sity Press, Cambridge.

Schmotter, J. W. (1998). ‘An Interview with Professor James G.March’, Selections, 14, pp. 56–62.

Science Policy Research Unit (1995). The Changing Shape ofBritish Science. Falmer, Brighton.

SHEFC [Scottish Higher Education Funding Council] (1997).Interdisciplinary Research – Process, Structures and Evalu-ation. Scottish Universities Research Policy Consortium.


SHEFC [Scottish Higher Education Funding Council] (2000). Research and the Knowledge Age. A ConsultationDocument, February.

Senge, P. (1990). The Fifth Discipline. Doubleday, New York.Sennett, R. (1998). The Corrosion of Character. W. W. Norton

& Co, New York.Starkey, K., C. Barnatt and S. Tempest (2000). ‘Latent Organ-

ization’, Organization Science, 11, pp. 299–305.Tichy, N. M. and S. Sherman (1993). Control Your Destiny or

Someone Else Will. HarperCollins, London.Tomorrow Project (2000). Tomorrow. Using the future to

understand the present. (M. Moynah and R. Worsley, eds).Lexicon Editorial Services, London.

Tranfield, D. and K. Starkey (1998). ‘The Nature, SocialOrganization and Promotion of Management Research:Towards Policy’, British Journal of Management, 9, pp. 341–353.

Van Maanen, J. (1995). ‘Style as Theory’, OrganizationScience, 6, pp. 133–143.

Watson, T. J. (1994). In Search of Management. Routledge,London.

Wind, J. and P. Nueno (1998). The Impact Imperative: Closingthe Gap of Academic Management Research. The Inter-national Academy of Management – a proposed manifestofor the IAM, presented and discussed during the IAM’sNorth America Meeting on May 28.


Bridging the Relevance Gap: Aligning Stakeholders in the Future of Management Research

Documents

Transcript of Bridging the Relevance Gap: Aligning Stakeholders in the Future of Management Research