The Decreasing Value of Our Research to Management Education

For centuries we have expected the best teachers also to be scholars. The practice of scholarship should do more than make scholars more humble teachers; scholarship is expected to be more than an activity done for its own sake. Here we present evidence that our scholarship is increasingly failing us as teachers: The research published in our best scholarly journals has become less actionable over time, and so, less useful to our students. We focused on research that can be used either conceptually or instrumentally as a basis for action, by anyone taking a management course or executive session of any type. We call such research actionable for several reasons. To see if our research has become less useful over time, we selected the two most prestigious management journals that have been published the longest, allowing us to test the changes. We took the most recent complete volume of both journals, and sampled the articles in each of the preceding 10 years through 1960, the first year both were in print using our once-a-decade sampling frame. We collected data to test our suspicion that the scholarly research published in our best management journals has become proportionally less conceptually and instrumentally useful to executives, managers, and others who want to participate in and run organizations more effectively, and so, less useful to us as teachers of management. We found a significant decrease in the proportion of journal articles that generated actionable knowledge from 1960 to 2010. We offered several speculations for the decline in the proportion of actionable research despite the continuing calls for more relevant management research and numerous concrete suggestions intended to foster more useable research over the years. These include the favoring of complex moderator-mediator analyses, and studies demonstrating that abstract economic theories have not been implemented in practice.