Whose Perspective Does Management School Research Take?

Management schools and departments spend a significant part of their resources on research conducted by their faculty and doctoral students. Published research is an important, sometimes dominant, criterion for evaluation of faculty for promotion and tenure. Organizations whose management is the subject of study in business schools are social entities in which many people participate for their own respective motives. In management research, the attention paid to the interests and perspectives of various classes of participants varies considerably. Shareholders and managers appear to get the lions share of this attention, with the interests of other employees, customers, vendors, government and the community receiving less attention in research literature.

There could be many reasons for this variation. It is possible that the challenges of better management of (privately owned) organizations lie in balancing the interests of shareholders and managers--the well-known agency problem--and the attention paid to this perspective in management literature is simply a reflection of the challenge.

This is a good possibility, but it does not help us understand the scant attention to the interests of government in collecting taxes, interest of the community in preserving its clean water and air, interest of customers in not getting mislead by products and advertising, etc. There is much research to learn the laws of consumer behavior, for example, so companies can sell more of what they make, but relatively little on seller behavior so consumers can buy only what is best for them. Similar statements could be made about other aspects of management school research such as accounting, finance, and organizational behavior. Perspective of managers and shareholders seem to have acquired a dominant share of attention in management research considered as a whole.

Whether management schools serve the society better with the dominance of this perspective is an open question which deserves additional debate and engagement in universities.

Why I Refuse to Rank Scholarly Journals

I was recently asked to submit my ranking of a journal in my field of research to a panel of deans who had been tasked by their association to decide which journals belong to various categories on the basis of research published in them. I wrote to them to explain why I am reluctant to do so.

I hope you will forgive me for this unsolicited submission and my attempt to suggest that, on balance, ranking of academic journals, when used for the purpose of evaluating scholarly contributions of individual members of faculty, does more harm than good. Research is about ideas, innovation, and discourse. Not surprisingly, it calls for constant questioning of what we are doing, and why. By the time some line of work acquires the status of orthodoxy on the basis of method, theory or perspective, it is hardly worth doing any more. Most of what is done for the purpose of promotion and tenure is not worth doing, and the world might as well be better off if the resources were devoted to teaching and other endeavors. For this reason, I think that continual injection of new experimental journals into any discipline is an essential feature of keeping it alive as a scholarly field.

By their definition, new journals take time to become widely recognized, perhaps not until they have developed their own special orthodoxy. For this reason, ever since I started getting requests from friends in British universities in the 1980s to rank academic journals in economics, finance, and accounting, I have refused to do so as a matter of principle. My rationale is that these journal ratings become substitutes for actual reading of scholarship, and hurt critical discourse by transferring the responsibility to read and form our own opinions about each piece of scholarship from each of us to editors and referees. Not surprisingly, this process has created journals whose sole purpose is to help people get promoted, and few people read them (except those who are looking to be promoted by the published authors). Even the most highly rated journals publish a lot of what I regard as trash. Unfortunately, journal rankings just promote and glorify that process.

In an ideal world, people will write when they have an idea they are excited about, publish it when the idea appears to be of interest to others also, and it will be accepted or rejected by the readers on its merits. Screening by journal ratings does incalculable harm to scholarship.

I do not expect to persuade you on how much damage your well-meaning effort may inflict on scholarly discourse. I hope you will encourage "rebellious" ideas in every discipline, not treating articles like a cut of lamb to be assessed on the basis of the store they bought it from.

During my visit to a university recently, I had a conversation with a young colleague next door who said that she keeps her papers secret until they are published for the fear of being rejected by A journals for having been "published" on the internet, or being scooped by others. Something is seriously wrong here. Whatever else our journal culture does, it is not devoted to promoting scholarly discourse. And that is a tragedy. I hope your Council will give its attention to this matter.

Challenges of Running a University in India

Three key challenges are: (1) trust and trustworthiness, (2) balance of vigilance and docility, and most important, (3) the regard for public goods.

When people do not trust others to do the right thing, or do not deserve to be trusted to do the right thing, we try to make up for the trust deficit by writing down rules and procedures to impose order and bring about some predictability. Unfortunately, rules are poor substitutes for judgment, and coarsen communication, relationships, and performance in workplace and in society at large. But in absence of trust, there are no clear alternatives to rules. If a powerful politician calls the director/vice-chancellor of a university demanding the opportunity to speak to the community for political purposes, he/she is violating the trust placed in him/her by the public. The system reacts by trying to draft rules on who can and cannot speak, erring on the side of isolating the university community from legitimate and rich social and political engagement. If a member of faculty uses university resources for personal benefit, the system reacts by drafting rules that err on the side of preventing efficient and legitimate uses of resources. One can come up with many examples. In universities where the output of faculty (and the university) is so difficult to measure, this problem is especially critical, and writing of rules to try to measure faculty's intellectual contributions just makes it worse. What scares most people about taking such responsibilities is walking into an environment where trust and trustworthiness are weak, and not valued sufficiently by the governance structure and the community at large.

Universities, like all societies, face the problem of dispersed information (Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek, American Economic Review 1945). On one hand it is critical that all people in positions of power be monitored by those who have the information about the consequences of their actions (e.g., employees, faculty, and students in the university and general public in society). On the other hand, it is also important that those who are governed have a degree of docility (Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon, American Economic Review 1993) to accept the decisions of legitimate authority even if they impose some inconvenience, and give the authority some benefit of doubt, instead of rising immediately in protest against every and all actions which are, or appear to be, ill-advised. Protests carried out judiciously help governance of the system by feeding information to those who run the place; indiscriminate protests vitiate the environment, destroy reputations, and push authority into a defensive posture behind the rules and become non-transparent. The second fear that scares people from accepting such positions is the risk that the governance structure and the community may not act with a reasonable balance between vigilance and docility.

The third, and in my assessment the most important, issue is the lack of regard for public goods and externalities. Excessive regard for private goods (my house, my car, my children, my safety) without balancing it with public goods/bads (filth outside my house, effect of my car on city air, traffic congestion, and walkability of the street outside my house, effect of private schools on quality of public education, effect of street parking of cars in residential neighborhoods blocking access of fire engines) are just a few examples. Although these examples are chosen from everyday life, they are also applicable to academia. In fact, academic communities often have more intense externalities than elsewhere,with actions of  members of a university having important impact on others. For example, when one faculty member lingers over a cup of tea to arrive late in the class, it affects the punctuality of students in all other classes. The possibility that the community may not value the public goods sufficiently, and transfer the burden of recognizing and enforcing the consequences of extensive externalities within the university to the director scares potential candidates. Such a responsibility immediately puts the director in an untenable position.

None of these three factors belong to the category that (like material resources) either the Board of Governors or the Ministry of Human Resource Development can offer a candidate on a platter. However, the former can, in their own day-to-day functions and decisions, consider how their choices will have consequences along these three dimensions. The same applies to the faculty and staff. Building a fruitful and rewarding academic institution is like growing a tree. No matter how badly I wish to eat mango for dinner today, my ability to do so depends on whether I planted and nurtured a mango tree over the past ten years. Likewise, if I wish to have mango on the table ten years from now, time to start is now. When even the subsidized apex institutions like IITs and IIMs focus their primary attention on the revenue generating degrees (B.Tech. and MBAs respectively) instead of dealing with the problem of insufficient top talent in teaching and scholarship by using their subsidies to support the negative-revenue PhD programs, it is clear that we have some distance to go to recognize and deal with the externalities in the domain of higher education in India.