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2007 16: 128Journal of Management InquiryJames P. Walsh, Michael L. Tushman, John R. Kimberly, Bill Starbuck and Susan AshfordOn the Relationship Between Research and Practice : Debate and Reflections

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128

On the Relationship Between Research and Practice

Debate and Reflections

JAMES P. WALSHUniversity of Michigan

MICHAEL L. TUSHMANHarvard University

JOHN R. KIMBERLYUniversity of Pennsylvania

BILL STARBUCKUniversity of Oregon

SUSAN ASHFORDUniversity of Michigan

This article offers a lively and spirited debate on the pros and cons of relating researchto practice. The authors’ goal is to illuminate fundamental issues in the debate in detail,consider a variety of prescriptions, and then come to a mindful conclusion about acourse of action. The article begins with a point–counterpoint debate to make sure thatscholars fully understand the issues in play. Mike Tushman starts off by arguing for anemic approach. He believes that scholars are most effective when they closely work withmanagement and organizations. John Kimberly counters with an etic perspective. Heargues that scholars need to keep their distance. Two attempts to make sense of the manyissues raised in the debate close the article. First, Bill Starbuck steps back and offers hisideas about what the debate means for continuing scholarship. And then Sue Ashfordbrings the exchange to a conclusion. She draws on her many years in the dean’s officeto offer her wisdom about how to best organize business schools in the coming years. Inthe end, the authors know that there will be nearly as many errors as trials when theworld’s business schools determine how best to proceed. Their aim here is to minimizethe effects of these errors. If and when schools do err, the authors want to be sure thatthey do it with their eyes wide open.

Keywords: practice; relevance; rigor; theory

♦♦♦

ESSAYS

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT INQUIRY, Vol. 16 No. 2, June 2007 128-154DOI: 10.1177/1056492607302654© 2007 Sage Publications



ADDRESSING THE EMIC–ETIC OSCILLATIONIN BUSINESS EDUCATION

James P. Walsh, University of Michigan1

American business schools were established a little more than 100 years ago. The University ofPennsylvania’s Wharton School was founded in 1881,graduating its first five undergraduates 3 years later;Dartmouth College’s Tuck School was the nation’s firstgraduate school of business, opening its doors in 1900,graduating its first four MBA students a year later.These institutions, and those that quickly followed,emerged in response to the profound economicchanges unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. Theirgoals, of course, were both to understand these changesand to prepare individuals to lead the firms created bythis revolution. Students came to understand manage-ment both as a noun—understanding the phenomenonof business, and their leadership role in it, in all its eco-nomic, political, and social complexity—and as a verb—using this understanding to guide action, to managethese enterprises.

The Tuck School describes their early curriculumin this way:

The first-year courses were taught by Dartmouthinstructors from fields such as law and political sci-ence, history, sociology, rhetoric and oratory, econom-ics, and public speaking; the second-year coursesdrew heavily on outside business people, such as anexport merchant, an attorney, an insurance companypresident, and an accountant. Edward Tuck waspleased as he wrote to President Tucker in February1902, “I am glad that it will be the aim of the school tobring students in touch with practical businessmen.(Dartmouth College, 2007)

Paradoxically, this laudatory connection to “practi-cal businessmen” almost destroyed business schools ahalf century later. Bennis and O’Toole (2005) put it thisway: “For the first half of the twentieth century,Business schools were more akin to trade schools; mostprofessors were good ole’ boys dispensing war stories,cracker barrel wisdom, and the occasional practicalpointer” (p. 98). Midcentury, the Ford and CarnegieFoundations challenged business schools to do better.Gordon and Howell (1959) captured their dissatisfac-tion and offered a new, scholarly direction. The newprofessors began to distance themselves from the day-to-day experience of business. They embraced the sci-entific method, brought formal analytical sensibilities

to the study of business, and, in so doing, trained thenext generation of students to become professio-nal managers.

Subtleties of all kinds distinguished the many busi-ness schools that formed throughout the century(Spender, 2007). Nevertheless, it is fair to say that thisfirst half century was marked by what anthropologistscall an “emic” perspective on business, insights bornfrom an insider’s point of view. The limitations of thatperspective eventually culminated in the 1959 protestmovement and a switch to an outsider’s point of view,the “etic” perspective. The pendulum seems to swingevery 50 years. Living in the moment, it is difficult toknow which event will later be recognized as openingthe next chapter in business education, but it is clearthat change is in the air. Signs of dissatisfaction withthe 1959 model abound.

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools ofBusiness (AACSB) counts 511 accredited businessschools worldwide. According to the AACSB’s 2004-2005 survey, these schools just graduated 180,376 BBAand 57,125 MBA students. These impressive numberssuggest that all is well in our world. It is not. The dis-satisfaction takes many forms. Ghoshal (2005), forexample, argued that “bad management theories are,at present, destroying good management practices” (p. 86). He believed that the notorious Enron and Tycoscandals were rooted in the “ideologically inspiredamoral theories” (p. 76) that we teach in our class-rooms. He was particularly hard on agency theory andtransaction cost theory. Pfeffer and Fong’s (2002) cri-tique was different. Ghoshal presumed that businesspeople pay attention to what business school profes-sors write and say; Pfeffer and Fong were not so sure.They showed us that only a few of the best-sellingmanagement books written since 1984 were written bybusiness school professors. Shifting from a demand-side analysis of what business people read, they lookedat the supply side as well, examining the legacy of theaward-winning books that business professors write.They studied the citation patterns for the Academy ofManagement’s (AOM) Terry Book Award winnersfrom 1991 to 2001. It turns out that these books receiveonly 6.86 citations per year. Our best books are not par-ticularly read by business people or by their scholarlypeers. Hambrick (1994) caused a commotion when hedelivered his now-infamous AOM presidential addresstitled “What if the Academy Actually Mattered?” Adozen years later, Bennis and O’Toole (2005) lookedback on the results of the 1959 revolution and arguedthat “by allowing the scientific research model to drive

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RESEARCH AND PRACTICE 129



130 JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT INQUIRY / June 2007

out all others, business schools are institutionalizingtheir irrelevance” (p. 100). They concluded that “busi-ness schools are on the wrong track.” Pfeffer and Fong(2004) observed that “all is not well in the businessschool world” (p. 1517). Henry Mintzberg (2000) wasdespondent. Indeed, he argued that “it is time to closedown conventional M.B.A. programs” (p. 65). Strongwords.

What happened? The conventional wisdom is thatas the pendulum swung away from the promulga-tion of the midcentury’s “cracker barrel wisdom,” itswung too far into an arcane world of academic busi-ness scholarship. Ghoshal (2005) has little use foragency theory (p. 80), but his diagnosis of our prob-lem sounds very familiar to anyone who has studiedagency costs:

I believe that as academics, we may have been guiltyof overexploiting our freedom. In the desire to createand protect the pretense of knowledge—in our ven-ture to make business studies a science—we mayhave gone too far in ignoring the consequences notonly for our students but also for society. (p. 881)2

Bennis and O’Toole (2005) agreed with Ghoshal’s viewof professorial self-dealing. They argued that “thedirty little secret at most of today’s best businessschools is that they chiefly serve the faculty’s researchinterests and career goals, with too little regard for theneeds of other stakeholders” (p. 103). What is to bedone? Mintzberg (2000) wants to shut down mostMBA programs. Short of that, Ghoshal (2005) arguesthat a “powerful countervailing force” (p. 88) is neededto counteract these self-serving business professors.What could it be?

I suspect that when our time is considered 50 yearsfrom now, most historians will point to the many con-temporary business school rankings as the catalyst forchange. Like it or not (and most do not), businessschools deans and faculty live at the mercy of thesemultiple rankings. I would not be surprised if they arethe harbinger of a more grassroots, technology-mediated evaluation of business school activity.“Smart mobs” (Rheingold, 2002) may someday soonrise up against the status quo. In any event, the cur-rent rankings are enormously influential. Everyschool readies itself for the results of the BusinessWeek, Financial Times, U.S. News & World Report, andWall Street Journal evaluations. And these rankings arejust the beginning. There are more. We know that ourschools are also ranked in terms of our attention to

social and environmental justice and our treatment ofwomen, minority, and gay students. These businessperiodicals often ask students and the companies thathire them to evaluate the quality of the businessschool education experience. The market is speaking.

Some people decry this kind of market assessmentof an educational experience. Jim March (2003) maybe the most passionate, and articulate, critic of thisphenomenon:

A university is only incidentally a market. It is moreessentially a temple—a temple dedicated to knowl-edge and a human spirit of inquiry. It is a place wherelearning and scholarship are revered, not primarily forwhat they contribute to personal or social well beingbut for the vision of humanity they symbolize, sustain,and pass on. . . . Higher education is a vision, not a cal-culation. It is a commitment, not a choice. Students arenot customers; they are acolytes. Teaching is not a job;it is a sacrament. Research is not an investment; it is atestament. (p. 206)

This kind of orientation no doubt guided his earlierthinking about whether or not we in business schoolsshould strive to be more “relevant” to practicing man-agers. Again, let me quote him at some length. Hisideas run counter to the current grain, the sentimentthat presses us to be more relevant:

Unfortunately, we are engulfed in a contemporaryenthusiasm for immediate relevance. That enthusiasmis not new, and the reasons we attend to relevance aresalutary, but our enthusiasm has become excessive. Itis an enthusiasm that I believe threatens to make busi-ness schools and management research minor contrib-utors to the development of ideas about businessmanagement and organizations, condemned to therole of pursuing short-run research on questions ofminuscule importance, contributing little to intellec-tual life, and therefore to business life. In the long run,if business schools cease to be effective as intellectualinstitutions, they will not thrive as economic institu-tions. (Huff, 2000, p. 55)

March’s ideas were born in his Stanford Universitysetting. Interestingly, for all the talk of relevance in theair right now, Stanford may be the center of contrar-ian thinking. Pfeffer and Fong (2004), March’s col-leagues, also decry this headlong rush to relevance.They argue, “In their adherence to a market-like ide-ology of responsiveness to customers, presumablystudents and recruiters but alumni as well, businessschools may have lost their bearings” (p. 1503).




Neither March nor Pfeffer and Fong are enamored ofthe drift, if not embrace, of market-based relevance.So what is their response to our current crisis?

All three articulate the perils of walking down apath toward relevance and then use this fear to moti-vate their vision of a future. First, let’s look at the fear.Pfeffer and Fong (2004) argued that

to be a smaller version of McKinsey or some otherconsulting firm seems like a losing proposition. It isonly by rediscovering some core purpose more con-sistent with a professional ethos that business schoolsmay be successful in standing apart from their manyvarious competitors. (p. 1517)

March argued that “researchers who pursue immedi-ate relevance are likely to produce knowledge that isboth redundant with what managers already knowand useful only over a limited time and under limitedconditions” (Huff, 2000, p. 55). They offer an iconoclas-tic “back to the future” prescription for us to consider.

March asks us to pursue fundamental knowledge.He encourages us to look for “basic ideas that shapethe discourse about management” (Huff, 2000, p. 55).He points to our ideas about information and incen-tives, bounded rationality, diffusion of legitimateforms, loose coupling, liability of newness, and moreas illustrative of the kinds of impactful ideas that wehave already developed. He further argues that

managers are not stupid. They recognize or can be ledto recognize that the primary usefulness of manage-ment research lies in the development of fundamen-tal ideas that might shape managerial thinking, andnot in the solution of immediate managerial prob-lems. (Huff, 2000)

Coincidentally, John Reed, the longtime chairman andchief executive officer of Citibank and later CitiGroup,agrees with him. He argues that

if the academic community, for ease of simplicity ofwhatever, were to move away from the tradition ofstanding back and trying to develop big ideas andinstead got caught up in trying to generate short-term techniques, summarize best practices, or makeother interpretations of business problems, we willlose some of the dynamism that has characterizedthe U.S. private sector. (Huff, 2000, p. 62)

How are we to get there from here? Pfeffer and Fong(2004) direct us to March’s Promised Land. They arguethat business schools need “to rediscover their roots as

university departments and to become more like otheruniversity-based professional schools” (pp. 1514-1515).They need to “look less like the firms they teach aboutand more like educational and research institutions”(p. 1515). Dick Scott (2004, p. 16), another Stanford col-league who sat in their sociology department for manyyears, would no doubt approve. He recently took stockof 50 years of research in organizational sociology andended with a concern about the movement of organi-zational sociologists to professional schools (businessschools in particular). He worries that the coming workwill be more problem driven than theory driven andtoo influenced by economics, the dominant paradigmin these schools today.

We are hooked on the horns of a dilemma. Howshould we best study organizations and share ourwisdom with those who will lead them, regulatethem, and live with them? How can we best servesociety with our work? In the name of relevance, dowe return to our early emic roots and get much closerto the world of business? Or should we embrace themidcentury’s etic reform movement and keep ourdistance? The excesses of the early model becameapparent in the 1950s. Perhaps we are living with theexcess of its reform movement.

Clearly, there are people who argue that we havebecome too solipsistic for our own good. Notwith-standing our noble etic aspirations, some argue that wehave devolved into a world that serves our own inter-ests at the expense of others. Bennis, Ghoshal, Gosling,Mintzberg, and O’Toole argue that we are headingdown just such a path to professional suicide. OurStanford colleagues disagree. Fong, March, Pfeffer, andScott might have us reread Gordon and Howell (1959),take their lessons to heart, and recommit ourselves tothis fundamental vision of what business educationcan be. Paradoxically, our problem of relevance may bethat we are drifting too close to the world of practice.They believe that we need to keep our distance.

How should we think about all of this? In hind-sight, it is clear that business schools dramaticallychanged 50 years ago. It is also clear that businessschools are under assault right now. Just as our orig-inal business school model suffered in the extremeafter 50 years of use, it may be that the reform move-ment itself is suffering 50 years after it was born. Wehave no paucity of ideas about how to proceed. Ourproblem is that we need to decide what to do.

Augier, March, and Sullivan (2005) recentlyreviewed the evolution of organizational scholarshipsince World War II. They concluded that “the future




of organization studies will undoubtedly reflect themulticontinental and multilingual nature of scholar-ship in the twenty first century, and the brief periodof North American hegemony and isolation willend” (p. 91). They remind us that the business school“industry” has been largely shaped by the Americanexperience. Obviously, this will change. Of the 511AACSB-accredited business schools, 76 are nowlocated outside the United States. They also remind usthat, our best ideas notwithstanding, we will redesignour educational experiences by trial and error.

ON THE COEVOLUTION OF KNOWING AND DOING: A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

ON THE SYNERGIES BETWEEN RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

Michael L. Tushman, Harvard University3

The current rigor–relevance debate is a centralstrategic issue for business schools and their faculty. Iargue that ongoing relationships with firms, rooted on the joint acknowledgement of the importance of faculty research by firms and respect for practice byfaculty, increase the quality and impact of facultyresearch. With roles and boundaries clear, such ongo-ing relationships with firms, particularly those rootedin executive-education venues, increase the insightful-ness of our research questions and the quality of ourdata. Furthermore, to the extent that these relation-ships help faculty translate our field’s research intopractice, we are able to live in our institution’s prom-ise to shape managerial practice. These engaged rela-tionships with firms help faculty and their businessschools excel in both rigor and relevance. This articleprovides a personal example of these synergistic rela-tionships and discusses boundary issues associatedwith these faculty–firm collaborations. Executive edu-cation in general, and custom programs in particular,may be an underleveraged vehicle in reducing therigor–relevance gap between business schools and theworld of practice.

The Challenge of Knowing and Doing: A Personal Context

My career has been one of deliberately linkingresearch (knowing) and practice (doing). As an under-graduate student at Northeastern University, I workedfor 5 years as a co-op student at the General Radio

firm. During this period, this distinguished electronicsfirm (it was one of the first electronics firms and was,at the time, the leading test equipment firm in theindustry) failed in the face of technological change andthe entrance of new competition (HP, etc.). My carpoolfriends were about to be laid off. They faced thetrauma associated with a historically dominant firmfloundering in the face of a rapidly shifting competi-tive arena. As it turned out, making the same productsbetter simply drove the firm more quickly out of busi-ness. I observed General Radio’s inertial responses tothese competitive shifts and the disastrous conse-quences for its employees and stakeholders.

These experiences at General Radio led me to leavean electrical engineering career and move to graduateschool to try to understand just what happened. For 30years now, I have been working to answer the ques-tion my carpool colleagues asked so many years ago.Just why do successful firms often fail at technologicaltransitions? Why were seasoned executives renderedso incompetent at this particular transition? Althoughmy specific research questions have evolved overtime, the central theme of my research has been rootedin this General Radio experience, on trying to betterunderstand how and why firms fail to adapt in thecontext of technological transitions.

After Northeastern, I went to graduate school atCornell University. At the School of Industrial andLabor Relations, I worked with a heterogeneous fac-ulty committee (William F. Whyte, Leo Gruenfeld,and Mike Beer). Although these colleagues could not have been more different as scholars, they were each interested in research shaping the real world.My master’s thesis on leadership and change in aCorning manufacturing plant built on the extant literature on change. But it was also substantiallyinformed by emergent political and cultural issuesthat I observed in the field (Tushman, 1978). Thisexperience illustrated the benefits of a close relation-ship between the world of research and the world ofpractice. The phenomena taught me to look in placesand at questions that were not central to the field atthe time. I also experienced issues and tensions thatoccur at this boundary between knowing and doing.For example, early in my field work, I was pressedby the plant general manager to shape my researchto his needs and to provide him with inside infor-mation gained from my interviews. My committeehelped me sort through these boundary issues asso-ciated with the locus of data and research questionownership.




Because of my interest in technology, innovation,and organizations, I left Cornell and enrolled in a PhDprogram at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Working with another heterogeneous faculty commit-tee (Tom Allen, Paul Lawrence, Ed Schein, and RalphKatz), I replicated this work at the interface betweenthe phenomena and research.4 My dissertationexplored the relations between informal communica-tion networks and performance in R & D settings. Igathered network data from Owens Corning and wasable to show that differential performance in R & Dteams was associated with communication networksthat were contingent on task characteristics (e.g., Katz & Tushman, 1979; Tushman, 1977). Although theresearch was academically well received, I was chal-lenged by several R & D managers to translate myresearch in a way that might be useful to them. I wasfurther challenged by these managers to broaden mywork from simply studying R & D settings. Thesemanagers observed that if I was really interested inunderstanding innovation, understanding R & D set-tings was insufficient. They pushed me to move fromthe R & D laboratory to the organization as the unit of analysis.

These early experiences made clear the benefits(and threats) of having the phenomena shape thequestions I asked and the data I gathered. During thepast 30 years, I have, with colleagues and PhD stu-dents, worked at the interface between research andpractice, between building our field’s stock of knowl-edge of innovation and organizational change andaccentuating our field’s impact on practice. I have

been working out my own research-based responsesto my carpool friends and to those R & D managerswho challenged me to link our field’s research totheir real-world innovation issues.

In distinct contrast to this active linking betweenresearch (knowing) and practice (doing), our field hasbeen drifting toward a greater bifurcation betweenresearch and practice. Knowing has been increasinglyuncoupled from doing. This increasing gap is prob-lematic. It has the potential to push our research togreater internal validity at the cost of stunted externalvalidity. Our field runs the risk of having great answersto less and less interesting problems. As our fieldretreats from relevance to practice, other disciplinesand professions move into that vacuum (Bazerman,2005; Bennis & O’Toole, 2005; Pfeffer & Fong, 2002).This lack of coupling between our research and ourability to speak to practice affects our legitimacy withour students and with our external constituencies (alsosee Khurana, Nohria, & Prenrice, 2005; Rynes, Bartunek,& Daft, 2001).

Business Schools: Toward Knowing and Doing

To fairly evaluate the relative importance of busi-ness schools’ research and impact on practice, wemust first be clear about the role of professionalschools in general and business schools in particular.What, if anything, differentiates a business school (orschool of medicine or law) from conventional aca-demic departments? To understand these differences,we draw on insights from the history of science wherethere has long been a tension between “basic” and“applied” research (Stokes, 1997).

In his book Pasteur’s Quadrant, David Stokes (1997)draws on the history of science in general, and on LouisPasteur’s contribution in particular, to develop a taxon-omy of types of research (see Figure 1). In this frame-work, research is categorized as to whether it isconducted in a quest for fundamental understanding(basic research) and/or whether it is motivated by con-siderations of use (applied research). Stokes shows howsome research is simply driven by a quest for under-standing, with no thought of specific use (e.g., NeilsBohr and the discovery of the structure of the atom).Other research can be simply undertaken to developapplied uses (e.g., Thomas Edison and the invention ofthe phonograph), whereas other research, which Stokesfavors, proceeds with both a quest for fundamental

Quest forFundamentalUnderstanding?

Yes

Yes

No

No

Pure BasicResearch(Bohr)

Considerations of Use?

Use-inspiredBasic Research

(Pasteur)

Pure AppliedResearch(Edison)

Figure 1: Stokes’s quadrant model of scientific researchSource: Pasteur's Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation(p. 73), by D. E. Stokes, 1997, Washington, D.C.: BrookingsInstitution. Copyright 1997 by the Brookings Institution. Reprintedwith permission.




understanding and a desire to apply the findings (e.g.,Pasteur and the development of microbiology).

Stokes’s (1997) classification scheme can be used toinform the debate on the aspirations of business schoolresearch (see Figure 2). Although conventional aca-demic disciplines are typically about a quest for under-standing (rigor) with little thought of use (relevance),business schools, and professional schools more gener-ally, are about both, about operating in Pasteur’s quad-rant. Consulting firms, unlike business schools, areabout meeting clients needs (relevance) but have littleconcern with carefully controlled research (rigor). Theimplication of this taxonomy for business schools isstraightforward. In business schools, research shouldbe judged both by its quality—how rigorously it isdesigned and conducted—and by the degree to whichit provides understanding of the phenomena beingstudied. Stokes refers to this as “purposive basicresearch” (p. 60) and observes that this research can behighly fundamental in character in that it can have animportant impact on the structure or outlook of a field(e.g., Porter’s work on competitive strategy, Bazerman’swork on decision making and systematic deviationsfrom rationality, or Kaplan’s work on activity basedaccounting). The fact that research can be applied doesnot mean that it is not also basic.5

Consistent with Mintzberg’s (2004) and Bennis andO’Toole’s (2005) call for relevance and rigor and withGhoshal’s (2005) plea for faculty research that respectsdiscovery-driven research and integrative andapplication-oriented research, Stokes’s framework

imposes high standards on faculty in professionalschools. Although the evaluation of rigor is straight-forward in traditional academic domains (Does theresearch meet the standards of peer review?), the eval-uation of professional school research is more complexin that this assessment must attend to both academicrigor and managerial relevance. In the business schoolcontext, this implies that our research must meet thejoint criteria of internal and external validity.

A Point of View on Knowing and Doing

My early research experiences at Corning andOwens Corning illustrated the benefits and costs asso-ciated with research informed by conversations withthe phenomena. Encouraged by my faculty advisors towork at this boundary, I have evolved an implicitmodel on the coevolution of knowing and doing.These knowing–doing relationships have had animportant effect on my research and on my MBA, exec-utive, and PhD teaching (also see Tushman, O’Reilly,Fenollosa, & Kleinbaum, in press). Although theseexperiences are idiosyncratic, to me, my students, andmy colleagues, they may have broader implications.

During the past 25 years, I have experimented withseveral executive-education program designs withcolleagues at Columbia, INSEAD, Stanford, andHarvard (most intensively, with Jeff Pfeffer andCharles O’Reilly). These alternative designs have hadimportant impacts on our research streams and on ourability to affect practice. Our early, more traditional,executive-education designs were loaded with con-tent; faculty delivered their material during a 5-dayprogram. We quickly received feedback that althoughthe content was of interest, participants wanted to linkour field’s researched-based knowledge to their ownunique innovation, leadership, and change issues. Inresponse to this request, we built in more applicationwork and began to encourage intact teams to come tocampus to work their issues throughout the program.We encouraged both intrateam and interteam sharingand collaboration. This active link between knowingand doing was highly valued by participants, even aswe learned more about the relevance of our research.Furthermore, these more engaged relationshipsbrought us closer to those leadership, innovation, andchange issues where our field’s research had little to say.

More recently, O’Reilly and I have developed bothcustom and open executive programs for senior teams.

Rigor?(Quest for

FunU

Yes

Yes

No

No

Rel(

Ba

Firm(e.g., McKinsey)

PSchools

(e

Fun

Yes

Yes

No

No

Relevance?(

BaResearch

Firm

FundamentalUnderstanding?)

No

(Considerations of Use?)

Basic Disciplinary

(e.g., Chemistry)

ConsultingFirms

Professional

(e.g., Business)

Figure 2: Business school researchSource: Pasteur's Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation(p. 73), by D. E. Stokes, 1997, Washington, D.C.: BrookingsInstitution. Copyright 1997 by the Brookings Institution. Reprintedwith permission.



In these programs, content is tailored to a particularfirm, and senior teams come to campus for 3 or moredays to work their specific innovation and changeissues. Roughly half the time is spent in content ses-sions; the other half is spent in facilitated teams linkingfaculty content to their specific issues. Although inter-acting with executives in our traditional executive-education design enhanced our sense of importantresearch questions, these more action-oriented, seniorteam–sponsored executive programs provided a con-text where we were able to sharpen and extend ourresearch questions, improve our access to the field, anddirectly shape practice.

The most extensive and sophisticated action-learningversion of our executive-education work has beenwith IBM. Under the sponsorship of Bruce Harreld,IBM’s senior vice president of strategy, we have col-laborated during a 4.5-year period on StrategicLeadership Forums (SLFs). Although we learned howto construct these workshops over time, the funda-mental design was composed of senior teams spon-sored by a corporate executive (e.g., Harreld). Thesenior sponsor commissioned the scope of the work,chose the teams, and agreed to sponsor the changesassociated with the workshop. The SLFs often had acorporate or line-of-business issue as a theme (e.g.,cross-line of business innovation, developing emerg-ing business opportunities).

For these IBM SLFs, senior teams came to campus for3 days, armed with prework and a preliminary per-formance or opportunity gap articulated by the seniorsponsor and general manager. During an SLF, facultypresent and link content to cases for roughly half of theSLF. The rest of the time is spent in facilitated work-shops where these intact teams directly link material inthe plenum to their specific managerial challenge.Teams present their diagnostic work and their imple-mentation plans to each other. There is much learning

in the feedback sessions where each team gets feedbackfrom the other teams on the depth and quality of theirdiagnostic and change work. During this 3-day work-shop, teams and their leaders gained substantial con-sensus on root causes, action plans, and next steps. Notonly do the feedback sessions help individual teamswith their strategic issues, but hearing a multiple set of teams helps senior executives to induce IBM-wideissues relating to innovation and change. Senior IBMexecutives initiated each workshop, were involved forthe 3 days, and were, in turn, actively involved in fol-lowing up on work initiated at these workshops.

In return for this long-term faculty involvement,IBM’s senior leadership provided support and accessfor faculty and PhD student research projects.Although these research projects were distinct fromour executive-education work, the results of theresearch were reported back in subsequent SLFs. Wehave replicated these senior team–action learning rela-tionships with a range of firms including BOC, U.S.Postal Service, Siebel Systems, Irving Oil, Ameriquest,and Agilent Technologies.

These senior team–action learning executive-education designs facilitate a virtuous cycle betweenfaculty collaborating with managers in research andmanagers collaborating with faculty in shaping prac-tice. This type of executive-education design has hadan important impact on our ability to shape practiceand on the participants’ ability to shape and host ourresearch. The more action oriented the program, thegreater the quality of our relationship with these teams.In turn, the more senior teams trust us, the more theyunderstand our research agenda, the greater our abilityto affect practice and the greater their ability to connectwith and help support our research (see Figure 3).

Some Observations

1. Through executive-education programs, I have beenable to leverage our field’s research to influencepractice. My most productive relationships withexecutives are all rooted in using our field’s frame-works and literature to help solve real managerialissues. Because our field’s work does add value,these relationships open up the opportunity for fac-ulty to learn not only what is managerially impor-tant but also where our literature is silent. Thisability to be taught what phenomena are importantand then to use these relationships to explore thesephenomena is one of the great benefits of engagedscholarship. Those most productive knowing–doing


L C

Open Enrollment Custom

Te

Individuals

(Traditional Executive Education)

L

Teams

TargetAudience

LCOR with Intact Teams Custom LCOR with Senior Teams(e.g. IBM/SLF)

LCOR (HBS/GSB) Custom LCOR for Individuals

Degree of ProgramCustomization

(Action Learning)

Figure 3: Experimenting in executive-education designs




relationships start with our adding value throughresearched-based insight (doing) and then movingto our research (knowing).

2. The more PhD students are involved in these executive-education workshops, the more theyinteract with managers who are grappling with thephenomena, the more they understand the reality ofinnovation, leadership, and change. This deeperunderstanding leads, in turn, to well-anchored andinsightful research questions (Lawrence, 1992).Although it is clearly not necessary to be in the fieldto induce important research questions, those doc-toral students who know both the literature and thephenomena may be better equipped to ask relativelymore provocative research questions. Finally, directaccess to managers facilitates our students’ access tohigh-quality data.

3. The longer the relationship, the greater the trust andrespect between managers and researchers. The morefaculty understand and respect the practitioners’ needfor performance and the more practitioners under-stand and respect the faculty’s need to ask importantresearch questions and gather reliable data, the morethese relationships provide a setting for the copro-duction of knowledge and organizational impact.

4. These knowing–doing relationships affect our MBA,executive-education, and PhD teaching. As execu-tive education–research relationships have matured,we have been able to write cases, create leadershipvideos, bring executives to class, and have execu-tives host student field projects. Furthermore, to theextent that our work with firms shapes those firms,we are more deeply informed on the phenomena weteach. These rich examples infuse and enliven ourabilities as teachers.

5. The greater the action orientation of executive-education programs, the greater the potential todevelop relationships such that our research andimpact on practice are both enhanced. Executive-education programs differ by degree of customizationand level of participant. The most action-orientedform of executive program we have employed is thecustom program oriented to senior teams (see discus-sion of our IBM custom program above). These pro-grams have been associated with the greatest impacton practice and with the greatest involvement of senior executives in our research questions, our data,and the interpretation of those data. It is in theseaction-learning settings that we have coproducedaction in these firms and coproduced innovativeresearch (see Tushman et al., in press).

Yet Some Concerns

With all the benefits of active collaboration betweenfaculty and practitioners, there are also important

boundary issues and areas of concern associated withthese collaborations. These issues are rooted in thepotential blurring of boundaries between the univer-sity’s independent pursuit of research and the firm’slocal pursuit of practice, the possible distorting effectsof faculty incentives in executive-education pro-grams, asymmetries in required skills and the associ-ated need for faculty development and mentoring,and executive-education administration in action-oriented executive programs.

1. Who owns the research question; who owns the data;who has access to the data; and who controls theinterpretation, writing, and publication of theresearch associated with these faculty–firm collabo-rations? Is it possible to test research questions in set-tings where the firm is buying executive education?These are all fundamentally important questions thataddress the roles and boundaries between universi-ties and external organizations (e.g., Bok, 2003; Brief,2000). For these engaged scholarship relationships toflourish, they must be rooted in the firm’s respect forindependent faculty research. Independent researchrequires that faculty own the research question, thedata associated with addressing the research ques-tion, and the decision where to publish the research(while protecting the firm’s confidentiality). Customclients must understand that an important piece ofthe relationship with the business school is to sup-port and encourage faculty research. It is vital tohave PhD students well integrated into these rela-tionships between business schools and executive-education clients. PhD students need to have accessto custom program work on campus. These bound-aries were tested several times. For example, a cus-tom client balked when we asked that a PhD studentsit in on our content sessions. We reiterated theimportance of our research to the custom programclient and our doctoral student’s centrality to thisresearch. We observed that if the student could notsit in on the meeting, neither could the faculty. Thesemisunderstandings were resolved in a fashion thatclarified the synergistic relationships between thefirm’s need for confidentiality and impact and thefaculty’s research requirements.

2. Another major boundary issue is the question ofconsulting on campus. To what extent is actionlearning the same as faculty consulting? Does actionresearch on campus inappropriately use the univer-sity to host faculty consulting projects? Althoughcustom programs do have an action component,they are not consulting projects. Work on campusmay be facilitated, but it is limited to the work oncampus. Where faculty control the content in tradi-tional executive-education programs, they share



control with custom clients in action-learning pro-grams. Indeed, one of the reasons that firms woulduse these modes of executive education is to getaccess to faculty research and the independence offaculty who have no vested interests as consultants.Although relations on campus may well lead to sub-sequent consulting relationships (where the client hasthe control of the questions and pace of the relation-ship), these subsequent relationships are distinct fromthe faculty, PhD student, and executive-educationparticipant roles in on-campus programs.

3. For action-learning relationships to flourish, facultymust be willing to cocreate these executive programswith the client firm. Custom programs inherently givemore power to the client firm in both content deliv-ered and program design. Furthermore, faculty mustbe willing to teach for practice as they actively facili-tate the linking of the program’s content to the partic-ipants’ specific needs. Furthermore, faculty must notonly be willing to teach their material but also be prepared to create linkages across faculty contentdomains. This mode of teaching and program admin-istration is more difficult than traditional executive-education programs. The roles of faculty director andprogram administration are much more client focusedin these action-oriented custom programs. Facultycompensation models must be adjusted to account forthe extra time involved in the teaching, facilitation,and design involved in action-learning programs.

4. Finally, faculty interest and skills in these active collaborations are not equally distributed. If theseaction-oriented executive-education programs are toflourish, all faculty must be given the opportunity towork at the knowing–doing boundary. Issues ofinequity of opportunity will dampen these boundary-spanning experiments. As some senior faculty willbe differentially capable of working these interfaces,they must take a proactive role in helping their seniorand junior colleagues develop their integrativeskills, their skills in translating research in ways thatmanagers can understand, and their skills in actu-ally helping managers solve real problems informedwith our field’s research.

Toward Knowing and Doing: Executive Educationas a Lever in Shaping Practice and Research

Given the reciprocal relationships between know-ing and doing and doing and knowing, executiveeducation is of particular relevance to businessschools and their faculty. Executive education is a set-ting where practitioners come to campus to create aconnection between faculty research and their ownmanagerial challenges. In these settings, there is an

enhanced opportunity to forge long-term, collabora-tive research–practice relations. Because these rela-tionships develop on campus, they can be rooted bothin research and in managerially anchored issues.Executive-education settings are then a potentiallyimportant venue for developing engaged scholarship(Van de Ven & Johnson, 2004). Executive education isa natural context for creating externally valid researchprojects and making the connection between ourresearch and managerial practice. This potential tofurther the coupling between research and practice isaccentuated as firms ask for more return from theirexecutive-education investment (e.g., L. Anderson,2003; Conger & Xin, 2000).

Rigor and relevance, then, need not be separate butcan rather be seen as interdependent activities in serv-ice of powerful theory and informed action (Huff,2000; Weick, 2004). This form of engaged scholarship,where faculty and thoughtful practitioners coproduceknowledge and practice, is underleveraged withinbusiness schools and in the larger academy (Van deVen & Johnson, 2004). The action-learning executive-education workshop is one concrete way to embodythis coproduction of knowledge and practice. Theseenhanced individual learning and organizational out-comes are built on active collaboration between faculty and firms in program design and in linkingprogram content to organizational outcomes. Throughaction-learning workshops, we have been able todevelop relationships with a set of firms such that ourfield’s research has had a real impact on practice. Asimportant, this interaction with practice has had asubstantial impact on my research and that of my stu-dents and has increased the quality of my teaching.

These relationships between business schools andspecific firms have the potential to create virtuouscycles of knowing and doing. A meta–research ques-tion anchored these cycles for me (e.g., What is therelationship between technical change and organiza-tional evolution?) and hosted a range of more con-crete research questions (e.g., What is the relationshipbetween competence-destroying change and execu-tive team succession?). Our field knows much in thesebroad domains (Tushman, 2004). Executive educationprovides the setting where we can share this researchwith practitioners. In these educational settings, wecan make the knowing–doing link.

Relationships formed in action-learning settingsin turn have shaped my research questions, even as

they have affected how I understand innovation andorganizations. Doing has directly affected my knowing.





Finally, both my action-learning work and myresearch directly affect the quality of my MBA, PhD,and traditional executive-education work. As thesebusiness school–firm relations matured, the linkagebetween my research and practice became tighter andthe coproduction of research became more effective.Executive-education workshops are contexts that helpforge research–practice partnerships that permit thesevirtuous cycles to flourish (for a discussion of this vir-tuous cycle in the accounting and control area, seeKaplan, 1998).

Yet business schools systematically underleverageexecutive education. At a time where firms are callingfor more relevance and more customization, businessschools remain in the modular, lecture-discussion for-mat. Although this traditional approach is often asso-ciated with participant satisfaction, the impact of thesetraditional executive programs on practice is equivo-cal (L. Anderson, 2003; Conger & Xin, 2000; Pfeffer &Fong, 2002). Furthermore, because traditional execu-tive programs do not encourage the development ofrelations between faculty and participants, the link tofaculty research is stunted.

The concept of action-learning workshops, of activecollaborations between business schools and firms, isquite generalizable. This action-learning approachrequires clear and well-defined relationships andexpectations. Faculty must take practice seriously andfirms must take seriously the importance of support-ing faculty research. This action-learning model is notnew. It is similar to action-learning approaches hostedwithin firms (e.g., GE’s workout and IBM’s ACT;Kuhn & Marsick, 2005; Tichy & Sherman, 1993; Ulrich,Kerr, & Asheknas, 2002). It is also similar to the con-sulting and executive-education practices of a range ofconsulting firms (e.g., Argyris & Schon, 1996; Beer,2001). What is different about action-learning work-shops hosted within business schools is their empha-sis on generating powerful ideas and subjecting theseideas to rigorous inquiry. Although consulting firmsdo generate powerful ideas, they are less equipped ormotivated to subject these ideas to rigorous testing.Action-learning workshops position business schoolsto operate in Pasteur’s quadrant, to be able to excel inboth research-based insight and practical impact.

Although action-learning workshops may be anunderleveraged opportunity for business schools,there are important issues that these executive-education designs raise. Action-learning designs raiseissues on the appropriate boundary of business schools(Kaplan, 1998). For research to flourish in action–learning

relationships, faculty must own the research ques-tions and own the data gathered in service of theseresearch questions. Bartunek (2002) observes that fac-ulty must be in the firms, not of the firms. As facultyget co-opted by the sponsoring firm, the quality of theresearch will suffer (e.g., Bok, 2003; Brief, 2000; Hinings& Greenwood, 2002). Furthermore, these action-learning workshops should not be confused with fac-ulty consulting. Rather, action-learning workshops arecocreated workshops, conducted on campus and man-aged by executive-education staff. Faculty present con-tent tailored to the client’s issues, teach to practice, andactively facilitate the linking of content to practice.Finally, these boundary-spanning opportunities mustbe made available to all faculty who are interested indeveloping their skills to work at these interfaces.Issues of faculty inequity will ensure that these experi-ments will fail.

Although action-learning workshops are associatedwith a set of issues and concerns, they are vehicles thatshow promise of bridging the divide between ourresearch and the world of practice, between rigor andrelevance. This form of executive education comple-ments traditional executive-education formats. Action-learning is a highly generalizable activity for businessschools and business school faculty. Firms want morecustomization, and our field has generated enormousknowledge that deserves the opportunity to shapepractice. Action learning promises high leverage forboth faculty and firms. With this leverage also comesthe opportunity for increased faculty insight andprovocative research. Although there are real bound-ary issues to be resolved, my experience suggests thatexecutive education in general and action-learningworkshops in particular have the potential to movebusiness schools more firmly into Pasteur’s quadrantof knowing and doing, toward building powerful the-ories and fundamental ideas that affect practice.

SHIFTING BOUNDARIES: DOING RESEARCHAND HAVING IMPACT IN THE WORLD

OF BUSINESS EDUCATION

John R. Kimberly, University of Pennsylvania

The motivation for the reflections that follow ini-tially came from an invitation to enter a debate withMike Tushman on the question “Can researcher/man-ager interaction increase research quality?” a questionwe were asked to address on the occasion of BillFest,



a conference held at New York University in May 2005in honor of Bill Starbuck and his many contributionsto the world of management research and education. Iam grateful for this invitation because it caused me toexamine choices I have made as my career hasunfolded and to reflect on some of the forces that mayhave influenced the choices made. I am also wellaware of what my friend Karl Weick would whisper inmy ear at this point. Yes, Karl, I am unquestionablyengaging in retrospective sense making and probablyin a certain amount of retrospective rationalization aswell. But here goes. . . .

Introduction

“Can researcher/manager interaction increaseresearch quality?” On the surface, the answer to thisquestion seems to be painfully obvious. Yes, of course.After all, how could the quality of research on mana-gerial issues not be improved through contact by theresearcher with the phenomena being examined?

However, it’s not that simple. Interaction per se isno guarantee of enhanced research quality. In fact,particularly when the researcher is a faculty memberin an academic institution, there are likely to be mixedmotives and conflicting incentives when that interac-tion becomes too close and when it unfolds during along period.

My colleague Hamid Bouchikhi and I have arguedelsewhere (Bouchikhi & Kimberly, 2001) that the roleof “professor” in schools of business is likely to changedramatically in the next 20 years. We are in a period oftransition in the world of business education, a periodin which “partnerships” between business schoolsand businesses generally, and between some businessschool faculty and some businesses more specifically,are becoming increasingly common. These partner-ships generally involve a relationship in which theknowledge-based assets of the faculty partner arefocused on the particular problems the business part-ner is facing in exchange for financial contributions ofone sort or another. And they are fueled by the seem-ingly insatiable search by the schools of business forrevenues on one hand and the needs for training, exec-utive education, and advice on the part of business onthe other.

It is against this backdrop of increasingly close tiesbetween businesses and business schools in generalthat I offer some personal reflections on researcher–manager interactions and on the broader question of

doing research and having impact in the world of busi-ness education. All are, of course, influenced by the con-text in which they take place, and it is important torecognize both how this context has changed over timeand the consequences of this change for behavior inboth the macro and the micro; that is, the behavior ofthose institutions in which researchers are embeddedand the behavior of the researchers themselves. In theparagraphs that follow, I briefly touch on elements ofthe university and business education context and howthey have changed, before turning to how my ownwork and thinking about how researcher–managerinteractions have evolved.

The University and Business Education Context

1. During the past 35 years, since I completed my doc-torate, universities and their budgets have grownsubstantially, and most, if not all, have begun usingmanagerial tools and practices formerly reserved for the world of business. Some observers (e.g.,Readings, 1997) paint a bleak picture of the conse-quences of this pattern, whereas others applaud themovement of universities from administrative inepti-tude to greater managerial efficiency. In the midst oflegitimate disagreement over the likely consequencesof growth and increasing “corporatization,” the factis that universities have had to develop multiplestrategies to generate the resources to fuel ever-increasing capital and operating budgets. Theseresources typically come from some combination oftuition, research grants, and contracts from both pub-lic and private sources, returns from the commercial-ization of university-developed intellectual property,and donations from wealthy alumni and corporatebenefactors. Now more than ever before, universitiesare experimenting with new ways to generate rev-enues and in their enthusiasm are creating ties withoutside entities that push the boundaries of theirthoughts about the importance of independence andthe proper role of the university in society.

2. During this time, the nature of the relationshipamong business schools, their universities, and theworld of business has been hotly debated. Businessschools have been desperately seeking academiclegitimacy on their campuses, trying to recast theirtrade-school image in the direction of greater intellec-tual respectability. In this search for legitimacy, theyhave recruited large numbers of discipline-based fac-ulty, many of whom more closely identified withtheir particular discipline than with the more appliedmission of their school, with the inevitable conse-quence of moving further from, rather than closer to,





the concerns and priorities of their constituents in theworld of business. Recently, the pendulum has begunto swing in the other direction. Business schools havebeen taken to task for the alleged irrelevance of muchof their faculty’s research and for their apparent insu-lation from the real world of business (e.g., Bennis &O’Toole, 2005; Ghoshal, 2005; Pfeffer & Fong, 2004;Starkey & Madan, 2001), and many schools havemade it a priority to address this criticism by devel-oping closer ties with this world.

3. Ironically, during this period of ambivalence aboutmission (or at least about the extent to which theirown activities should be shaped by the priorities oftheir corporate constituents), business schools havegrown dramatically, and the MBA degree has becomehighly valued, both by employers and by individualsseeking to advance their careers. As competitionamong business schools has accelerated, fueled bythe proliferation of institutional rankings in themedia, new markets with new programs and revenuestreams have been developed, including distancelearning, the “executive” MBA, and, most signifi-cantly for present purposes, shorter, nondegreecourses or programs for executives. These latter pro-grams have grown rapidly and have become hugerevenue producers with very attractive margins formany business schools, in some cases accounting formore than half of total revenues. The programs typi-cally are of two sorts, open enrollment and custom,and recently custom programs, designed to meet theparticular needs of particular clients, have come todominate the market. The explosive growth of cus-tom programs has raised a number of importantboundary issues, some of which I will address later inthis article.

4. During this period of growth in the business educa-tion industry, and as business schools struggled withthe issue of their own identity (What does it mean tobe a professional school in a larger university?), theymade a range of choices about how close a relation-ship they wished to develop with various segmentsof the business world and what the terms and condi-tions of those relationships would be. At the heart ofeach and every choice, either implicitly or explicitly,has been the issue of the school’s independence and autonomy. In the case of company-sponsoredresearch, what limitations, if any, would be put onpublication of results? In the case of corporate con-tributions to development campaigns, what specialaccess, if any, might contributors have to the recruit-ment process? In the case of custom executive-education programs, to what extent do clients definethe nature, scope, and content of what is delivered?These choices, often made in various parts of theschool and sometimes made quite independently of

any overall strategy, in aggregate define a posturethat the school has toward its constituents in thebusiness world. And although these postures mayvary from one school to the next, the overall trend istoward much closer ties between the two, ties whoseconsequences for individual faculty members arerarely examined.

It is in the context, then, of shifting boundaries, ofexplosive growth of universities and of businessschools, of debate about the proper role of universitiesand business schools in society at large, of debatewithin business schools about “knowing versusdoing,” and of the incessant search by businessschools for additional sources of revenue that I beginto reflect on the question posed at the outset, “Canresearcher/manager interaction increase researchquality?” and on the larger question of doing researchand having impact in the world of business education.My views have been shaped by this larger context andits evolution, I am sure, and probably in ways ofwhich I am not completely aware.

Initial Experiences, Fresh Out of Graduate School

I completed my doctoral work in organizationalbehavior at Cornell in 1970. My dissertation on orga-nizational structure and innovation had been fundedby a large grant from the National Institutes of Healthand was based on a mail survey of a national sampleof hospitals. I was encouraged to publish the findings,and the only requirement from the funder was thatthe grant support be acknowledged on anything thatwas published.

My dissertation was enthusiastically received by mycommittee. I, however, was less enthusiastic. I realizedthat I had done everything “right” from a researchpoint of view: a reasonable theoretical framework, asolid research design, appropriate use of surveymethodology, reasonably skilled application of statisti-cal techniques, obligatory acknowledgement of studylimitations, and carefully worded conclusions. But Ialso realized that I didn’t have a whole lot to say whenpeople asked me how innovation in hospitals might bestimulated. So although my doctoral research met onetest, it failed a second. I sensed the “knowing–doinggap” but didn’t have a label for it, and, besides, my aca-demic colleagues were almost entirely lined up on the“knowing” side of the gap.




Fortuitously, soon after arriving in Champaign-Urbana as a “rookie” in the Sociology Departmentand the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations atthe University of Illinois, I met the dean of the brandnew medical school on campus. A cardiologist, he hadnever worked with a social scientist before but feltthat it would be useful to have someone with no par-ticular vested interest in the venture help him track itsprogress. The school he was building was highlyinnovative in its approach to medical education, andI was attracted by the opportunity to see innovationup close. The research approach I developed with himfell somewhere between evaluation research andaction research and was what I called at the time“process research” (Kimberly, Counte, & Dickinson,1973). One central feature of the design was provisionof feedback on a regular basis to the dean and his staffabout what I and my team of two doctoral and twomaster’s students were learning about the students,the faculty, the community physicians, and the schoolas a whole through our interviews and surveys. Theresearch itself was funded by a series of grants andcontracts from what was then the Department ofHealth, Education and Welfare in Washington.

The experience confirmed for me the potential benefits to both parties of relatively frequent researcher–manager interaction. The dean made several adminis-trative and operational adjustments in the school onthe basis of findings from our research, and I was ableto adjust our data collection strategy as necessary as aresult of our discussions. It also further shaped myview about research funding. It was up to me as theprincipal investigator to determine the focus of theresearch, the methods to be used, and the time framefor completion. Although I discussed these matterswith the dean to keep him informed, there was neverany question about decision rights. The project alsoreaffirmed the initial sense about intellectual auton-omy I had developed at Cornell. The deliverable wasa final report to the funding agency; however, as prin-cipal investigator, I was free to publish what andwhere I wished, and indeed several articles were pub-lished based on the data the team collected (e.g.,Counte & Kimberly, 1974, 1976; Kimberly, 1976, 1979;Kimberly & Counte, 1978). I was sensing norms andboundaries with regard to funding and to publishing:Third-party funding preserved intellectual autonomyregarding research content and allowed me, as princi-pal investigator, to make all publication decisions.Articles would be reviewed with the dean and hisstaff for factual accuracy, but decisions about contentand interpretation were ultimately mine.

Yale and Diagnosis-Related Groups (DRGs)

In 1976, after spending a year in Paris, I moved toNew Haven and the new School of Organization andManagement (SOM) at Yale, where, again fortu-itously, I met Bob Fetter and John Thompson. Bob wasin operations research at SOM, whereas John was thehead of the hospital administration program in theDepartment of Epidemiology and Public Health inthe medical school, and both were involved asco–principal investigators in a major research projecton the relationship between patterns of resource consumption and types of conditions treated in hos-pitals. This research had a strong “applied” focus andinvolved closely working with practitioners—initiallyclinicians and subsequently managers. I becameinvolved when the research led to the development ofa tool that could be used by hospital managers andwhen the challenge was to “sell” both the tool and thethinking behind it to them. One disseminationapproach that our team used was executive educa-tion, and we designed and launched the first programto introduce hospital managers to DRGs in the sum-mer of 1978. This program ran on an annual basisthrough 1986 and was offered in England, Australia,New Zealand, and a number of other countries. Thetool developed was initially tested in New Jersey andsubsequently adopted in 1983 at the national level asthe Prospective Payment System. By any measure, itsimpact was huge.

A number of things about my experience at Yalewith the development and diffusion of DRGs influ-enced my thinking about researcher–manager interac-tion and shifting boundaries. First, the project itselfwas viewed with ambivalence within the school. Onone hand, the Dean’s Office was happy to have the sig-nificant overhead dollars that accompanied the federalgrants, but on the other hand, the faculty tended todevalue the project itself because of its applied orien-tation. Clearly, the project was on the boundaries ofacademic respectability, and the commercial potentialof the tool and the underlying software raised a wholeset of boundary questions that were new to me at thetime. Second, the publications that came out of theproject were principally practitioner oriented, and Ifelt that opportunities to make more general contribu-tions were missed. And finally, discussions withparticipants in the executive-education programs thatwe ran helped me understand the magnitude of the challenge of change. The worlds of these hospitalmanagers were being potentially uprooted by theimplementation of DRGs, and their hesitation or




resistance was palpable. To summarize, my time atYale brought me closer to certain tensions on theboundaries of relationships among universities,business schools, individual faculty members, andexternal constituencies that I had not previously expe-rienced, and I saw firsthand the kinds of conflicts andidentity issues that beset individual faculty membersas a result. I saw ambiguity in the relationshipbetween the university and the school: Does a busi-ness school really belong at Yale? I saw ambiguity inthe identity of the new school: What kind of school arewe, and how should we value research that speaks tovery practical real-world problems? I saw great vari-ety in the way this ambiguity played out at the level ofindividual faculty members: What does it mean to bea full-time member of the standing faculty, and whatrights and responsibilities go with the position? Howmuch consulting should I do? Where should I be pub-lishing? Should I be using doctoral students on con-sulting projects? These certainly were not newquestions, but they were new to me and to many in thecontext of Yale and SOM and were hotly contested.

The Wharton Years

I moved to Wharton and Penn in 1983, intrigued bythe prospect of being at a university where there was ahistory of collaboration among researchers in the busi-ness school and the medical school. Once again, Iarrived just prior to a transition in deans. The newdean, formerly the CEO of Touche-Ross, had a veryambitious agenda for the school and aggressivelymoved to enhance the school’s reputation. One of hispriorities was executive education, and extensiveefforts were made to develop the faculty’s ability todeliver in this domain. As is the case at most businessschools, some faculty were more effective with execu-tive audiences than were others, and people responsi-ble for running programs quickly identified the “stars”and got them involved in multiple programs on a reg-ular basis. All executive teaching was done for extracompensation, and it soon became apparent that thiskind of teaching could be both lucrative and, because itwas done on campus, convenient. Individual faculty,confronted with opportunities to supplement theirincome without leaving campus, had to decide how tomanage the boundary between executive teaching andother uses of their time. Although it was not a zero sumsituation, many faculty avoided executive educationaltogether, whereas others became heavily involved.

In 1986, I agreed to become chair of the ManagementDepartment. One experience in that role has particular

relevance for present purposes. My predecessor, PeterLorange (now president of IMD), had started a corpo-rate sponsors program as a way of raising discre-tionary funds for the department. To become sponsors,companies would pay a yearly fee, and Peter had usedhis network of personal contacts to develop an initialroster of 10 participants. Although the program didraise money, and although it did increase interactionbetween some faculty and practicing managers, I ulti-mately shut it down because the underlying valueproposition for both parties was ambiguous at best.The companies were invited to semiannual meetingson campus for research briefings by faculty and wereincluded on mailing lists for faculty research. But thosemanagers who attended the meetings found theresearch typically distant from their immediate con-cerns and found the research similarly problematic.Faculty, on the other hand, found the meetings burdensome and without any intellectual payoff. Asbroker between the two groups, I found the wholearrangement to be more trouble than it was worth.This experience was significant for me because ithighlighted the problem of relevance for both parties.What was clearly missing was an agenda that wasmutually rewarding.

In 1992, I got involved in executive education in asignificant way as academic director of Wharton’s 2-week program for managers who were making a shiftfrom functional to general management responsibili-ties. This open enrollment program consistently drew40 or more participants and moved from being offeredonce a year to twice a year and ultimately to fourtimes a year and, in the process, became one of theschool’s flagship executive-education offerings. Asacademic director, I valued the opportunity to interactclosely with the participants, and I also felt the pres-sure to involve faculty who I knew would be wellreceived by them. I wanted the program to be suc-cessful, and the most obvious measures of successwere enrollments and participant evaluations. Bothpersonally and as an inducement to other faculty, Iexperienced the attractiveness of additional income,and I saw how the boundary between the school andthe business world was shifting in the direction ofcloser ties between the two, with what I believed tobe both positive consequences—faculty becomingmore directly knowledgeable about the business ofbusiness—and negative ones—faculty potentiallylosing intellectual autonomy.

I saw the boundaries shift even further when Ibecame involved in 1998 as co–academic director of acustom program for Toyota with my colleague John




Paul MacDuffie. At the time, the company wasexpanding rapidly and wanted a program that wouldmeet the challenges they were facing in preparing sen-ior management for this rapid growth on a globalbasis. The school saw the relationship with Toyota asstrategically important, and John Paul and I heavilyinvested in working with their staff to design andimplement a very high-quality program that would bevalued by all parties. Toyota has the well-deserved rep-utation of being a very demanding customer, but it alsohas a reputation of being committed to the principle ofcontinuing improvement. The program has been care-fully evaluated and modified each year in the processof kaizen, or continuous improvement, and today itbears little substantive resemblance to the originaldesign. This process, though time-consuming, affordedus an extraordinary opportunity to work with andlearn about a remarkably successful company. Wewere privy to briefings to the program participants byvery senior executives from the CEO down during theweek of the program that was held in Japan. We wereasked to undertake a consulting engagement thatexamined a series of issues in the relationshipsbetween headquarters in Japan and the NorthAmerican affiliates and that required us to interviewsenior executives in both locales. And we consultedwith the European affiliates, developing and runningworkshops for senior management in those affiliates.So far, however, we have not published any of ouranalyses of or insights into the company, underliningone of the potential trade-offs that often arises asboundaries and priorities shift. The boundarybetween executive education and consulting needs tobe carefully drawn and rigorously respected. Becauseour insights into the company come from bothsources, and because we respect the differencebetween the two, we have taken a very conservativeapproach to publication.

In my view, the risk with custom programs is thatalthough they are great revenue generators andprofit makers, and although they enable faculty tosee the clients from the inside, they put businessschools and their faculties in an ambiguous position.The line between custom executive education andoutright consulting can become blurred, and facultytime can be overcommitted to a set of activities thatmay pull them away from research in service of otherobjectives. So at the end of the day, paradoxically,increased researcher–manager interaction can actu-ally lead to a decrease in research productivity.

So What do I Conclude?

I have had the good fortune during the past 30-plusyears to have been witness to and part of an extraordi-narily rich and complex set of evolving relationshipsamong universities, business schools, and the businessworld. My conclusions about these relationships ingeneral and about the implications of increasingresearcher–manager interaction in particular are as fol-lows. In my view, the quality of management researchcan be seriously compromised when researcher–manager interactions unfold under conditions of roleconfusion or role ambiguity, when it is not clearwhether the faculty member is acting as a researcher(whose role is to discover new insights about the waythe world works) or as a consultant (whose role is toprovide advice to a client). I would argue that role con-fusion is likely to be found in cases where there arelong-term, close relationships between the researcherand the organization in which the work is being carriedout. In fact, I would argue that role confusion is virtu-ally an inevitable consequence a long-term relationshipbetween the two parties. Remember, the fundamentalquestion here from the perspective of the faculty mem-ber is “When am I acting as a researcher, and when amI acting as a consultant?” When the answer to thisquestion is unclear, role confusion results.

Role confusion may compromise the quality ofresearch carried out. On the basis of my own experi-ence, I would suggest that five issues (at least) oughtto be seriously considered: the issue of cognitive andemotional distance between the researcher and what isbeing researched, the issue of the motives and rewardsthat drive the researcher, the issue of basic competen-cies that researchers can be expected to exhibit, theissue of the time horizon for the completion of schol-arly research, and the issue of how the work product isused. These five are discussed below in no particularorder of priority.

Cognitive and emotional distance. The craft ofresearch heavily depends on the ability of theresearcher to maintain a certain degree of cognitive andemotional distance from the phenomena being exam-ined. In an ideal world, the researcher is a dispassionateinvestigator, motivated by a deep and abiding interestin understanding something new or different about theway the world works. In an ideal world, the researcheris able to maintain a healthy skepticism about the phe-nomena under investigation and to leverage his or her




critical faculties when appropriate. I’m not talkingabout “objectivity” here. Objectivity is a myth. Rather, Iam talking about the perspective the researcher bringsto the work.

When researcher–manager interactions become tooclose, it is not clear whose agenda is being followed.Nor is it clear that the advantages of an outsider’s per-spective can be maintained, that serious questioningof the status quo can be effectively voiced. It is too easyto be captured—little by little—by the very systembeing researched and to lose the dispassionate edge. Insome cases, this unintentionally happens, as the sim-ple byproduct of sustained interaction. In other cases,intentionality plays a more significant role. In eithercase, however, the end result is the same. Theresearcher loses both cognitive and emotional dis-tance, putting the quality of the work done at risk.

Motives and rewards. The motives and rewards thatengage the researcher are an important piece of thepuzzle. To the extent that the researcher’s behavior ismotivated by the prospect of immediate financialreturn, and to the extent that the relationship betweenthe researcher and the setting in which the work isbeing carried out involves direct financial return tothe researcher, there is risk that the researcher’s capac-ity for skepticism and critical analysis will be com-promised. Absence of direct financial ties to thesetting (by direct financial ties, I mean those in whichthe more the researcher does, the more he or she getspaid) allows the researcher to exercise acquired skillsand competencies more effectively. Direct financialties more closely equate with consulting. Althoughconsulting can certainly be high quality, high-qualityresearch and high-quality consulting are two differentthings, the former being motivated by a wish tounderstand some general things about the way theworld works and the latter motivated by finding solu-tions to the client’s immediate problem or problems.

Basic competencies. University-based researchershave a set of skills and competencies in theory devel-opment, theory testing, and research methods thatwell serve the research community but that do noteasily and naturally transfer into settings that demandeffective, client-oriented problem-solving skills. Thelatter often require pragmatic, time-driven, necessarilypartial solutions to real client needs. They requirecompromise, often serious compromise, with the crite-ria of research excellence and integrity with whichuniversity-based researchers are inculcated during

their training and that, I would argue, often requireresearchers to behave in ways that contradict whatthey teach their students about research design.Excellence in research and excellence in consulting, inother words, require different competencies, some-times overlapping but never perfectly symmetrical.

Time horizons. The time horizons involved in schol-arly research are typically long and often conflict withthe needs of managers, who typically are concernedwith immediate issues. Researcher–manager interac-tions can make each party aware of the time constraintsof the other but cannot resolve them. To the extent thatthe researcher’s work is driven by the shorter-runneeds of the manager, the quality of the research islikely to suffer.

Dissemination of results. Perhaps the most seriousissue the researcher faces when roles get confused ishow the results of the work are disseminated. Thenorms of university-based research place a high prior-ity on the widespread diffusion of research results. Infact, a researcher’s reputation is based on how widelydisseminated and how frequently cited his or herwork is. By contrast, consulting work is typically pro-prietary, and the consultant is rewarded for doingwork that is highly effective and that diffuses only tothe extent that others are willing to pay (dearly) for it.The difference here is somewhat similar to the “opensourcing” issue in computer software, with the aca-demic researcher squarely in the open sourcing camp.Researcher–manager interactions can deepen theresearcher’s appreciation for and depth of under-standing of the setting in which he or she is workingbut may place real restrictions on what may be pub-lished as a result. This directly limits the possibilitiesfor others to learn, thus confronting the researcherwith a professional dilemma of the most serious sort.

So what does all of this imply? Am I saying thatresearchers should not interact with managers, thatsuch interaction inevitably and invariably diminishesthe quality of the research product? Of course not.My own experiences have convinced me of theimportant potential benefits of such interaction. But Iam pointing out some fundamental tensions in therelationship between the two parties, tensions thatcertainly can, if not openly and honestly acknowl-edged and discussed, lead to the sort of compromisesthat will diminish quality and that may, as bound-aries shift, ultimately compromise researcher andinstitutional independence.




I believe that it is the interaction among the fiveissues discussed above that puts quality of research atrisk. It is not interaction between researchers and man-agers per se that is the problem, but the confusionabout roles that can arise when this interaction unfoldsin the course of long-term partnerships. We do our-selves and our profession a disservice by being con-fused about roles. Researchers and consultants bothcreate value, but the value created by each is different.The way in which researchers influence practice is notby trying to be consultants; it is by leveraging theirdistinctive strengths as researchers.

Interaction between managers and researchers is notneutral and is likely to have measurable consequencesat both the macro and micro levels over time. In oureffort to be responsive to the priorities of our con-stituents in the business world, we need to maintainwhat is distinctive about a professional school that ispart of a university, the capacity for critical apprecia-tion. This capacity can be maintained only byacknowledging boundaries, by being aware of the con-sequences of shifting boundaries, and by not unwit-tingly compromising our intellectual autonomy andindependence as these shifts occur. Faculty who helpdesign and deliver executive education need to be inconversation with their colleagues who do not andwith their colleagues who have administrative respon-sibility not only for executive education but also for thefull range of partnerships with those in the world ofbusiness. We need to constantly challenge the assump-tions, both explicit and implicit, about mission thatundergird the partnerships we form. We need to beresponsive to the needs of the business world, but atthe same time we need to maintain our independence.In the long run, it is through maintaining a self-conscious, carefully considered balance between thetwo that we will create the most value for all concerned.

WHY RESEARCHERS SHOULD SOMETIMESSEEK OUT OPPORTUNITIES TO COOPERATE

WITH MANAGERS

Bill Starbuck, University of Oregon

I see an academe in which many researchers try toextract meaning from very bad data. As a result, people having great ability and much education arewasting their time and generating research “findings”that have little or no long-term value. Indeed, theflood of meaningless, noise-laden “findings” is prob-ably obscuring the small percentage of truly useful

findings. I would like to find ways both to use moreproductively research potentials and to raise the qual-ity of research outputs.

Some researchers mail out questionnaires that arethen filled out by very small percentages of therecipients. When I studied sampling methods, oneground rule we were taught was that any surveyshould be suspect if the responses came to less than70% of the intended sample. Much managementresearch has return rates around 15% to 25%, whichraises the question of why these respondents had thetime to waste filling out questionnaires. Were theactual respondents merely secretaries or public-affairs personnel?

Other researchers try to analyze data that are widelyavailable from various databases. Virtually none ofthese researchers make allowance for the high errorrates in such data. San Miguel (1977) found a 30% errorrate in Compustat’s reporting of R & D expenditures.These errors arose both from firms’ reporting and fromCompustat’s processing. Rosenberg and Houglet(1974) examined the stock prices reported byCompustat and by the Center for Research in SecurityPrices at the University of Chicago. They remarked,“There are a few large errors in both data bases, andthese few errors are sufficient to change sharply theapparent nature of the data” (p. 1303). Rosenberg andHouglet advised researchers to pinpoint errors by com-paring data from different sources.

In 1990, a prominent business magazine quotedRichard West, dean of the business school at NYU, ashaving said of the writing in management journals,“It’s often crap. They say nothing in these articles, andthey say it in a pretentious way” (Byrne, 1990, p. 62;also see M. Anderson, 1996). Then shortly afterward,in a long interview in the New York Times, West statedthat nearly all business school faculty are unqualifiedto teach because they lack firsthand experience inbusiness. I do not agree with West that one needs towork in business to pose meaningful questions relat-ing to business, but I have seen enough silly academicresearch that I can appreciate West’s impatience. Muchmanagement research poses questions in ways thatguarantee that the answers will be meaningless(Starbuck & Mezias, 1996).

Cooperation with managers can help researchersto ask better questions, to obtain better data, and tomore meaningfully interpret their findings moremeaningfully.

In 1961, Wharton’s dean asked several businessfirms to become ongoing members of a new organi-zation. This new organization, the Marketing Science




Institute (MSI), would encourage academic researchin marketing that related to contemporary manage-rial problems and have potential for application.

MSI has had ups and downs over the years. Itmoved from Wharton to Harvard and later estab-lished separate offices. It incorporated, expanded, andthen spun off the Profit Impact of Market Strategydatabase project. Its membership has fluctuated.

However, during recent years, MSI has had morethan 60 member firms, and its influence in the field ofmarketing has been remarkable. During the 1990s,projects that MSI sponsored won every award for out-standing research in marketing, and they composed60% of the articles in Journal of Marketing and Journal ofMarketing Research. During 2003, MSI-sponsored proj-ects won two awards for research that had had signif-icant impacts over long periods and won one of twoawards for the best research published during 2003.Perhaps more importantly, MSI has sponsored two-way dialogues between executives and professors.MSI’s premise is that theory and practice can andshould reinforce each other: Good theory can improvepractice, and good practice can lead to good theory. Of course, the auxiliary verb can is essential becausemutual benefits are far from automatic.

MSI’s member firms identify research priorities,which it circulates to 2,000 academic researchers.Approved research projects receive modest financialsupport. Around 30 to 35 new projects begin eachyear, so about 90 projects are underway at any time.Because the projects generate written reports thattend to be technical and academic, MSI employs jour-nalists to restate the reports as executive summariesthat draw out their implications for practice. MSI’smailings reach around 2,000 professors and 2,000executives. Member-only conferences and implemen-tation workshops also discuss research findings andexplore their practical implications. A typical confer-ence involves 40 executives and 20 professors andemphasizes dialogue among the participants.

The benefits of MSI sponsorship are mainly con-ceptual and facilitative. Sponsored projects receiveonly modest financial support. MSI’s activities mainlyproduce better research by helping researchers to askbetter questions, to make better analyses of questionsbefore they gather data, to obtain better data, and tomake better analyses of the implications of researchfindings. Of course, not every question that companiesfind interesting is important from a theoretical point of view, but companies ask questions because theanswers are not obvious to them. This implies that thequestions touch on core issues that challenge accepted

beliefs. Discussions between researchers and man-agers about research designs help to clarify whatissues can be investigated from a practical viewpoint.The support of participating companies can improvethe quality of data by raising response rates, by phras-ing questions more intelligibly, and by motivatingrespondents to respond sincerely. Discussions betweenresearchers and managers about research findings canboth help researchers to understand the value and lim-itations of their work and help them to pose betterquestions in the future.

Few executives express interest in sponsoringresearch as such. Nearly all new ideas about how tomanage arise from actual practice, as do the challengesthat business people confront. However, many execu-tives would like to contribute to management educa-tion, and member firms have opportunities toparticipate in research projects that will be highly visi-ble to professors and students. Executives understandthat the best way to get current and useful content intocourses is to facilitate good research on contemporaryissues. The findings of such research go into textbooksand teaching cases and set the priorities for curricula.Also, executives are looking for inexpensive, time-efficient ways to obtain professional development andcontinuing education for themselves and their col-leagues. Business people do not have enough time tokeep up with the journals and books that constantlypass across their desks, yet professional developmentand intellectual rejuvenation are critical to personaland organizational performance. Seminars and two-way conversations with professors about the results ofresearch can serve this purpose. MSI’s meetings andreports pinpoint major trends and new ideas, and theyinvolve the leading academic and executive thinkers in marketing.

MSI influences the careers and attitudes of profes-sors by sponsoring research, by making awards forthe best dissertation and for the best paper publishedin the Journal of Marketing, and by creating interactionbetween professors and executives. MSI sponsorshiphelps research projects to gain access to firms and toobtain higher quality data.

My own experiences suggest that the goals of nearlyall researchers can be rendered compatible with thegoals of business firms that serve as research sites. Themain reason is that the issues that academic researcherswant to investigate are nearly irrelevant from the com-panies’ viewpoint, and the issues that companies wantto investigate are nearly irrelevant from the viewpointof academic researchers. For example, companies usually focus on immediate, short-term issues that




change often, whereas researchers are primarily inter-ested in long-term issues that slowly evolve. Suchmutual irrelevance makes it possible to constructresearch designs that satisfy the needs of both.Researchers can help companies to find answers theyseek while also asking questions that interest theresearchers themselves, and, conversely, companies canhelp researchers to find answers they seek while alsogetting answers that interest the companies. Mutualcompatibility is especially likely when researchers wantto study prevalent, general human behavior becausesuch topics can be investigated in diverse settings.However, it does require a bit of imagination and flexi-bility to develop research plans that frame researchers’questions within the applied perspectives of compa-nies. Both researchers and companies must be willing togive something to get something.

For example, John Mezias and I wanted realisticdata about the accuracy of managers’ perceptions(Mezias & Starbuck, 2003). We approached a seniorcorporate executive in one of the world’s largest com-panies, and after 8 months of negotiations, we gainedthe company’s support for our project. The senior cor-porate executive said that the company’s top prioritywas quality improvement and that we could gatherdata if the data would tell the company how it wasdoing in that domain. Had we been designing a studywithout concern for its relevance to anyone else, wewould not have chosen quality improvement as thetarget subject. But managers have perceptions in thisdomain, and the company was spending a lot ofresources trying to measure quality, so we would haveaccess to good measures of “objective reality” to com-pare to the managers’ perceptions. Personnel in eachof four large divisions helped us to design question-naires that suited the managers in their divisions. Thesenior corporate executive personally delivered ourquestionnaires to the top managers in these four divi-sions, we had a 100% response rate, and the respon-dents completed our questionnaires themselvesinstead of delegating them to their secretaries.

THE DIFFERENCE LEADERSHIP COULD MAKE:A COMMENT ON THE CURRENT DEBATE

Susan Ashford, University of Michigan

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the debatecurrently being waged in various publications aboutthe conditions, future, and fate of business schools

has been the silence of business school deans. Fewdeans have weighed in on the issues raised, includ-ing those reviewed in the current discussion. Giventhe not-so-thinly veiled charges of pandering (Pfeffer& Fong, 2004), irrelevance (Bennis & O’Toole, 2005),and cowardice contained within these articles, you’dthink deans would have something to say. If nothingelse, sitting deans might object to the portrayal ofdeans as crassly gaming the system while they skipthrough their short-term appointments with a short-term focus, without seeming concern or love for thesacred pursuit of education and longer-term issuessuch as the scope and meaning of professional edu-cation, how we should go about the process of edu-cating business professions, and how we can meetour dual mission of both training the next generationof managers and contributing to our understandingof organizations and management (DeAngelo,DeAngelo, & Zimmerman, 2005). Surely, there is moreleadership occurring within business schools thanpublic accounts would have us think!

This essay, more informal than the ones that pre-cede it, briefly comments on both the broader and thenarrower aspects of the debate formally conducted atthe celebration of Bill Starbuck’s retirement (in May2005). My main purpose is to articulate a set of ideasfor deans and other academic leaders who care aboutthe subject of management and business and are ded-icated to the education of future professionals andideas about how to bring theory and practice together.In addition to being an avid follower of the recent discussions, these comments are informed by mywork as the University of Michigan’s Ross School ofBusiness senior associate dean from 1998 to 2002 andas associate dean for the PhD program in 1994-1995and by my close observation of the two academicleaders who served as deans during those periods.

The Debate

The deans of several top business schools havegrounds to vigorously argue that the characterizationof business schools has been overdrawn in the cur-rent debate. For although symptoms of all the mal-adies identified (e.g., ivory tower, no relevance, noconnection to the real world, faculty with no interestin same) can surely be found, there is also muchgoing on at many leading business schools that isinconsistent with this portrayal. Let’s look at the topthree business schools as ranked by their facultyresearch (Trieschmann, Dennis, Northcraft, & Niemi,




2000): the Ross School at Michigan, Wharton, andHarvard. In the Ross School, scholarship is valuedand promoted, excellent PhDs are produced, aca-demic values are maintained, and yet MBA studentsare given plenty of opportunities to learn by doingthrough a broad program of project work in organi-zations. Cross-disciplinary teams of faculty interactwith MBA students trying to influence practice andthe practicing managers who sponsor them. Facultymembers are thus put in situations where they seetheir ideas at work (for good or for bad). Whartonhas a similar, though less extensive, project focus anda multifaceted research center structure in whichcompanies and executives not only fund researchand programs but also extensively interact with fac-ulty. And Harvard is renowned for the close connec-tion between faculty and the world of practice.Clearly, it is not absolutely true that faculty areremoved from, and have no interest in, practice.Rather, these three schools are tackling the sameissue (having some creative interface with practice)in different ways.

In general, we might move far more productivelyforward on the issues raised in these debates if wewould stop drawing boundaries so starkly. Pettigrew(2001) notes the long-standing tradition in social sci-ences and management of “using bipolar modes ofthinking” such as dichotomies. He comments thatthese “powerful simplifiers and attention directors”are remembered and influential but may “conceal asmuch as they reveal” (p. S61). I believe that thisapplies in the current debate regarding rigor or rele-vance and theory or practice.

I know of few business school faculty memberswho care nothing for practice. I know plenty of juniorfaculty members who know very little about practiceand are putting their emphasis elsewhere to gettenure and survive. But they do care. If they don’tcare on their own, they care because they face classesof practice-oriented students in a larger school envi-ronment that values teaching. This reality well alignsincentives so that faculty members both do researchand think about its practical importance. Many juniorfaculty worry that they need to maintain a focus thatdoes not allow them to take advantage of opportuni-ties to teach in the type of custom executive-educationprograms that promote application and practicalextension such as the ones that Tushman describes atHarvard Business School. However, I know many inthe management field, at least, who would gain manybenefits from his model of executive-education

interaction and from participating if the opportunitywere appropriately structured (i.e., time managedwell and taken for load, not extra pay). Prime amongthe benefits would be access to data and samples, oneof the trickiest problems in today’s research environ-ment where companies are “too busy” to participateand support faculty research.

I know of few practice-oriented senior facultymembers who are not interested in new ideas. In fact,they have great incentive to know the latest ideas asthey are often in the business of selling ideas on theopen marketplace through their consulting and indealing on an ongoing basis with powerful executivesin their executive-education classrooms. They are inthe hot seat to have something new and relevant tosay. If they don’t have ideas, they don’t have much.That said, I know plenty of practice-oriented seniorfaculty members who no longer have the patience foror the discipline to tackle the morass of journal articlesnecessary to get at that particular source of new ideas.If we recognize these realities—research-oriented jun-ior faculty without the experience to effectively inter-act with practitioners and practice-oriented seniorfaculty without the patience or discipline to scourjournals for new ideas—we gain some leverageregarding possible actions.

For if we were to stop drawing the lines of thisdebate so starkly, we would recognize that people area mix and business schools are a mix and that theproblems lie elsewhere. The problems lie in the cul-ture that we’ve created in business schools and thelack of forums and structures to support a dual focus.This is good news for deans as it suggests things thatare amenable to intervention. It suggests that startingwith faculty leaders such as Tushman, Kimberly,Starbuck, and Walsh, and supported and enabled bydeans, we can create what we collectively want tocreate in the business school’s internal environment.

Foundation

Before we turn to possible interventions or reme-dies, I’ll advance one final, central tenet. That is, it isimportant to note that Kimberly (and the others whohave said it before him; e.g., Grey, 2001; March, 2003;Weick, 2001) is right—the production of knowledge isa sacred pursuit. A dean’s most central responsibilityis to support it, celebrate it, and be a spokesperson forit. This point is worth noting first because, although itis portrayed in the current debate as all powerful, it is



actually quite fragile. Although it is the case that thereis a power structure that supports this truth (Bennis &O’Toole, 2005), it is fragile in that is so easily attacked,so patently absurd on the surface. However, there isno other institution in society that is so purely aimedat the pursuit of truth and the production of knowl-edge than the university. It is, as Grey (2001), comments,what is “special and distinctive about [universities]: thethings which they uniquely, can do” (p. S29). It is nowonder that March (2003) likens the university to atemple that should be kept free from market pressures:

The university is only incidentally a market. It is moreessentially a temple—a temple dedicated to knowl-edge and a human spirit of inquiry. It is a place wherelearning and scholarship are revered, not primarilyfor what they contribute to personal or social well-being but for the vision of humanity that they sym-bolize, sustain, and pass on. (p. 206)

Universities have been entrusted with a particularrole in society, one of great value. The university

stands for things that are forgotten in the heat of bat-tle, for values that get pushed aside in the rough-and-tumble of everyday living, the goals we ought to bethinking about and never do, for the facts we don’tlike to face, and the questions we lack the courage toask. (Gardener, 1968, quoted in Weick, 2001, p. S71)

And in today’s uncertain world, we surely need aplace where questions that trouble us are asked, whereknowledge with no immediate applicability is pur-sued, and where findings with no immediate rele-vance are permitted and considered.

With such a mission, there will always be ineffi-ciency. As Grey (2001) puts it,

The production of useless knowledge is a publicgood because it is the price to pay for the possibilityof producing useful knowledge. Much knowledgewill, quite rightly, only be used by other academicsduring the process of refining, testing, criticizing anddiscarding. (p. S29)

In addition, value often can’t be immediately deter-mined but will only be realized later as conditionschange, such as in the case of several strands of eso-teric mathematics that became relevant only when theworld of computers exploded. The process is alsomessy because it is indeed true that alongside a fac-ulty working hard to create new knowledge exists

another faculty who have long lost a sense of missionand are pursuing their own ends or are pursuing noends (no output) at all. In short, the creation of knowl-edge is incredibly messy, costly, inefficient, and risky.And it is valuable nonetheless. It is worth our effortsto protect and encourage this pursuit.

Having said this, business schools are professionalschools and are held to a dual standard—to produceknowledge and to prepare people for practice. Twothings, two foci, are not too much to ask of an institu-tion as well endowed with financial and human capi-tal as business schools. In this dual focus, businessschools may be just slightly ahead of where universi-ties are going more generally. Lee Bollinger, presidentof Columbia University (quoted in Kanter, Khurana,& Nohria, 2005), recently stated, “We are now at anew period where universities are reentering theworld” (p. 9). Kanter et al. (2005) laud Bollinger’sstatement because they believe the task for universi-ties at this historical moment is to “again becomeproactive in the ongoing effort to achieve and main-tain alignment between its internal structures and cul-ture in the needs and demands of society” (p. 9). Ifuniversities seriously take on the task of “justifyingtheir prerogatives and access to resources throughservice to society” (p. 9), a heightened sense of dualfocus will mimic that played out in business schoolsduring the past several decades.

Interventions

To make a dual focus work, it is important to keepin mind that it’s not critical to the success of the busi-ness school that every single faculty member in theschool be one way or another—be practice oriented orbasic-research oriented (or even to be both). There isroom within a business school for different types ofpeople and for valuing different types of people. Forexample, at Michigan, Weick is highly esteemed as afaculty member. Karl has produced some of the mostimportant foundational knowledge in the manage-ment field. His work would be mysterious to mostpractitioners, and yet his insights show up in the writ-ings of Tom Peters and others who are regularly readby practitioners. Bob Quinn is also highly esteemed asa faculty member. Bob has been highly influential inthe world of practice (focusing on leaders and leader-ship). He writes more books than articles, is exten-sively involved in executive education and workwith companies, and yet he teaches one of the most





transformative sessions our highly research-orientedPhDs ever experience. There are others who do funda-mental research, some whose research influences prac-tice and some who are passionate about their teachingwho are also valued within the school. The more weresist making a “once and for all” defined mold towhich all business school faculty members must con-form, the better. For deans, the job is to inspire excel-lence in all faculty members, despite their stripe, andto affirm what’s best in each. For deans and depart-ment chairs, the job is to understand the range ofcompetencies needed and to select the people who aremost needed in the mix of faculty and to develop thosefaculty over time. It is possible to find pure researchers,practice-oriented professors, and those who can doboth extremely well. I know because I’ve recruitedthem and battled other schools to keep them.

Second, it may be that there is a career progressionfor many faculty members, with the need to focus onmore fundamental (perhaps more esoteric) researchearly in a career and the growing ability and desire tobranch out into more practical concerns later in acareer. Junior faculty just exiting PhD programs knowa lot about the former and very little about the latter.Why not play to their strengths? For a faculty mem-ber, the trick is to not so starkly make the decisionabout “who to be” that he or she stops growing.Tushman clearly benefited from his interactions withpractice as a young faculty member. Tushman alsogenerated the type of vita that warranted tenure at atop business school. It is possible to do. If we decidethat junior faculty can only do one thing and not theother, we set a pattern that can lead them away fromopportunities to grow during a life span of a career.And that would be a great shame. For the worst thatacademia has to offer is not an avid basic researcheror an enthusiastic practice-oriented teacher or scholar.The worst academia has to offer is a faculty memberwho is burned out—no longer writing, no longerinteracting with practice, no longer teaching well, andno longer growing.

Deans can help by seeking out and structuringsmall opportunities for junior faculty members tointeract with practice in ways that promote theirgrowth. I suspect that the junior faculty members whowork with Tushman on the executive-education pro-grams he describes in his essay do really grow. Theyget new ideas. They get access to data from which theycan publish and develop a tenurable record. Deans canalso help by recognizing, honoring, and valuing acareer progression—creating small opportunities for

interaction with practice early on and helping to pro-mote larger opportunities later on.

Third, the business school culture would be helpedby the creation of forums that enable an exchangeamong and between these two (or more when you con-sider various permutations) camps of people. I havewatched practice-oriented faculty listen with delight toa well-crafted research talk in which an excellent ideais developed and made accessible. Practice-orientedfaculty, in turn, can create minioccasions for interactingwith practitioners by inviting more research-orientedfaculty into their executive-education efforts in waysthat makes sense. It might be an evening lecture onsome new research idea or in a smaller role on the fac-ulty teams working with senior management in theway that Tushman describes. The goal isn’t simply tobridge a divide in the faculty ranks. For those who loveacademia and what it has to offer, there is something ofreal value here on the sacred level. That is, these inter-actions can enrich the offering to the executives andenrich the thinking of faculty.

But the true transformative power of this practicewill only be realized if a school broadens the set ofopportunities beyond the base of the “usual suspects”who get tapped over and over again to do the execu-tive teaching of a school. In this regard, executiveMBA (EMBA) teaching is another great forum forinteraction with practitioners. Because the EMBA is adegree program that spans more time (e.g., 21 months)than the typical executive-education program (e.g., 1to 2 weeks), younger faculty have a better chance to besuccessful teaching in it. The power relationship ismore balanced in that EMBA participants can value ornot value the faculty member, but that faculty memberalso gives a grade. These two factors make the EMBAa tantalizing possibility for promoting faculty interac-tion with practitioners in ways that the faculty mem-ber can be successful and preserve his or her time forresearch (as this teaching can be part of his or her reg-ular academic load). These classrooms share many ofthe characteristics of the executive-education workthat Tushman describes (such as interaction with peo-ple 10 to 14 years out who are actively working onproblems) but have qualities that make them viableteaching possibilities for younger faculty members.

Fourth, deans who desire to see more interactionwith practice need to foster the active mentoring ofmore faculty (junior and senior) to create greater abil-ity and capacity to do so. If there were a career pro-gression toward broadening one’s thinking during thecareer span, then maybe more senior faculty would



develop an active interest in interactions with practi-tioners later in their careers, just when businessschools as institutions have stopped thinking aboutany sort of mentoring or development for them at all.It is at just that point that these faculty may be mostamenable and open to increasing interactions withpractitioners and most able to develop in that arena.But if no one is thinking of them or thinking of reach-ing out to them, then the potential lies fallow. A dean’sprimary responsibility is the development of the faculty over the long run and in accordance with somevision of the ideal faculty member—or, more appro-priately, the ideal mix of faculty.

Another potential for cross-connection and impactthat often lies fallow is that there are many fabulousideas in more traditional academic research just wait-ing to get out to a practice-oriented audience, but oftenthe faculty member himself or herself is the worstcommunicator of these ideas to this broader audience.Business schools can hire translators to help marketthe knowledge that exists in academic research to peo-ple who might benefit from it. We have such transla-tors in our field right now, with Tom Peters translatingWeick, as mentioned, and Malcolm Gladwell translat-ing all sorts of basic psychological research in waysthat make it not only highly palatable but also attrac-tive to a broad public. Wharton has an establishedprogram of translation of faculty ideas into layman’sterms that they then sell as an online subscriptionservice to 400,000 subscribers worldwide. The addi-tion of such people within the business school doestwo things. First, it allows faculty to do what they dobest (continue to produce knowledge) while also stillcreating a desirable impact on practice. And second, ithelps more basic research-oriented academics come tosee over time what they are not naturally inclined tolook for—the practical import of their work. Thisgrowth happens by osmosis and incrementally ratherthan by demeaning one aspect of faculty work anddemanding another.

An additional dean responsibility in today’s world,I believe, is to foster interdisciplinarity. The world ofpractice today doesn’t show up in disciplinary silosand probably never did. Problems in the world arecomplex and multifaceted. And yet the academyoften operates within very rigid boundaries whereacademics only read “their own” literatures and talkto their own colleagues. One of the hallmarks ofUniversity of Michigan is the low boundaries betweenschools and colleges. Organizational scholars from 11 different schools and colleges come together weekly

for a seminar, for example. PhD students cross bound-aries. Faculty members coauthor with faculty mem-bers in various disciplinary departments. An issue intoday’s world is that academics not only need tointeract more extensively with practice but also needto both understand and take into account the theoriesand findings from other disciplines. Making this happenrequires academic leadership—first, to make the casefor its importance and, second, to make sure that ourreward structures take into account the greater com-plexity of doing research in this way. Theoretically, it’sa longer path with a greater reward at the end of it. Butmost academics need to see some reward along theway as well.

A final intervention involves deans becoming moreeffective spokespersons for the importance of develop-ing generalizable knowledge about business and man-agement. To my mind, the most inspirational exampleoffered in these essays is the story of MSI described byStarbuck. That institute was the idea of a dean, and itscreation was the result of that dean’s proactivity. Itclearly was respectful of the work of academia, and yetit brought about structured interactions with practi-tioners that have been highly influential in the field ofmarketing. I know of few academics who would signup for interactions with practitioners where the focus ison how silly and irrelevant their work is. I know manyacademics would love to sign up to interact with prac-titioners who are interested in talking about the impor-tant ideas of the day and how the practitioners mightfacilitate the accomplishment of research on them. It isthis kind of leadership from deans with the broaderbusiness community and society that we need to see alot more of. If it takes courage today to be willing toloudly and proudly state who we are and what weoffer society and the world, then I would like to seemore of that courage.

I think there is a lot of hope in business schoolstoday—hope in the willingness to have a mix of mod-els regarding what is a successful academic, hope in thecross-disciplinary bridges between business schoolsand academic departments, hope in faculty leaderssuch as Tushman who are willing to be the bridgebetween practitioners and their junior academic col-leagues, and hope in the numerous possibilities forintervention on the part of academic leaders to set highaspirations and to create more of the culture that welike to create within our schools. I agree with Pfefferand Fong (2004) when they state that we need to focuson caring about the subject matter of business and man-agement. I think that deans can play an important role





in making the case for what we’re about as an institu-tion, both in society and within the university, and set-ting up structures and systems to reinforce it over time.

NOTES

1. I would like to thank Joe Mondello at the Associationto Advance Collegiate Schools of Business for provid-ing the contemporary portrait of business schools andtheir graduates.

2. Walsh, Weber, and Margolis (2003) showed us howour collective research interest in human well-being signif-icantly declined during the past 25 years.

3. This essay builds on my Organization and ManagementTheory Distinguished Scholar presentation at the Academyof Management (Tushman, 2003), on my presentation at theBill Starbuck celebration (Tushman, 2005), and on Tushman,O’Reilly, Fenollosa, and Kleinbaum (in press).

4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is rooted in itshistory of respect for research affecting practice. Indeed“mens and manus” is embedded in the Institute’s historyand symbols.

5. Indeed, Stokes (1997, p. 31) argues that the distinctionbetween so-called “basic” research and “applied” researchis both inaccurate and pernicious. It is inaccurate in that acareful examination of how science proceeds in disciplinesas diverse as physics, biology, chemistry, demography, andeconomics reveals that innovation almost always reflects acombination of basic and applied research. It is perniciousin that it promotes an artificial status hierarchy in whichbasic research is seen as superior to applied research.

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JAMES P. WALSH (PhD, Northwestern University) is the Gerald andEsther Carey Professor of Business Administration at the University ofMichigan’s Ross School of Business. He is very interested in betterunderstanding the purposes, accountability, and control of the firm insociety. Now the vice president elect of the Academy of Management, hewill serve as its 65th president.

MICHAEL L. TUSHMAN holds degrees from Northeastern University(BSEE), Cornell University (MS), and the Sloan School of Managementat MIT (PhD). He was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business,Columbia University, from 1976 to 1998; he was the Phillip HettlemanProfessor of Business from 1989 to 1998. He has also been a visiting pro-fessor at MIT (1982, 1996) and INSEAD (1995-1998). He is interna-tionally recognized for his work on the relations among technologicalchange, executive leadership, and organization adaptation. His work cen-ters on the role of senior teams in building organizations that can hostboth incremental and more discontinuous innovation and in leadingthose organizational changes associated with these innovation streams.He has published numerous articles and books, including WinningThrough Innovation: A Practical Guide to Leading OrganizationalRenewal and Change (with C. O’Reilly, 1997, 2002), NavigatingChange: How CEOs, Top Teams, and Boards Steer Transformation(with D. Hambrick and D. Nadler, 1998), Competing by Design: ABlueprint for Organizational Architectures (with D. Nadler, 1998),and Managing Strategic Innovation: A Collection of Readings (withP. Anderson, 1997, 2004). He is the Paul R. Lawrence Class of 1942Professor at Harvard Business School.

JOHN R. KIMBERLY is Henry Bower Professor in the Departments ofManagement and of Health Care Systems in the Wharton School and inthe Department of Sociology in the School of Arts and Sciences at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. His research interests include processes oforganizational innovation and change, the origins and consequences oforganizational identity, and the business of addiction treatment.

BILL STARBUCK is professor in residence at the Lundquist College ofBusiness of the University of Oregon and professor emeritus at New YorkUniversity. He received his PhD in industrial administration at CarnegieInstitute of Technology. He held faculty positions in economics, sociol-ogy, or management at Purdue University, the Johns HopkinsUniversity, Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee,and New York University and visiting positions in universities andbusiness schools in England, France, New Zealand, Norway, andSweden. In addition, he was a senior research fellow at the InternationalInstitute of Management in Berlin. He has been the editor ofAdministrative Science Quarterly, he chaired the screening committeefor senior Fulbright Awards in business management, he directed thedoctoral program in business administration at New York University,and he was the president of the Academy of Management. He has pub-lished more than 130 articles on accounting, bargaining, business strat-egy, computer programming, computer simulation, forecasting, decisionmaking, human–computer interaction, learning, organizational design,organizational growth and development, perception, scientific methods,and social revolutions. He has also authored two books and edited 14books, including Handbook of Organizational Design, which waschosen the best book on management published during the year endingMay 1982.

SUSAN ASHFORD is the Michael and Susan Jandernoa Professor ofOrganizational Behavior and Human Resource Management at theUniversity of Michigan Business School. She is a fellow of the Academyof Management and has published research on managerial effectiveness,issue selling, feedback seeking, and nonstandard work in a variety of out-lets including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy ofManagement Review, Academy of Management Journal, StrategicManagement Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, andOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. She hasserved in several administrative capacities at the Ross School of Business,including stints as the school’s senior associate dean for academic affairsand associate dean for the PhD program. She currently serves as associ-ate dean for leadership programming and the EMBA.



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