Researching research
Mar 7th 2012, 14:56 by J.L.H.D | ATLANTA
FOR those of you who were wondering where your MBA fees went, AACSB, a business-school accreditation agency, has the answer: 83% of member schools' expendititure goes towards the salaries of their staff. Not surprisingly, business-school leaders occasionally wonder what the profesoors receiving those salaries are working on, and whether it matters. Hence AACSB published a long-awaited report (PDF) last month on the impact of their research.
Schools do have ways of counting how research makes its way into the wider world. The most common ones being publication in academic journals (the more prestigious the better), memberships on the editorial boards of said journals, presentations requested and grants awarded. Some schools cautiously count less exalted measures, such as mentions in newspapers and blogs. But lesser-known schools, in particular, are at pains to prove—to themselves and to potential faculty recruits as well as students—that they are just as intellectually serious as their top-ranked competitors.
Furthering the difficulty, research impact, by definition, does not lend itself well to short-term metrics. Trends happen in academia as much as anywhere else, and so an article that gets a flurry of citations upon initial publication may be completely forgotten in ten years; or a piece that starts in relative obscurity may eventually prove groundbreaking. And a particular study might lend itself to easy publicity yet prove less useful in the long term. As the AACSB report notes, a school can count whether its professors present at conferences, but a better, albeit considerably more expensive, metric might be whether the audience took interest.
What does this mean for MBA students? They may not consider the role of research when choosing a school, save perhaps interest in the work of a particular professor. But the AACSB report provides a way to think about research that might help them evaluate schools better. It divides research directions into five broad categories: creating new theoretical models; applying theory to business practice; advancing teaching practices; using interdisciplinary approaches; and providing services to the wider world, such as consulting or partnering with local firms. If a school chooses to focus on one of those five areas, that will shape its research decisions, and in turn its faculty hiring and its attractiveness to certain students. A quant jock in the making might prefer a school interested in models; a lifelong battler of a learning disability might be happier at a school with an interest in innovative teaching approaches.
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