Business-school research: The physics-envy problem
Oct 14th 2011, 15:56 by J.L.H.D | ATLANTA
IN WRITING about the lack of globalisation in business schools, my colleague noted the problem of physics envy: the need to reduce a series of complicated situations to clear, broadly applicable lessons. But while the laws of gravity and thermodynamics work the same way in Vancouver, Seoul or Athens, businesses do not. New entrants to a market find this out fairly quickly, or fail trying. But under the circumstances, are the newly minted MBAs prepared to shed their preconceptions and recognise such differences in time to avoid failure?
The physics-envy problem plagues business research as well. Part of the problem is the data sets researchers usually have to work with. Even concentrating solely on American businesses, as many professors do, there are significant variations as to which data get collected. Comparing businesses in different states often requires sifting through regional or national sources. This means including less information about each business in particular. Trying to compare, say, small businesses from two different countries, in a statistically significant way, does not allow the researcher a whole lot of room to draw conclusions once all other factors are accounted for. In social-science research one can have breadth or depth, but almost never both. Academics are more likely to get grants, or tenure, if their research errs on the side of breadth.
In part this is an issue of reputation: business schools have long yearned to show that management is just as worthy of respect and research dollars as any sceince. This physics-envy is not unique to business schools; it plagues other social sciences, such as sociology, political science, and my own field, city planning. (Take the above-named cities, for example, and try making some statistically significant, useful statements about the effects of hosting the Olympics on economic development in all three.) Bent Flyvbjerg, a former professor of planning now at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, wrote a book called “Making Social Science Matter,” in which he argued that trying to emulate the physics paradigm, with its broadly applicable rules, ends up making social science irrelevant: “The social sciences appear unable to demonstrate the kind of progress which is supposed to characterise normal science.”
Why? Human behaviour, Mr Flyvbjerg argued, occurs in a particular context, which changes from day to day, place to place, and person to person. Research that depends on statistically significant comparisons, in which context has be filtered away with dummy variables, neuters social sciences. To explain what’s going on, a researcher needs to take context into account. In the case of business, the missing context is local business conditions and customs; so the “globalisation” promoted by business schools turns out to be thin gruel.
Researchers are used to winning research grants on the basis of quantitative analyses, and find it hard to change methodological gears: fair enough. But the alternative has implications for teaching as well. When addressing a broad base of students, recruited in part for their diversity, it is easier to speak in generalisations; easier to lecture and to grade coursework. Business education does have the long-standing use of the case study in teaching. But if the teacher spends days discussing a particular case—on, say, the decision of a supermarket chain to expand to Romania—it takes a certain ingenuity to keep that relevant to students not interested in retail or Romania. The book that made Mr Flyvbjerg’s reputation, “Rationality and Power,” is 290 pages tracking, in great detail, the decision to redevelop the town centre of Aalborg, Denmark. It is an excellent book, but cannot be said to have universal appeal.
Henry Mintzberg, a longtime critic of business education, took a similar approach with his 2009 book “Managing”. Instead of providing a statistical overview of what managers do, he dissected the daily lives of 29 managers from very different fields. His conclusions, though, are necessarily vague. There is just too much variation between the working days of the orchestra conductor, the park ranger, the refugee-camp manager and the telecoms executive.
In order to correct the physics-envy problem, qualitative research—or, to be more blunt about what Mr Flyvbjerg and Mr Mintzberg are doing in their books, storytelling—needs to have pride of place alongside quantitative research. Statistical analyses are useful but should not be the only way to talk about the dilemmas of management, especially when addressing globalisation and difference.
But a curriculum that puts more emphasis on story and detail, where the proper treatment of a case takes weeks rather than one or two sessions, might mean more reading, more hours in the classroom and a longer programme. It might also turn the professor into a facilitator and put greater responsibility on the student to draw conclusions. This at a time when the traditional two-year programmes are under threat like never before. Has anyone written a paper showing that a 20% increase in context sensitivity in business education is positively correlated with a 31% increase in post-MBA salary?
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