Research Roundup: August 2025

Dive into our monthly Research Roundup, showcasing the latest insights from the business education community to keep you informed of new and noteworthy industry trends. Here are this month’s selections:

Rethinking Research After Tenure

• Researchers: Giorgio Tripodi, Yifan Qian, Dakota Murray, Benjamin Jones, and Dashun Wang, Northwestern University; Xiang Zheng and Chaoqun Ni, University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Output: “Tenure and Research Trajectories,” Applied Physical Sciences, 2025
• Overview: What happens to a scholar’s research once the pressure to earn tenure is behind them? This study examines the careers of 12,611 tenure-line faculty across 15 academic disciplines in the United States to understand how research output, direction, and influence shift before and after tenure. Using data from seven large-scale sources, the researchers tracked each faculty member’s publications across an 11-year window, five years before and after tenure, to identify patterns in productivity and exploration.
  
  The study aims to clarify whether tenure simply rewards strong early-career performance or actively changes how scholars approach their work. It also highlights differences across fields, especially between disciplines that rely on laboratory models and those that do not. The analysis offers insight into how institutional incentives shape the development of research agendas over time.
• Findings: Publication rates increase steadily during the tenure-track period and peak in the year just before tenure is awarded. After tenure, productivity trends diverge; faculty in lab-based fields such as biology and chemistry often sustain or increase output, while those in fields like business, sociology, and mathematics typically see declines. Over half of the study’s faculty in lab-based fields increased their publication rates after tenure, while a majority in non-lab fields published less.
  
  Notably, the number of highly cited papers declines after tenure across both lab and non-lab fields, even as the novelty of research increases. About 67 percent of faculty begin at least one new research topic after tenure, and one-third discontinue prior lines of work. This shift toward new, less conventional topics is driven in part by the security that tenure provides. Freed from the immediate pressure to demonstrate productivity for promotion, faculty are more likely to invest in riskier, longer-term research directions. It may not yield quick recognition, but it has the potential to advance knowledge in unexpected ways.

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Influence Meets Investment

• Researchers: Marius Molders, Lennart Bock, Henning Zulch, HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management; Eloy Barrantes, St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences
• Output: “Understanding Finfluencers: Roles and Strategic Partnerships in Retail Investor Engagement,” Journal of Business Research, 2025
• Overview: Finfluencers (short for financial influencers) are social media creators who share content about personal finance, saving, and investing with wide audiences, often through platforms like Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok. They use a blend of credibility, authenticity, and “infotainment” (information-based entertainment) to explain financial topics in ways that are more accessible than traditional advice channels. This study focused on German-speaking finfluencers in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), where researchers surveyed 106 finfluencers to better understand their self-perceived roles and potential as strategic partners in retail investor engagement.
  
  The researchers sought to learn whether these individuals function more as educators or marketers and how they might complement corporate financial communications, including investor relations. The study addressed two main questions: how finfluencers view their influence on retail investors’ financial decision-making, and how they form business partnerships in that space.
• Findings: The results showed that 91 percent of finfluencers considered increasing their followers’ financial education to be very important, far above goals like promoting products or growing their personal brand. Over half reported investing more than 20 percent of their net income, with 95 percent personally invested in exchange-traded or equity funds. While 57 percent had engaged in paid partnerships with companies, mostly through affiliate links and sponsored posts, only 11 percent had partnered with investor relations departments. Most respondents agreed that such collaborations would become more important in the future and agreed that finfluencers will become as important as financial journalists in company communications.
  
  Finfluencers identified credibility, authenticity, and personality as the top three success factors in reaching their audiences. Ninety-one percent agreed that financial motives behind promotions should be clearly disclosed. When evaluating partnerships, they prioritized alignment with a company’s values, product quality, and opportunities for creative control. Professional design, high posting frequency, and giving specific investment recommendations were rated as less important.
  
  These findings suggest that finfluencers are not only focused on building trust; they also see themselves as educators filling a financial advice gap, particularly for younger retail investors.

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India’s Global Brand Is Not Yet a Global Choice

• Researchers: Andrew Crisp, Carringtoncrisp
• Output: “International India,” Carringtoncrisp, 2025
• Overview: India is investing in its global reputation as a destination for business education, but the world has yet to fully notice. With traditional study destinations like the United States and the United Kingdom tightening visa and immigration policies, the timing appears right for India to emerge as an alternative. Yet interest from international students remains limited. This study by CarringtonCrisp surveyed 4,160 prospective business students across 22 countries to understand why.
  
  The research aimed to examine students’ perceptions of Indian business education and identify the factors influencing their willingness or reluctance to consider India as a destination for graduate study. The results offer a focused view of how India is currently positioned in the global education market and where gaps in awareness and appeal persist.
• Findings: While 79 percent of respondents said they were open to studying abroad, only 8 percent identified India as a likely destination. The most common barrier was limited awareness—33 percent said they did not know of any reputable Indian business schools. Other concerns include a preference for different countries (21 percent), a perceived lack of scholarships (19 percent), and discomfort with the idea of living in India (17 percent).
  
  Still, the study highlights areas of strength that Indian institutions can build on. India was seen as the most welcoming country for international students (57 percent), the easiest for obtaining a student visa (56 percent), and the second most dynamic economy after the United States (50 percent). Notably, 82 percent of respondents found a joint degree between an Indian business school and a school in their home country appealing, suggesting that international students may be more willing to engage with Indian institutions through hybrid or short-format experiences.
  
  These preferences point to practical steps Indian schools can take to broaden their global reach—beginning with visibility, collaboration, and program flexibility.

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Signals in the Syntax

• Researchers: Dennis Herhausen and David de Jong, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Stephan Ludwig, Monash University; Ehsan Abedin, Flinders University; Nasim Ul Haque, The University of Melbourne
• Output: “From Words to Insights: Text Analysis in Business Research,” Journal of Business Research, 2025
• Overview: Business communication is a constant presence in organizational life, yet its deeper meaning is often overlooked. This study challenges the idea that language is merely a tool for delivering information. Instead, the authors introduce message design logic, a framework that treats communication as a deliberate act shaped by who is speaking, the environment they are responding to, and what they hope to achieve.
  
  The goal is to help researchers and decision-makers better understand how a message’s design, structure, tone, and content can reveal insights into relationships, power dynamics, and strategic priorities.
  
  Alongside this conceptual foundation, the study provides a detailed comparison of current text analysis methods, offering guidance on how to apply them effectively in business research. The combined approach equips readers with both a lens for interpretation and a toolkit for analysis.
• Findings: The authors find that message design provides a reliable path for identifying four key elements in business communication: the communicator’s background, the context of the interaction, the intention behind the message, and its influence on the audience. For instance, personal traits such as experience, status, or emotional state can be reflected in word choices and sentence structure. Similarly, contextual pressures or strategic goals often shape how directly or persuasively someone communicates. These patterns can be detected through systematic analysis and linked to measurable outcomes.
  
  To support these findings, the authors reviewed 20 empirical articles published in the Journal of Business Research between July 2023 and June 2024 that used automated text analysis to examine business communication. Among them, 45 percent used dictionary-based methods, 35 percent used topic modeling techniques, and another 35 percent used either supervised machine learning or large language models. Many studies combined multiple techniques to strengthen results. Across these examples, researchers were able to detect deception in emails, assess sentiment in customer reviews, and link executive language to firm performance.
  
  For business leaders, the research suggests that communication should not be treated as noise or background. It is a source of behavioral data that can inform decisions and reveal patterns that traditional metrics often miss.

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Opening Doors With Low-Code Ventures

• Researchers: Bryan K. Stroube and Gary Dushnitsky, London Business School
• Output: “Mapping Entrepreneurial Inclusion Across US Neighborhoods: The Case of Low-Code E-Commerce Entrepreneurship,” Strategic Management Journal, 2025
• Overview: A new form of entrepreneurship is taking shape, driven by tools that reduce the cost and complexity of starting an online business. This study looks closely at Shopify, a “low-code” platform that allows users to build e-commerce sites without technical expertise, to see how it is changing patterns of business creation in U.S. neighborhoods. Drawing on data from nearly 160,000 Shopify ventures and demographic profiles for 32,000 neighborhoods, the researchers examine whether this technology has expanded opportunities for communities that have historically been underrepresented in business ownership.
  
  The study focuses on neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black residents, a group that has often faced structural barriers to entrepreneurship, and compares Shopify trends with both traditional and venture capital-backed e-commerce ventures. By mapping where Shopify activity occurs, the study evaluates whether these tools are influencing who can establish and sustain a business.
• Findings: The study found that even a small shift in demographics matters. Neighborhoods with just 1 percent more Black residents typically host about 3 percent more Shopify ventures. This pattern differs from traditional startups and venture capital-backed e-commerce firms, where no such positive relationship is found. Approximately half of all U.S. neighborhoods have at least one Shopify-based business, indicating widespread use of the platform.
  
  The findings suggest that low-code tools like Shopify can reduce entrepreneurs’ reliance on large amounts of capital, advanced technical skills, or established business networks, allowing them to start with modest monthly costs, often under 50 USD. While these ventures may not aim for the scale of investor-backed firms, they appear to enable a wider range of business models and market niches.
  
  For business leaders, this signals a change in the geography and composition of entrepreneurial activity, with growth emerging from places and populations that have previously had limited visibility in the business landscape.

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If you have new research from your school share with the business education community, please submit a summary and relevant links to AACSB Insights via our online submission form at aacsb.edu/insights/articles/submissions.