Research That Reaches: Scholarship With Impact

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• It’s difficult for research to be influential or timely when schools reward faculty for publishing in a few select journals, academics specialize in narrow fields, and articles are paywalled.
• Schools can enhance the impact of research by broadening promotion and tenure requirements, encouraging relationship-building, embracing open access publishing, and treating teaching as a way to disseminate research.
• Sage’s new open access journal will organize research around four kinds of impact—interdisciplinary, professional and policy, societal and sustainable, and teaching and learning.

Business schools spend several billion in U.S. dollars a year on research. By most measures, that ought to make us one of the most influential intellectual communities on earth.

Business faculty study the institutions that move money, employ people, shape supply chains, set wages, build technologies, manage healthcare systems, govern resources, and decide who moves ahead or falls behind. These are consequential topics with high currency. Yet, evidence indicates that the public is not buying our ideas and research.

In the past decade, the case for changing our approach to research has become urgent. Public confidence in higher education has fallen sharply. Funding environments for academic research have become more uncertain. Many stakeholders are questioning the value we deliver, the audiences we serve, and the costs we impose. They deserve sharper answers.

How We Got Here

A few years ago, I helped to design a global survey for the Academy of Management (AOM) on what management academics around the world believed about their own scholarly impact.

Respondents told us that the primary audience for their research consisted overwhelmingly of other management academics. About 60 percent reported that the journal rankings and impact factors that administrators used to evaluate their research probably or definitely did not reflect actual impact. About 59 percent thought interdisciplinary research had greater external influence, but also less publishing potential.

Most academics wanted to have an impact and did not feel fulfilled. Ninety-four percent of the respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that the goal of their research was to make a positive impact on society. Yet only 38 percent felt their institutions supported their pursuit of broader impact.

I have explored these findings, and the institutional architecture that produced them, at great length in Impact and the Management Researcher. I also worked with co-authors on a shorter form of the results for a Sage white paper called “Measuring Societal Impact of Business & Management Research: From Challenges to Change.”

Over the years, academic research in every discipline has adapted to the lack of incentives and reputable publishing avenues. A 2023 paper in Nature analyzed 45 million manuscripts and 3.9 million patents going back to 1945. Across every field, the disruptiveness of new research has fallen sharply over the past several decades. In the social sciences, disruptiveness of research dropped by 90 percent. We are publishing more than ever, yet saying less than ever. But why?

While educational systems proclaim they value impact, the protocols they adhere to are designed to produce less of it.

Institutional forces provide some answers. Business schools build career paths for faculty who publish in a small number of so-called A-list journals that tend to reward methodological refinements of established questions over the messier work of asking new ones. Scholars who spend a year designing clever instruments for existing models often receive institutional rewards.

By contrast, scholars who spend three years building relationships with federal agencies, city governments, or community organizations to study difficult real-world problems may face limited career advancement, fewer institutional rewards, and little recognition. As management professor Steven Kerr warned several decades ago, we have built a system that rewards A while hoping for B.

Cultural forces shed more light. Disciplinary identities have grown narrower. Faculty attend conferences within sub-sub-fields. We cite within ever-tighter networks. One senior scholar in our AOM survey described management academics as “angels dancing on a pinhead.” From within our specialized fields, we rarely are willing to undertake the interdisciplinary research most likely to address what governments and the United Nations call “wicked problems,” such as climate change, inequality, migration, AI governance, and pandemic preparedness.

The pressures fall hardest on early-career researchers. Young faculty facing tenure clocks have every incentive to choose questions that sit comfortably inside existing literatures, methods that reviewers in single sub-fields will recognize, and journals whose acceptance criteria they can predict. Even when scholars want to pursue research that explores community partnerships or regulatory engagements, they know such lines of inquiry make for poor career bets. Consequently, while educational systems proclaim they value impact, the protocols they adhere to are designed to produce less of it.

Finally, the design failures of publishing outlets must take some of the blame. These outlets are not structured to react quickly to pressing global issues. From 2015 onward, the World Health Organization and the U.S. National Institutes of Health repeatedly named pandemics as one of the gravest threats to human life and the global economy. However, from 2015 through the end of 2020—six years that included COVID-19’s arrival—only about seven articles in the Financial Times’ list of 50 top business journals dealt even peripherally with the civilizational consequences of pandemics.

What Counts as Impact

The good news is that the educational community is changing how it views research. Today, as the U.K.’s Research Excellence Framework assesses the value of a university’s research, it bases a quarter of its evaluation on demonstrated impact beyond academia. The U.S. National Science Foundation requires every grant proposal to articulate broader impacts, and weak impact statements can sink otherwise strong proposals.

In addition, the Responsible Research in Business and Management network, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, and the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics together have pushed thousands of institutions to reconsider how they evaluate scholarly contributions.

AACSB has assumed a central position in this shift. Its standards have long distinguished between research outputs (what we count) and outcomes (what our research achieves). Through its Global Research Impact Task Force, a multistakeholder initiative launched in partnership with nine scholarly societies, AACSB is developing a framework to expand definitions of impact beyond traditional metrics and identify principles for measuring meaningful theoretical and empirical contributions. The framework also helps schools design incentives that reward evidence-based impact across academia, industry, policy, and society.

A simple insight emerges from all these efforts: Impactful research transcends perfunctory “implications for practice” paragraphs. Yet, we still need to communicate our findings.

Communicating What We Find

Even rigorous, interdisciplinary, and insightful research will not reach external audiences if scholars treat publications as conversational ends rather than beginnings. The law of triviality, which describes the disproportionate emphasis social science gives to marginal concerns, constitutes a deeper problem. Even when what we publish is technically sophisticated and methodologically defensible, too much of it has become invisible outside narrow specialist communities.

Closing that gap involves treating dissemination as integral to scholarship. This means we must customize messages for different audiences; translate findings for nonspecialists; and recognize that media mentions, op-eds, and video summaries play their own roles in making our work visible.

Empirical research that I have conducted with colleagues about measuring what matters proposes that faculty adopt a Commons Communication Model that includes committing to five interlocking actions:

• Seeking visibility in physical and digital spaces where publics already gather.
• Emphasizing accessibility, or translating findings without dumbing down content.
• Focusing on relevance by designing research with end users in mind.
• Engaging in reciprocity that treats communication as a series of two-way conversations, with mechanisms that enable feedback and co-learning.
• Adopting reform that addresses institutional incentives such as tenure criteria, training, and interdisciplinary infrastructures.

When our vocabularies expand to include external stakeholders, the reach of our ideas expands with them, sometimes resulting in the co-creation of wicked knowledge.

Four Changes Within Reach

The business education community can enhance the impact of scholarly research by taking four practical steps:

Broadening what counts in promotion and tenure. Citation counts and journal hierarchies do capture peer recognition. But our current evaluation systems either ignore or penalize other results that also signal influence: policy citations, regulatory adoption, downloads from practitioner sites, uptakes in classrooms, mentions in serious journalism, and contributions to standards-setting bodies.

Rewarding the long, unglamorous work of building relationships. The most impactful research I have seen—whether on industrial subsidies, supply chains, climate adaptation, or financial inclusion—has emerged from sustained partnerships with people outside the academy. Those partnerships take years to build and rarely fit neatly into tenure clocks. Models from the medical sciences, including joint appointments and clinician-scientist tracks, may merit some consideration.

Making our research findable and readable. Much business scholarship sits behind paywalls that practitioners and policymakers cannot or will not climb, or it is published in journals whose prose assumes audiences of fellow specialists. Most regulators and trade officials I have worked with have never opened a top business journal, and they never will. If we want our work to reach the public, we should write research that others can understand and publish it in outlets that others will read.

Treating teaching as a research-impact channel. Our graduates carry what we say about leadership, finance, ethics, and strategy into the organizations where they work. Yet research and teaching too often run as parallel tracks rather than reinforcing systems. Schools see a real spillover of knowledge when they build deliberate bridges between teaching and research through case studies, active research projects, and doctoral training for practitioners.

Why Open Access Matters

Business schools also can ensure that their faculty research reaches a wider audience by embracing open access. While not all disciplines enjoy the same advantages, and self-selection does pose problems, the overall trend appears clear: More people outside the academy seem to read, use, and build on open-access research and open science.

Research on the academic, economic, and societal impacts of open access finds that articles published in such outlets are cited more frequently and disseminated more widely among nonacademic readers. Similarly, a 2001 analysis of computer science papers in Nature shows open-access articles are cited at more than twice the rate of paywalled equivalents.

If business and management research aspires to gain global readership and attract globally diverse pipelines of contributors, open access should become part of the design.

Frontiers Policy Labs recently analyzed 53 papers that studied whether open access research enjoyed a citation advantage over traditional, paywalled papers. According to the analysis, 82 percent of empirical studies published between 2016 and 2021 confirmed the advantage. That’s a significant increase over the previous decade, in which 66 percent of studies on the topic gave the advantage to open access research.

Equally important for our field: Open access disproportionately benefits researchers and readers in lower-resourced regions, whose institutional subscription budgets cannot keep up with major commercial publishers. If business and management research aspires to gain global readership and attract globally diverse pipelines of contributors, open access should become part of the design.

A New Venue for the Next Conversation

In that spirit, I will serve as inaugural editor-in-chief of Business & Management (BAM), a new global, peer-reviewed Gold Open Access journal launching with Sage. Its goal will be to expand the reach and relevance of traditional research. Rather than requiring scholarship to fit within narrow disciplinary lanes, the journal will evaluate submissions across all functional areas of business on rigor and validity. BAM will organize research around four kinds of impact—interdisciplinary, professional and policy, societal and sustainable, and teaching and learning.

Three of the publication’s primary goals are to achieve reciprocity, relevance, and accessibility. It will aim for reciprocity by publishing collections of articles that converse across themes rather than issues, and it will put in place mechanisms that encourage feedback and co-learning. To ensure relevance, BAM is asking authors to articulate from the outset who they wish to reach through their research. And to promote accessibility, the journal is removing the paywall that otherwise quietly decides readership.

One journal cannot solve the structural problems I have described above, but the venues we publish in do shape the questions we feel free to raise. An old philosophical puzzle asks: If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Business scholarship has been falling, prolifically, in forests the rest of the world rarely visits. BAM aims not to fell fewer trees but to plant more where people walk and talk.

In many respects, BAM is designed to operationalize principles that AACSB and the broader impact movement now seek to advance: wider accessibility, global inclusiveness, engagement beyond academia, and research that meaningfully informs practice, policy, and learning.

If business schools hope to sustain public trust and demonstrate enduring value, our research must travel further than our journal shelves to inform classrooms, organizations, governments, communities, and global conversations. That larger aspiration shapes Business & Management—and, increasingly, business education’s future direction.

For more information about BAM or to submit articles, visit the journal’s website or contact the publication directly.