The poor quality of academic research in management schools is the outcome of a similar decline within the university system. The current economic crisis underscores the disconnect between such research and corporate realities.
In an assessment of research capabilities in business schools in India, two professors from the London Business School, Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam, found poor representation of Indian business schools in the 40 peer-reviewed journals that the Financial Times uses to rank research in MBA schools worldwide.
Covering two decades to 2009, the study shows just a handful of faculty from some IIMs and IITs having contributed papers to such journals. The authors suggest that while case papers are valuable as pedagogic tools they do not provide “cutting edge knowledge”
ACADEMIC RIGOUR
This knowledge, according to them, comes from academic research that is “double-blind peer reviewed (that is, the authors and reviewer do not know each other's identities)” with “high standards of proof”. The emphasis is on “rigour” as against practitioner-oriented research with immediate ‘relevance' and lower standards of proof.
Kumar and Puranam make a case for academic management research as the hallmark of superior management schools. They vouch for theoretical practice, dismissing the popular notion that it is of scant applicability to “real life”. They offer three reasons why such research constitutes the “backbone” that “supports the pedagogical mission”. The first is the introduction into the real world of concepts such as ‘core competence' that strategists and financiers cannot do without today; alternatively, such scholarship debunks the corporate world's “best practices”, for instance, by showing poor returns for investors from acquisitions. The second is the value it contributes to teaching consulting and “writing for practitioners”. And the third, the value it adds to the institution's efforts at attracting the best faculty.
RESEARCH AND REALITY
All this sounds perfectly reasonable on first consideration. Separate its constituents and the case isn't so convincing. The authors pose advantages of research for three target groups: The corporate world itself, the faculty that broadens its knowledge frontiers (and, of course, fattens its purse through consulting) and the student as the beneficiaries of enhanced pedagogy.
Anyone remotely acquainted with the current economic crisis would know how little management research (and, in the bargain, its practitioner) influences the world of financiers and corporate strategists.
Ramalinga Raju's Satyam's board of directors had leading management professors from Ivy League business schools: Mangala Srinivasan from University of California, Berkeley, Krishna Palepu from Harvard Business School, not to forget R. Ramamohan Rao, dean of Indian School of Business; none of them could prevent the promoter from hijacking the blue-chip IT company. And, if further proof were needed of the value of ‘rigorous' or ‘relevant' research on real practices, one need only remember Enron, QualComm and other frauds by American firms, both on Main Street and Wall Street over the last two decades. Is it any wonder, then, that the pioneer of modern management research, Peter Drucker, who was more a philosopher than a post-Tom Peters type management pundit, wryly observed that the appendage “guru” was popular only because “charlatan” was too long to fit in a headline.
The events of corporate malfeasance in the latter half of the 20{+t}{+h} century and in these times, not just in America but almost all over the world, spell the limits of the utility of management research as expressed so breathlessly by the two authors.
More ominously, the capacity of big corporations to define rules and set standards of corporate behaviour that are often at odds with public interest, demonstrates their underlying and unstated hegemony over business schools too.
Given the interface between management-school research and corporate practice “in real life”, the best that business schools can do is to get jobs for students who pay through their nose for the courses.
Viewed against the primary aim of imparting a value-loaded degree, the authors' claim for research and publications by faculty members has merit. Double peer-reviewed publications on issues relating to management theory and practice would improve the quality of the pedagogy and its recipients.
When Kumar and Puranam find the state of research in Indian B-schools scanty at best, they expose the absence of an essential ingredient in most business schools. At the very least, a faculty that engages in research beyond the case study sends its students into the world with the valuable gifts of abstraction and inquiry.
DRIVEN BY ONE AGENDA
What explains this poor representation of Indian B-schools in the corpus of global management theoretical practice? The more obvious answer is that management schools are driven by one agenda only — placements.
Indian firms do not tire of complaining about the shortage of managerial talent. As if in answer to this oft-stated gap between demand and supply, a rash of management schools has spread, some in the most unlikely places, including regions with few industries such as the North-Eastern States that want their own IIMs. To date, there are some 1,600 management schools and while there is no way of finding out if all their graduates get jobs, the lure of a business school binds both the promoter and the student. Landowners turned politicians turn again into founders of business schools, all with one aim: Increasing student enrolment.
B-schools in India are meant to be degree shops; in most rankings and in the popular imagination, “placements” determine quality. As degree shops, they are no different from the general university that has, over the decades, shed its research faculties to become an assembly-line producer of degrees.
The poor quality of academic research in B-schools is the outcome of a general and systemic decline of research within the university system.
Keywords: MBA schools, B-schools, IIMs and IITs, Education
Comments:
The business schools fail to teach the corporate governance.
I think that MBA is not a waste of money if you are serious in wanting to learn more. I see many colleagues of mine who went to some of the best business schools and pay their professors so that they can pass the course. I have been a strong advocate of higher learning but when I found out about this and the scandals that former alumni of these schools caused, it is very disheartening. However, not all of the people who took up MBA’s ended up as bad apples, some help shaped the industry and have become pioneers on their own industry. I hope that the future management grads would not become liability.
I read the article by Mr.Ashoak Upadhyay yesterday with great interest.
The article clearly indicates that there is need for good quality research.I have over 30 years of industry and consulting experience and now over two years of experience in teaching PGDM students in a premier b-school.And therefore, I feel I must express my views on the areas touched upon in the article and few other related issues in management education in India today.
I agree with the author that placement is driving B-schools today. That is not a bad thing if it is high quality placement for bright students well-educated in management theory with a lot of practical exposure through Summer Internship Project, Winter Project, Industry Visits, Industry - Interaction in class and beyond the classroom - all this to equip management graduates to have the knowledge and abilty to take on the challenges of the corporate world head-on.
The other aspect is to very clearly communicate to management students that in management there is past to guide us but no case study or management book is sufficiaent to deal with the real-life business situations that they will face in future. They need creative and innovative thinking to handle those situations. Simulations, introduced only in a select few institutes, can play a vital role in management education to help prepare students here.
In my experience as an expert to select management graduates for a few campus placements, I realised that very few students read a business newspaper daily, study business magazines or journals , watch business channels and refer to management websites regularly to keep themselves updated. It is the responsibility of the teachers to inculcate this habit for the overall development of a budding manager.
On the teaching front, most students ask for a copy of the PPT. A PPT can not be as detailed as a book and can not capture all that is discussed through cases and examples in a class of 75-90 minutes.
It is a combination of pre-study, PPT, notes and refering relevant materisl from recommended readings that delivers a comprehensive package of knowledge. Most of the teachers hand over PPTs because the fear of lower feedback points from students, so critical in their own appraisal.
Now about the quality of teachers.I have seen several articles mentioning dearth of good teachers in B-schools. The solution is not just to produce more PhDs but to nurture good quality PhDs (in the long term) in addition to attracting top professionals from industry
to management education (in the short term).
The good quality PhDs should also be given sabbaticals at regular intervals to go and work in the industry and come back to use their experience in management teaching. IIMs and AICTE should make their rules such that attracting good professionals at good salary is made possible for the management institutes with a vision.
(Pure university outlook will not work here, which is simply to attain a PG degree, get PhD, join as a lecturer and move up the ladder to become a professor without any real-life industry experience. This is of not much use and in many cases is detrimental to good management education.)
A very good salary ( close to if not comparable) to professors in management institutes is very important to elevate the stature of a management professor from mearly a low-paid teacher to a person delivering high-value education in the area of management. Today, in the abscence of good salary people term it as 'teaching is my passion and I am not doing it for money!' While this may be true for a few self-actualised professors, the reality is most of the professors try to make money from consulting and MDPs.This has become a legitimate way to earn good money for some professors in IIMs and their focus gets diverted from basic teaching in management classes. ( Bhargava Committee has very clearly pointed this out). What is needed is a good mix of teaching, consulting and MDP but not to manage a decent living through these activities at the expense of good value-added classroom delivery. We keep talking that if you pay peanuts, you will get monkeys but accept it as a matter of fact in the salary of management professors.This fact, I think, also lowers the prestige of a professor, so important for the image of a good B-school,among their industry colleagues.
Now let me come to the quality of research articles appearing in Various journals.This is also driven by quantity and not quality. All faculty members want to publish research papers and go to an academic conference to present it so that it can add to their CV as 'number of papers published'. Theoretically it is a good idea but in practice a majority of the research papers written are of very low quality. These get published as there are a lot of journals who also need content. In fact all this happens because there are points assigned to faculty for such activities and in most of the cases quality is not the consideration at all.
Let us now come to peer reviewed journals in management.Every B-school publishes a journal. Some of them are peer-reviewed too. All of them need regular flow of articles. These ,in some cases, are quality-checked but in majority of the cases are accepted even with lower standards.And the professor gets the credit for numbers of articles published and not for quality of articles.
This is just not the problem in India. It also happens in other countries. A few good B-schools have come up with an approved list of journals with categorization as A, B and C and assign different points for papers appearing in different grade of journals.There is also need to encourage other kind of high quality writing management but the focus of B-schools remains only on research articles as that is what helps in getting better score on various rankings.
Management institutes must produce research that can be used by industry easily. Therefore, a practitioner-oriented journal is equally important.That is why , after several decades, IIMs have decided to launch a journal on the lines of Harvard Business Review.The initial reports that I have read indicated that the idea is good but execution needs a lot to make it a success.
Another aspect that management academicians oftern ignore is that management education has grown and has become widely accptable because the industry needs good managers and in good numbers.In the past 40-50 years MBAs have performed well in the industry and industry now recognises that an employee with a good management degree is a valuable asset.
What I think is needed is an absolutely new way of thinking in management education at all levels- in teaching, in research, in industry-interface and in other areas of activities to help develop budding managers who are welcomed in an organization as future leaders and not liabilities.
And this new thinking can come if management education is looked at differently than other disciplines in higher education such as arts, science and engineering!
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Prriya Raj
Management Cartoonist, Brand Management and IMC Expert
and Professor of Marketing at a leading B-School
If one sows a neem tree, one cannot expect mangos out of it. Why are B-Schools necessary? Just to earn more money? Earning more money is good, but to earn more by any means is a social crime! Since the days of British Raj, Indian kids are taught only for earning more wages, the sole objective of tertiary education. Our policies look for number and not for quality, we separate education from real life world, no relationships amongst industry, agriculture, communiity, national intersts, etc., isolating so called academics within the four walls. In the age of ICT, students need to be more independent in their studies, faculty be loaded half of the present approved (paper) load, and faculty must go for counselling, consulatncy and research. In India, academic institutes, industry world and community rarely work as one unit. The secret of developed countries is the interdependency of these units, one cannot survive without the others. It is better to speak less about research (mostly academic for paper degree)in India. Neither industrty nor universities/ institutes are reserach focussed. Most of the faculty having PhDs are dead, get PhD, get higher pay and forget about the R & D work. In fact, PhD is just a certification that so and so is now trained (mentally)to carry out fruitful research needed by community and so and so henceforth continue to carry it (R & D) out in the areas of market demand. If one assesses our professors in this light, believe in me more than 95% professors will turn to be redundant. So is the fate of MBA too! It is the high time that recruit only those faculty who are live in research for the posts of Associate Professor and above. I do not think they are paid very low. In reality, if one works out houlry wages, Collecters are paid 4 times and Professors are paid 3 time of the private sector. Produce research or persish!
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