Within a couple of weeks of each other, two decisions have been made that will shape business research and education for years to come – but for very different reasons. One decision is a bold, risky decision that is global in reach and open in outlook; the other is small-minded and narrow, which nevertheless sends a strong message to those it will impact.
The first decision has been taken by the Academy of Management, which in a striking move has chosen not only to shift next year’s planned annual conference from Seattle to Vienna, but wholly move out of its traditional US home for the next few years. While it cites the success of its Copenhagen event in 2025 and increasing demand from non-US countries, it is hard to believe that the current pressure exerted on higher education institutions and their academics in the US by the current administration has not played some part in this decision.
Plus ça change
The second decision is much smaller in scope, but no less influential. In a review of the 50 journals it uses to measure the quality of business schools and their research output – the so-called ‘FT50’ – the Financial Times recently announced some changes. Just three, to be exact. Gone are Human Relations, Journal of Business Ethics, and Organization Studies, and in their place come Academy of Management Annals, American Sociological Review, and Psychological Science. The FT said the former three journals were removed due to being “identified as less influential,” while the new additions are more “relevant.”
Having worked with journal rankings and conducted research on them for many years, the FT’s decision to make such minimal changes is quite frankly pathetic. Research has shown that far from being less influential, when it comes to engagement with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Journal of Business Ethics, for instance, was one of the few FT50 journals to make any impact at all, while the other two journals put people and organizations at the heart of their research. In a recent co-authored paper, we saw that after exhibiting very poor performance across the board when it came to SDGs, the FT50 journals were improving; however, they still lagged behind other journals, which many may regard as inferior as they do not occupy such lists as the FT50, but nevertheless actually publish research relevant to the world in which business is being conducted today.
Wider criticism
The changes made by the FT, led by its Global Education Editor Andrew Jack, have also been challenged in other quarters. The Times Higher ran an op-ed by Australian business school academics Carl Rhodes and Alison Pullen which highlighted the “circularity” of the rankings and the damaging elitism it fostered. Concluding their piece, the authors said: “A business school that cannot defend the social purpose of the knowledge it produces ceases to function as a public institution and becomes little more than an instrument for the reproduction of academic and economic power.”
They added: “Rankings that equate excellence with conformity must be resisted.”
In its Global Focus magazine, European-based business school accreditation body EFMD recently published an article about the failure of rankings in measuring what was valuable in business education, citing the status quo as “an elaborate system that measures everything except what matters.”
It is not new for there to be widespread condemnation of journal rankings, nor should we be surprised when such rankings change little in the face of such criticism. However, in a time of such geopolitical, environmental, and societal upheaval, to suggest that only the best business schools ignore the very research that seeks to understand these changes is simply absurd, and regresses business education rather than progresses it.
