Irrelevance, Intransigence, and Business Professors

T he professor quoted above was explaining his lack of interest in relevant research on real-world business problems. Not three months later, the relevance of business education to the business world was the concern of a brouhaha that erupted at the Yale School of Organization and Management. Its new dean had decided to dismiss six untenured faculty members who taught organizational behavior, to eliminate the doctoral program in that area, and to transfer valued courses in production management and data analysis to a nonbusiness curriculum. A fire storm of criticism arose over what many saw as the destruction of the school's unique and useful emphasis on interpersonal skills in business.2 These are just recent examples of the continuing criticism leveled at collegiate business education and research. Many consider business scholarship irrelevant and deliberately recondite; books and articles complain that business executives and business professors have little in common and communicate infrequently. Although authors have proposed inventive schemes to unite these estranged parties,3 little evidence of reconciliation exists. In fact, cooperation between the two groups has been so unusual that their collaboration at Duke University made national newspaper headlines.4 The situation begs a question: If the rift between top managers and business professors is so wide, and if prominent critics have proposed ideas for solving the problem, why has so little change occurred? Strangely, even some academic writers seem oblivious to the query. In one of the most widely read articles on the subject, J. N. Behrman and R. 1. Levin5 complained that business schools simply were not doing their jobs. The authors suggested that schools change their pedagogical goals, implement new organizational and reward systems for business schools, and appoint deans capable of exerting extraordinary leadership. Scant attention was paid to the fact that there just are not enough extraordinary leaders to go around and that existing goals and systems remain in place because they work for many academicians. The lack of attention to the sources of academic intransigence turns potentially good ideas into emotional rhetoric that produces little action. Our purpose in this article is to explain the obscure but powerful roots of such intransigence, to suggest that the rift between managers and academicians will continue, and to make inferences about the future consequences of this rift.