A More Relevant Approach to Relevance in Management Studies: An Essay on Performativity

In this essay, we criticize how the performativity thesis, as described and exemplified in Do Economists Make Markets, has focused primarily on the field of economics generally and business school–based financial economics consequently. By doing so the performativity literature has ignored whether, when, and how financial economics outperforms, or might be outperformed by, other business school sciences, such as management. In other words, just as a firm’s economic performance depends on its capacity to outperform its competitors, we suggest that the performativity of a science, like financial economics, also results from its capacity to outperform other sciences, like management.