Bridging the Research-Practice Game

As a management faculty, one thing that I find both interesting and sad is the research-practice gap. The gap is interesting because management is supposed to be an applied field; hence, the gap between research and practice should be negligible. However, I have not found many executives poring over academic journals in management. I find the gap sad because the research-practice gap should not be there in an applied field. Also, as management institutions fund themselves primarily from the money collected from current or future practitioners and faculty are increasingly spending more time on research, the research-practice gap seems unconscionable.

When I mention the research-practice gap, I am not talking about the immediate applications of the study in a real-life setting. I am talking about the ability of the researchers to explain the value of the research for executives. If the value is clear, the practical barriers to applications can be dealt with. But in many cases, the researcher is unable to articulate clearly the value of the research to practitioners making the whole exercise dubious. This happens despite the presence of a mandatory section in most articles on practical applications.

The presence of a phenomenon leads to questions about its causes. Hence, if I feel that quite a few researchers are unable to explain their research then the question arises: Why does it happen? I can identify two possible reasons for the same. The first reason is that much research is fad-driven rather than phenomenon-driven. The second reason is that researchers are looking for a gap in literature rather than looking for a gap in our understanding of reality.

The term phenomenon traces its roots to the venerable Immanuel Kant and broadly refers to an observable event. So phenomenon-driven research means that the researcher observes some phenomenon, or more accurately a class of related phenomena that can be clubbed together, and then tries to find an explanation for the same. Phenomena-driven research requires reasonably close acquaintance with the phenomenon under study to describe it in concrete terms. For example, the phenomenon of "knowledge hoarding" needs to be explained in terms of the examples of real-life behaviors of people who hoard knowledge. With research training increasingly divorced from the lived experience of the workforce, phenomenon-driven research becomes more difficult and is increasingly replaced by fad-driven research where people research a supposed phenomenon because others are more likely to research it and journals are more likely to publish it.

The second problem that I see in the current research scenario is the focus on gaps in the literature. This focus assumes that the literature is a good reflection of the actual social reality of management and hence gaps in literature reflect actual gaps in understanding of the actual social reality. This approach would have a high probability of being correct if the first objection did not hold. However, because of fad-driven research, two problems happen in management research. Firstly, only some areas of the underlying social reality are covered and others are obscured. Secondly, fad-driven research leads to conceptual ambiguities as people conflate concepts and use incompatible definitions to publish research on fads. This makes knowledge accumulation difficult. As the current literature becomes less coherent and consistent, the identification of gaps becomes subjective and ambiguous. A better approach in my opinion would be a focus on those aspects of the domain where our understanding is less clear.

In conclusion, I believe that management research would become more practical if doctoral education for management scholars focused more on philosophy and the identification of actual problems. Understanding the philosophical roots of research will enable future researchers to couch their research agenda in the language of phenomena and possible causes. Interaction with practitioners would ensure that research is tackling issues of real interest.