Shyam Sunder

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Whose Perspective Does Management School Research Take?

Management schools and departments spend a significant part of their resources on research conducted by their faculty and doctoral students. Published research is an important, sometimes dominant, criterion for evaluation of faculty for promotion and tenure. Organizations whose management is the subject of study in business schools are social entities in which many people participate for their own respective motives. In management research, the attention paid to the interests and perspectives of various classes of participants varies considerably. Shareholders and managers appear to get the lions share of this attention, with the interests of other employees, customers, vendors, government and the community receiving less attention in research literature.

There could be many reasons for this variation. It is possible that the challenges of better management of (privately owned) organizations lie in balancing the interests of shareholders and managers--the well-known agency problem--and the attention paid to this perspective in management literature is simply a reflection of the challenge.

This is a good possibility, but it does not help us understand the scant attention to the interests of government in collecting taxes, interest of the community in preserving its clean water and air, interest of customers in not getting mislead by products and advertising, etc. There is much research to learn the laws of consumer behavior, for example, so companies can sell more of what they make, but relatively little on seller behavior so consumers can buy only what is best for them. Similar statements could be made about other aspects of management school research such as accounting, finance, and organizational behavior. Perspective of managers and shareholders seem to have acquired a dominant share of attention in management research considered as a whole.

Whether management schools serve the society better with the dominance of this perspective is an open question which deserves additional debate and engagement in universities.