Pressure for Relevancy at Top-Tier Business Schools

After decades of attempts to bring scientific rigor to the business school community, market forces are pressuring these institutions to produce research that is relevant as well as scientifically rigorous. At least three factors are responsible for this shift: the ongoing pursuit of revenues, the arrival of media rankings, and the emergence of student as customer. This essay revisits these pressures, which have shown no sign of abating since they were first studied in the late 1990s. Meeting the dual demands of rigor and relevancy is difficult, and faculty who can do so are rare. One solution is to publish performance research that attempts to address both sets of demands. Such research is controversial, however, and its viability is open to debate.