Management Research in the UK: A Personal View

Abstract

Thomas Jefferson once reflected that ‘the past isprologue’, so to understand the current state andfuture development of management research inthe UK we have to briefly explore its origins. Theacademic field of management in UK highereducation has a very recent history, in contrastwith many other academic disciplines. Indeed, thefirst academic presence of management in the UKwas only in l917, at the seat of the industrialrevolution, Manchester. The Manchester Me-chanics Institution established the Department ofIndustrial Administration, whose role was speci-fically to train engineers and scientists for poten-tial future managerial roles, with little if anyresearch infrastructure or strategy. This InstitutemetamorphosedintotheUniversityofManchesterInstitute of Science and Technology in 1966 (as anautonomous body but also as a Faculty of theUniversity of Manchester), at around the sametime as the Foundation of Management Educa-tion was established to create two UK centres ofexcellence in management education, the LondonBusiness School and the Manchester BusinessSchool – both created through private sectorfunding in 1964. From 1964 onwards, the numberand range of academic development in themanagement sciences escalated to the point thatby the 2009 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)there were over 100 business and managementschools in higher education institutes, producingthousands of undergraduates, MBAs and PhDs.The field went through what Preston and Post(1974) described as the three stages of managerialdevelopment, which they referred to as the ‘threemanagerial revolutions’. The first managerialrevolution was the appearance of managementitself as a specialized function within hierarchicalorganizations. The second revolution, ‘professio-nalization’, was encouraged by the growth inindustrial organizations and the complexity ofmanagerial tasks. The third, ‘participation’, was‘the inclusion of persons and groups involved andconcerned with the diverse outcomes of manage-rial activity as participants in the managerialprocess’. It is this third revolution that led to theimportance of research, particularly in system-atically evaluating what worked and what did notwork in this managerial process.There has been a longer history of research in alimited number of subjects allied and/or integralto management, such as economics, finance,occupational psychology, operational researchand the like, but as new functional areas ofinterest emerged in management (i.e. marketing,human resource management), research wasgiven a new impetus, stimulating interdisciplinarywork between disciplines and functions withinmanagement and between the managementsciences and other social science disciplines. Butthe real sea change occurred with the advent ofthe first RAE in the 1980s. This process ofrewarding universities for research output di-rectly had the effect of encouraging universities torecruit and develop their researchers, and in thenaturally competitive world of business schools ithad an even more profound impact of galvaniz-ing researchers to publish their work in the bestinternational journals. There were not only theindividual incentives in terms of career advance-ment through their research output, but also byenhancing their research portfolio it allowedthem to be more attractive to higher ratedBritish Journal of Management, Vol. 22, 343–346 (2011)DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00768.x