Why is Academia Sometimes Detached from Firms’ Problems? The Unattractiveness of Research on Organizational Decline

Fernando Antônio Ribeiro Serra,Isabel Cristina Scafuto,Manuel Portugal Ferreira

doi:10.1590/1807-7692bar2020200005

Fernando Antônio Ribeiro Serra, Isabel Cristina Scafuto + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1590/1807-7692bar2020200005

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Abstract

ABSTRACT We examined how scholars decide what they study, scrutinizing researchers’ problem choice. We qualitatively analyzed a survey conducted by e-mail with 40 top management scholars on organizational decline in top-ranked journals. This topic appears to be neglected despite the real life evidence that the performance of firms is declining at an increasingly rapid pace. We conducted a content analysis of motivation to undertake, remain with, or abandon research. We found explanations for what researchers’ study specifically related to concerns over tenure and promotion, difficulty in conducting research, and the general unattractiveness of ‘negative’ themes that lead scholars to avoid a research topic. We contribute to studies on problem choice in management research by explaining why relevant economic and societal research agendas are under-researched. Our findings indicate that motivation not to undertake is related to extrinsic factors. Motivations to remain are usually intrinsic. However, motivations to abandon may be intrinsic, in order to move on to another research project, or extrinsic, depending on the situation. It also serves as a warning that scholars may be paying excessive attention to mainstream theoretical approaches and topics, inhibiting the emergence of new ideas and detracting attention from phenomena that are important for teaching.

Highlights

If Sir Isaac Newton had to publish a number of articles in top ranked journals to ensure tenure, would he have chosen dynamics, optics, and mathematics for his groundbreaking contributions, or would he have pursued a more mainstream topic of the day? Would he have chosen a single topic on which to build his reputation? his genius might have led to groundbreaking discoveries, his choices of what to research had a profound impact on human development
Through an iterative process of analyzing the responses and the literature, we proposed an emergent process model of problem choice
An important practical contribution of our work is that external factors can be managed, and extrinsic motivation may support intrinsic motivation

Summary

Introduction

If Sir Isaac Newton had to publish a number of articles in top ranked journals to ensure tenure, would he have chosen dynamics (or Newtonian physics), optics, and mathematics for his groundbreaking contributions, or would he have pursued a more mainstream topic of the day? Would he have chosen a single topic on which to build his reputation? his genius might have led to groundbreaking discoveries, his choices of what to research had a profound impact on human development. If Sir Isaac Newton had to publish a number of articles in top ranked journals to ensure tenure, would he have chosen dynamics (or Newtonian physics), optics, and mathematics for his groundbreaking contributions, or would he have pursued a more mainstream topic of the day? We are driven by different motivations to conduct research and publish. One motivation is the pressure to publish, often for tenure or to guarantee the performance metrics imposed by the department or university (Davis, 2015). Perhaps primarily, publishing in well-ranked journals increases our reputation as scholars and aids career advancement (Bedeian, 2004; Davis, 2014). It is likely that these motivations and barriers to publish drive, albeit partially, how researchers select their research problems or what to study. In the literature on the sociology of science, this is known as ‘problem choice’ (Neff, 2014)

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