Measuring Societal Impact in Business & Management Research: From Challenges to Change
This Sage Business White Paper focusses on issues relating to existing bibliometrics and institutional reward structures at play within business schools. We aim to move the dial towards ways in which societal impact could become central to the assessment of business and management research.
This paper follows lively discussion, encouraging feedback and fertile follow-up questions from a recent webinar of the same title featuring some of the above names. This webinar took place within the context of the Financial Times’ (FT) “slow hackathon” and a recent contribution to the SAGE-published Business & Society journal regarding the FT’s business school rankings.
The White Paper also follows a recent SAGE-sponsored AACSB research report, ‘Research That Matters: An Action Plan for Creating Business School Research That Positively Impacts Society’ but focuses more specifically on the challenges relating to how we measure societal impact within business research and what a more responsible research environment might look like within the business school ecosystem. The White Paper includes contributions by two SAGE journal editors, Renate Meyer of Organization Studies, and Maura Scott of Journal of Public Policy & Marketing; a sobering snapshot of research social metrics within business schools compared to other areas of the university by Altmetric; and, some suggestions for post-pandemic business and management research directions in relation to health and well-being from Sir Cary Cooper.
By Usha C. V. Haley of Wichita State University and Andrew Jack of the Financial Times.
With contributions from:
Altmetric, a Digital Science company, Sir Cary Cooper, Alliance Manchester Business School, Renate Meyer, WU Vienna / Copenhagen Business School, and Maura Scott, Florida State University.