The Impactful Academic: Relational Management Education as an Intervention for Impact

Abstract

We widen the scope of the impact debate by extending Boyer's theorization of scholarship through Denyer, Tranfield and van Aken's CIMO framework to propose relational management education as an intervention that creates the generative mechanism of co‐production and subsequent impact. In so doing, we propose a new conceptualization of academic impact that occurs through teaching and is situated within a community of inquirers. We offer a critique of current thinking, dominated by the idea that the research paper is the most appropriate unit of analysis by which to measure the excellence and impact of research. We examine the notion of the gap between academics and practitioners and argue that the impact agenda should be widened to include a consideration of how management academics can become impactful through their teaching of practitioners, broadly defined to include the whole range of learners associated with business schools. We propose that for management research to have the potential to change these practitioners, an engagement with knowledge is needed, and that this involves more than translation but the creation of new ideas. Such impact can be brought about by a disruption of, and challenge to, thinking engendered by an approach to management education that we term relational.

Introducing Lean Six Sigma to a German municipality: an action research report

“…The collaboration characteristics of the presented case support several recommended factors from the British Journal of Management's special issue "Impact and Management Research" from 2017 (MacIntosh et al, 2017). According to the authors, the relationship between research and praxis as well as between students and teachers should be strengthened to achieve a greater impact of management research upon the economy (Anderson et al, 2017;Cunliffe and Scaratti, 2017). The perennial cooperation between university and municipality ("longitudinal immersion") and furthermore the continuous coaching of the student project leaders enables an "extensive engaged scholarship" as proposed by Wells and Nieuwenhuis (2017).…”

Problem- and inquiry-based learning in alternative contexts: Using museums in management education

“…They use frameworks and methods that are not pertinent in the museum. In turn, the practitioners provide information, question the students' ideas, and may be inspired to implement novel ideas from external sources (Alves, Marques, Saur, & Marques, 2007;Anderson, Ellwood, & Coleman, 2017).…”

“…The mission of the university postulates that courses and programmes include the transfer and application of skills and knowledge on science content and processes. The university is also involved in a dense network of partnerships with non-university research institutes in its neighbourhood, bearing the chance to embed teaching approaches in various contexts and stimulate interventions for impact (Anderson et al, 2017). Among the partner organisations is a cultural-historical museum, which is one of eight research museums funded by the Leibniz Association.…”

Management Education in Turbulent Times

“…In a recent Special Issue on 'Impact and Management Research' in the British Journal of Management, MacIntosh et al (2017) argue that the field of management would make serious gains by seeking to explore and exploit the integrated nature of education, practice, research and scholarship, and that our field has much to learn from other disciplines such as art, education and nursing where practice, research and scholarship are more overtly interwoven. In the same SI, (Anderson, Ellwood and Coleman 2017) question the way the 'gap' between researchers and practitioners is understood and show how a more equal relationship (Bartunek and Rynes 2014) can be created through 'relational management education'. Their approach builds a community of inquirers by reassembling the various actors and activities in and associated with business schools: publication, researcher-educators, teachers of full-and part-time students, future and current practitioners, and executive educationalists and consultancies.…”