When an A Is NOT an A in Academic Research, or How A-Journal List Metrics Inhibit Exploratory Behaviour in Academia

Abstract

On account of the leverage that the Academy of Management (AOM) has, via its positioning in the highest tiers of the A-journal lists currently used to adjudicate promotions and tenure evaluations, it is urgent to assess the premises and assumptions upon which the so-called pluralist model of scholarly impact, advocated by academics with executive responsibilities in the AOM, is built. Our findings are that the pluralist model is liable to three crucial problems: ecological bias, specific knowledge and pre-emptive costs. Consistent with extant performance evaluation scholarship, promotions and tenure evaluations must build instead on: (a) a qualitative evaluation of scholarly contributions unencumbered by ordinality assumptions; (b) the narrowing of the span of control of academics, moving supervisory authority away from the line structure and back into the hands of true peers; and (c) muting the incentives that prevent academics from focusing on riskier and long-term horizon outputs, which are pillars in agreement with known accounts of how exploratory behaviour has been successfully managed at IBM, Google, the SAS Institute and Nokia, to name but a few cases. JEL Codes: 123, O31

Bean-counting research and the mismanagement of knowledge production in business schools *

“…They will discuss at great length the ins and outs of performance targets such as impact factor, grant income, invited talks, number of research students, editorial positions, board memberships and awards. (Anonymous, 2018) This bean-counting culture (Tsui, 2013) encompasses measures of apparent impact on stakeholders, championed by academics with executive responsibilities in the Academy of Management, namely, the so-called pluralist model of scholarly impact (Aguinis et al, 2015(Aguinis et al, , 2019(Aguinis et al, , 2021Aguinis and Gabriel, 2022; see a critique in Agafonow and Perez, 2023). A theoretical or acquired capacity (Hansen et al, 2009) is thus calculated, where impact under ideal operating conditions is worked out on paper and serves as a target to be put out by academics under draconian contractual obligations.…”