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Your Turn The Modern-Day Men's Club During the Victorian era, gentlemen's clubs were run by members who con- spired to keep out the "wrong sort" by making the rules of entry hard to understand and impossible to follow. Today's top scholarly journals func- tion in much the same way. Histori- cally, publishers have burnished their reputations not by publishing useful and readable contributions to prac- tice and teaching, but by becom- ing narrower and more exclusive. I believe this mindset is damaging the entire field of business. Let me explain. Scholarly books and journals are typically judged on their exclusivity. The top jour- nals may publish only two or three papers out of every hundred sub- mitted to them. Once they're pub- lished, research papers are judged by peer-to-peer citations—that is, how many times they are referenced in other papers published in a select set of journals. This means publications are racing each other to reach great- er levels of introspection, narrowness of view, and obscurity of content. At the same time, the top journals may have a two- or three-year lag time between acceptance and publi- cation. Therefore, papers that appear in them may have taken a year or two to research; spent a year or two being shuttled among editor, author, and referees; and then spent another two years waiting their turns to be set in print. Because of this system, scholarly publications with the great- est prestige tend to reject any form of research except the highly conceptu- al—otherwise, the publications would be hopelessly out of date. Despite the flaws in the system, those of us who publish scholarly research provide an important way 68 BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2009 for business schools and professors to gauge the impact of their research: We enable a quality-assured "count- ing" mechanism that measures how much their research contributes to scholarship. We also help determine each individual's productivity by counting how often a scholar has published pieces of such scholarship. Institutions rely on this productiv- ity count to help them decide which scholars to recruit and retain, and which professors are making progress toward fulfilling tenure requirements. The problem is that this system is deeply focused on a single metric: discipline-based scholarship defined by the rigor of the research. Such a system cannot provide the relevant research the world needs today. As CEO of a specialty publisher in business and management research worldwide, I acknowledge that pub- lishers deserve a portion of the blame for the failures of our industry. But the problems are caused by players throughout the system—and change must come from all of them. Calls for Reform Let me pause a moment to note that those conducting management research are members of one of the highest brain-power clusters in the world. And anyone who has spent time around the professors and publishers producing management research knows that these are not just clever, soulless drones chasing maximum returns with no regard to consequences. They are, by and large, kind, funny, well-rounded, and reasonable people. But if these people are not using business research to better address the needs of society, why not? by John Peters Where's the disconnect? And how can we overcome it? People both inside and out- side of academia are agitating for change, demanding management research that is both relevant to today's complex world and under- pinned by scholarly rigor. From outside of academia, the calls for reform come from industry recruiters and senior HR people who sometimes make presentations at major academic conferences. In their sessions, they might say something like, "Please don't send us people who only can do financial analysis. Give us graduates who can think, who are plugged into what's happen- ing in the world, and who can help represent the external community within the business." At the same time, provocative thinkers from within the academic community—including Henry Mintz- berg, James O'Toole, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and the late Sumantra Ghoshal—have complained that professors in the ivory tower are detached from the real world. These individuals have also offered clever analysis about the need to better connect business school out- comes with business. The situation reminds me a bit of the "quality problem" much debated in the 1970s and '80s, when Joseph Juran, W. Edwards Deming, Philip Crosby, and others shook the tree on the need for improved quality assur- ance. Nonetheless, quality assurance didn't become embedded in operat- ing reality until a set of systems was codified by international bodies and standars organizations. I think the same thing is true now. Relevance and real-world impact will become part of scholarly research only when they are rooted in our quality standards, our awards pro-