The Future of Scientific Research in Business Schools with Peter Bamberger

Welcome to The Global Exchange, a podcast hosted by the Global Business School Network. That's 150 leading business schools working together to address the development needs of society. This podcast features conversations with expert guests about important trends and innovations in management education with the primary objective of increasing the positive impact of business schools on global prosperity and wellbeing.

Now, I'm very excited today about our guest, Peter Bamberger. We're going to talk about the science of management and organization and more broadly we'll talk about research, the research that defines that science. But Peter is Professor Simon I. Domberger Chaired Professor of Management and Organizations at Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University. And he's the research director at the Smithers Institute and the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. I need to take a breath after saying that.

01:39

There's so much more that we could go on to talk about your affiliations, but I think more importantly to us for this conversation is Peter is the immediate past president of the Academy of Management. And if you know anything about the Academy of Management, you understand how big a deal that is. And Peter, we appreciate that role. But if I could just add that you were also part of this research impact task force that was convened by AACSB. If I can suggest, I don't know if this is accurate or not, but I can probably say, Peter, that you spearheaded that effort. You weren't just a part of the task force. Is that correct, Peter?

Yeah, basically it was an initiative of the Academy and we realized we couldn't do anything unless we got AACSB on board. And luckily they grabbed the initiative and ran with it.

Yeah. Well, I like to hear that because to me that's one of the things, and perhaps we'll spend a little bit of time with this, that the Academy is doing at the moment in many ways leading beyond itself to try to generate change in the industry. And I really do appreciate what the Academy is doing with that. And I know that's been a big part of your agenda as president. But now as always, I always like to start by going back a little bit in time. Going back to your undergraduate work at Cornell in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, if I understand correctly, as a result of that experience or during that experience, you helped unionize…

Cornell. Yeah.

Cornell. I want to ask about that experience. And then what happened right after? What happened? What did you do with that and how has that affected the way you think about your career and research?

It's a great question. So the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell is a state-sponsored school and it's supposed to foster labor management relations in New York State. At the time that I was a student, there were about 150 students in each cohort of which probably a hundred went to law school, 45 went into human resource management and five somehow got involved in the labor movement. And I was one of those... I thought I would be one of those five. We had a little club and we had this wonderful idea that we could organize the workers at Cornell, everyone from the janitors to the kitchen workers, whatever. We actually pulled it off. Several of the people who were graduating, as soon as they graduated, they took jobs as janitors and kitchen staff and the rest of us as students played a role in helping to organize and it became a local of the United Auto Workers.

04:38

And one of the janitors went on to a major career, Al Davidoff in the United Auto Workers eventually. I got involved in research in my senior year and that was a good solution for me because I was kind of apprehensive about telling my parents that after getting this expensive Ivy League education, I was going to become a janitor.

05:01

So this was a way out. In the end, I ended up joining a Kibbutz in Israel and trying to live the socialist dream that way. But that three months picking avocados, I realized there's the dream and there's reality and I decided to go back to the research. That was the start of my research career.

Yeah, the start of your research career. But I'm also wondering, this is such an interesting story to me because of this set of questions that I hope we'll address about the tension between activism and science. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how that influenced your thinking about the role of research not only in business, but in general.

So I'm a very ideologically driven person. I have three citizenships, so I could kind of live anywhere, European citizenship, US and Israel. I was driven by my ideology to live here, which is not the best neighborhood in the world, as you know, out of ideology. And it was really ideology that led me to the research career that I'm in and has guided me through it. I've always been interested in taking an activist approach in my research focusing on topics that I'm passionate about that I feel I can make a serious contribution to. And they're phenomenon-driven topics. They're not theory-driven topics, which is problematic in the field of management. That can work against you. It's hard to publish on the basis of phenomenon. It's much easier to gear your career around a particular theory or perspective or framework and then just keep on hammering at that.

06:51

But I took an activist perspective and a phenomenologically focused perspective in order to have an impact. But I've been careful over the years to recognize that there's this boundary I can't cross with my activism, which is that I'm a scientist and that the data have to speak for themselves and I can't massage the data to tell the story that I wanted to tell, the data tell their own story. And the most recent... I started my career doing a lot of research on substance misuse in the workplace. Periodically, I would get findings that showed that drinking at work has some beneficial effects. I remember even going to the director of the institute saying, "Look, this is what the data showed." He was saying, "You can't publish this. We'll lose our funding." Somehow we managed a way to get that in. It's incredible. That topic, we got offers from the Alcohol Beverage Association of the US to big grant money potentially if we wanted it.

07:53

We never took the money. The money was coming from NIH, but there was still an endowment from this family that suffered multiple generations of addiction. There was a concern about what we would publish, but in the end, we published what the data said. And this has continued with my work on paid transparency. I felt very strongly that, I still do feel that, transparency is a beneficial thing for organizations and that managers should be as transparent as possible, but the data show that there's some real problems with some of that. And to some degree, you can say that I've published more about the problems with transparency than the benefits. I've done both. So I've always walked this careful line between activism and science. Ultimately, I think if the activism dominates the science, then we lose all faith and trust in science and we're dangerously close to having that happen already now.

The conversation, the way I envisioned it, would've looked at relevance first. I was going to start with that, but we jumped right ahead into this discussion about credibility, which I think it's, if not the most, one of the most important threats facing business education as we move forward, especially in the context of AI and things like that. But before getting, maybe what we'll come back to that, I want to ask about relevance because I remember listening to your presidential speech online and I wrote it down. I hope I got it exactly right. It's pretty simple. You said that you can't have impact without relevance. So we just talked about credibility. So the driver for you has always been impact because of your activism, because of your ideological basis, but you know you have to balance the credibility, the long-term credibility of your own work, but also of the discipline.

09:56

But you also think you can't have impact without relevance. Tell us what you mean by that.

So look, I think most of the research that we publish in at least the high tier scholarly journals in business have relevance. The question is relevance to whom. So it's fairly narrow relevance to the people that can A, understand what's being written, which right away reduces the impact and B, to those affected potentially by the findings. And a lot of what we do is driven by the need to be novel. To get into the better journals, you have to be novel, which means you always have to come up with some quirky... Well, don't always have to come up with some quirkiness, but quirkiness certainly helps if you want to get published in the top tier journals. And quirkiness typically works against relevance because it's finding some weird little angle that may or may not have implications for the bulk of society. So the result is, because of the incentive structures that we have in the science, and it's in most sciences, not just ours.

11:13

There's a push for scholars to do things that may not be the most relevant, but are novel and theoretically of interest to other people doing research in that particular area who are making the decisions whether or not the research gets published. The result of it is that we end up doing our work, our scholarly work in a manner that's addressed to a very, very small community of fellow scholars. For the most part, we ourselves as wearing our other hat as teachers rarely involve our students in that research, certainly never give them those studies to read because they're too complex and that would reduce our teaching evaluations. And most of that work doesn't get picked up by the media, doesn't get picked up in testimony by policymakers. So why should we be receiving tax money to do this kind of work in public institutions and why should students be paying hefty tuition, much of which goes to pay for the research that we do?

12:23

I don't think this is sustainable. I never approached my research with this perspective and perhaps because of that I had difficulty early on getting my work published. I always had to fight to create an interest in what I was doing and I never kind of just did more of what others were doing. I was always trying to find new things to work on that I thought were important. And in most of the cases it didn't hit because that's not what people were really interested in.

12:54

That strategy works if it hits and a couple of times it hit and I went with it.

Yeah. I want to come back to a question that popped into my mind about the connection between relevance and credibility that as you were talking occurred to me and that is about publishing replication or the lack of replication, which seems to be not really in the cards for most journals. And it seems to be an important part of what we need to do in science. If we can't replicate a study, shouldn't that be news to us, helpful to us as we think about the science? But apparently we don't do that very often, do we, Peter?

Business and management replication doesn't lead you to tenure, let's put it that way. It's not novel, you're not making a significant contribution for the most part. Even meta-analyses where you're actually aggregating the results of many, many studies, which should be the most impactful research, that too doesn't win you a lot of points. Incredibly hard to publish that in top tier journals. When it comes to the credibility of our science, there are incentive structures that highly value that quirky novel theoretical contribution, but every other step in the knowledge production process that could actually take some insight and turn it into some product that's meaningful to those with us and to society more generally, those other steps in the process… and that includes what you talked about in terms of replication, meta-analysis, translation into practitioner types of publications… none of that stuff wins points and it's very difficult to get tenure if that's where you fit into the knowledge production process, but all of these steps are critical in terms of, as a science, being relevant and having an impact.

15:01

Credibility is another element there. If you're not relevant, you're not credible. But then again, if you don't have a strong evidentiary base, you're also not credible. So both elements work hand in hand.

Yeah. I remember when you and I first met, I don't know if you remember this, it was in Nigeria and we had this discussion about the different approaches and you were at the time the editor of the Discoveries Journal for the Academy of Management and you were talking about abductive research and how important that is to understanding business and management.

Right. That's what I see as the first step in that knowledge production process, that discovery element – trying to pick up on phenomena that we haven't noticed before or that we may have noticed, but we haven't been able to explain effectively, and trying to propose some ideas that with evidence cannot be dismissed, let's put it that way. Not that we're able to demonstrate anything with certainty, but we're presenting ideas that need to be investigated further. That too, until Discoveries, also would've been very difficult to publish and would've been published in low tier journals where again, no incentive to do that for most.

Hey, quickly before we move on, you might want to expand, but just briefly, lost in translation or lost before translation, the debate about relevance often revolves around, are we producing relevant research, we're just not communicating about it well enough, or are we just not producing, we're not creating the kind of research that really matters to policymakers, managers, et cetera. I have a sense of your answer from your previous discussion, but help us understand that debate a little bit.

So I think it's both. I think again, I put much of the blame on the incentive structures at the core of what we do that move us into topics that are novel to approach them in a quirky manner and to emphasize the contribution to theory where we throw in a paragraph or two at the end about what the practical implications might be. There goes the relevance in terms of the topics we address. In terms of relevance because of the translation, if you read any article in the top tier journals, if you manage to stay awake through reading them, you will be scratching your head as to what exactly they're trying to say. They're written kind of in a different language so that translation work is really important and I think the Academy of Management has already taken a bunch of steps to work on that issue so that we're doing a service for the entire community of scholars.

17:54

We're not relying on the scholars necessarily to do that translation. And I think there's a role for AI to play as well. And I think major publishers like Elsevier are moving in that direction that they're going to be using LLMs to provide translations of evidence-based research to managers in an easy to understand format. And I think that's a wonderful thing.

In fact, thanks for bringing up AI. It's the next topic on our agenda here. Obviously there's something big happening in the research space. The way I describe it is that the research ecosystem is being transformed by AI and you've hinted at one part of that, but even the part that precedes that is how do we train the LLMs on the evidence-based research and how do we make it beneficial for publishers and for scholars to continue to do the kind of work that we need to do? But in general, what excites you most about AI in the research space and then what worries you most about AI in the research space and how things are evolving?

There are a couple of things I would say… there are two main things that excite me about AI in the research space. One is that it levels the playing field. There are many scholars around the world whose English is not very good and who can't afford copy editors to enhance their writing that aren't good at communicating theory in English and LLMs level the playing field. They're as good, if not better than a professional editor, which means that many of our colleagues in the Global South now have a leg up and the knowledge that they're creating, unique knowledge, things that we never thought about before because they're so distant from the Western paradigm that we would never see published because it couldn't be communicated effectively. I think LLMs are going to be solving a large chunk of that problem and I think that's a very good thing for the science.

20:03

The other thing that I'm positive about or optimistic about, just this morning I was working on a revision of a paper for a journal and I need to collect additional data and I needed to find some measures that I could use with which to collect those data. And in the past it would've taken me a day, two, three or four days to find good measures for what I wanted to capture if I could find them at all. This morning it took about five minutes and I got three or four different options for measures I could use. I could check them out, pull up the articles, make sure that they were valid. And yeah, within a half an hour, I did three days worth of what would've taken me three days to do in the past, four days. So all of this is making my life a lot easier, which means I can be a lot more productive.

20:56

Where does it scare me? It scares me, first of all, with what I see happening with many of the journals. The Academy of Management Journal, for example, has seen submissions rise by I think about a third over last year. Much of that they attribute to AI-written papers, hard to identify exactly if they're AI or not, but there's certain signs you can pick up. But in any case, we're getting many, many more submissions to the Academy journals and people who would normally submit one or two papers a year are now submitting five or six. Now that could be partially because of what I just said, that our productivity is increasing, but it could also be that for some people the productivity is increasing to the point that AI is just writing their papers for them. And that's problematic because of what you said, the training of AI means that if and when AI writes a paper, it's doing more of the same.

21:53

It's taking the same models, the same frameworks, the same perspectives, because it doesn't necessarily know any better. It's just working off what it's been trained and that doesn't necessarily move the science forward. So I'm all in favor of AI helping us produce our research and moving our knowledge forward, but I think it's got to be much more with the scholar using these tools effectively rather than the tools kind of driving the scholar.

That's amazing. 33% increase in the number of submissions.

Around. Don't hold me to that number. I think it's something like that.

I was in a meeting. I'm part of this group of fellows for the Responsible Research in Business and Management. And during the last meeting, a journal editor said that theirs was 42% year-to-year increase in the number of submissions. And I forget where they are on this, but where's the Academy on using AI for reviews?

It's absolutely not allowed. As a reviewer, you actually sign off that you have not used… that the review has not been written by the large language model. You're able to use AI. Obviously, if I want to verify something or check something, I'm not going to struggle. I'm going to use AI to help me do that quickly. That's fine. But uploading the paper into ChatGPT or Gemini or something is completely disallowed. If anything, for the simple reason that you're now taking proprietary knowledge and putting it into the world of AI and violating copyright and all the guidelines about review in general.

Thanks for sharing that. I hope we can continue to unpack some of these impacts as we go forward, but I want to pick up on something you said about AI and leveling the playing field, because this is where I mentioned earlier in the conversation, I've been impressed with the work of the Academy of Management. I'm happy to be a part of that work even. But one way that I explain it is that with 22,000+ members of the Academy of Management, exactly 106 are based in Africa. And apparently that's been pretty consistent for some time. And the challenge with that, the problem with that is that if we think about the global community of scholars, when we think about the science and what we know about business and management, we have these voices that are not being heard as part of the community and not publishing in the journals.

24:29

And the Academy wants to do something about that, or has been doing something about this, with the community accelerator program, but also the Academy is moving ahead and pushing forward with the open access component as well. Tell me how you think these things fit together with, I guess, building on your point about leveling the playing field and what role do all of us play potentially in helping to make some of this a reality?

So I think the most important initiative of the academy in the last two or three years has been the community accelerator program, in that rather than hoping and waiting for scholars to join the Academy and to join the community, we're actually taking the community to them and doing it in a very, very collaborative manner that we're allocating our resources and our scholars on a voluntary basis to assist in building those communities locally. So if in the past they would've had to come to an Academy conference in the US in order to build collaborations and to get access to some of the workshops we run to boost their skills, now we're bringing all of that actually to the communities in the context of programs that the members of the community themselves are actually leading. So we can take the example of the Turkish Academy of Management, which two years ago, this was kind of our lab rabbit.

26:14

Two years ago, I think there were 40 members of the Academy of Management from Türkiye. So the Turkish Academy of Management started. I went to the first conference, they had about 200 attendees. They're now up to 700 members and they're expecting over 700 at the next annual meeting in September in İzmir. Their involvement in the Academy of Management, their membership in the Global Academy of Management has increased, I think, four or fivefold in just two years and they're starting to see their members publishing in the top tier journals. Now this is a process. These communities outside of Western Europe and North America don't immediately start to organize and then start publishing in top tier journals. There's a process to learn how to do that and the open access journals are part of that process. The academy has never really offered publication opportunities except in the highest tier of the journals and it takes people time to learn how to publish in those journals.

27:21

So you're expected to do this in North American, Western European, mostly in North American graduate schools. You can't get a job unless you've got a publication or two in at least one of those top tier journals. In my case, that didn't happen so fast. I was a slow learner and I think most of my education came through miles on the road publishing in lower tier journals and finally learning how to publish in those higher tier journals, a process of five or six years after finishing my PhD. I think I'm much more typical of scholars than the ones we normally think about that come out of grad school and boom. I remember at Cornell, I had a couple of friends that they were like the rabbit and I was the tortoise and I'm still going and they're kind of like, they stopped publishing years ago. So I think that's the right approach for science and the open access journals are geared towards guiding these scholars in the Global South in particular because both of the first two journals that we've set up in the Academy are led by people from the Global South and they're targeting the Global South.

28:27

They're going to be developing scholars primarily in those areas and we'll see the movement over the next five to 10 years of publications from those open access journals into the mainstream top tier journals, I believe.

Yeah. And eventually having a truly global scientific body of knowledge representing what happens in an organization. So Research Impact Task Force, which you helped spearhead, just issued its final report just last week in conjunction with the Research Impact Conference that was jointly convened by AACSB and the Academy. Just very quickly, what are you most proud of with that report? And then if you don't mind sharing, what do you wish the task force had either done differently or done more of at this stage?

Well, first of all, the task force isn't done with its work. We said right from the start, we were not going to produce another report that gets put on the shelf because I have a bad history with that, participating in other impact task forces that had absolutely zero impact. So this is a continuing effort and the report that we put out a little over a week ago just gives a framework for how we're going to proceed to actually implement changes that produce higher impact research. What I'm most proud of in our efforts, at least up till now, there are a couple of things. First of all, that we were able to bring in all of the scholarly communities in the field of business and management with the exception of finance, which we're still struggling to bring those folks in, but everyone else – accounting, information systems, marketing, I mean, we're all in this together, number one.

30:17

And number two, that we're doing it in the context of an accreditation framework that automatically builds in an incentive structure. I know that in the beginning of our conversation, I kept on talking about incentive systems, incentive systems. I do a lot of work on pay. So I guess I'm geared, I think in terms of incentive systems, but I really believe that that's the trick. And AACSB has said right from the get-go that what we do is going to be built into or put into their standards. And in fact, we see some of that already in standard seven, eight and nine and the implementation guidelines that are in the process of being developed as we speak, I think are going to reflect a lot of what you see in that actual report so that naturally things will start to change, but we're going to be moving forward in other areas working with publishers and journals and journal editors to really change around those incentive systems as we've kind of hinted has to happen in that report.

Thanks. The second part of the question, if you could ask for anything more, anything different, what would you ask for?

More detail. And again, it may be actually happening. I'm not involved in writing those implementation guidelines for AACSB so they may actually be putting in a lot more of the technical stuff that it's going to have bite. I hope they are. If they don't, this is something that happens every year and we'll be pushing for that in the future. Stuff that I would've liked to see more of is more work on the journal side. This is the kind of thing that no single journal editor can work on or do independently. We have to make changes in the ecosystem. We're starting, but this is a really hard thing to shift. And again, no dean is going to be the first one to make the change either. Everyone has to... We've got to turn the ship collectively in all of its aspects and it's a big ship to turn.

32:13

I think we're off to a great start. I really do. And the leadership from AACSB has been more than anyone could ever ask for. It's just been tremendous.

Perfect. Well, thank you, Peter. Thanks for letting me push you on that last dimension as well. Peter, you've been amazing. Thank you so much for sharing so much of your life with us, not just your current work, but your career and your leadership through the Academy and through the work that you're spearheading with AACSB. It's been amazing.

Thanks a lot, Dan.