A new book argues that too much modern management research is a mess of inconsequential jargon
BEWARE THE guru with a theory that explains how companies behave or the perfect recipe for how firms succeed. Beware, too, the lengthy academic studies to similar effect. That is the stark warning of “Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research”, a new book by Dennis Tourish, a scholar of organisations at the University of Sussex.
Elton Mayo conducted another much-cited early 20th-century study. He found that changes in lighting at the Hawthorne works in Illinois improved productivity. Remarkably, the analysis indicated that making the lights more or less bright made no difference; workers simply responded to the special attention paid them. This was welcomed by many managers as it implied it was not always necessary to reward workers with more money to increase output.
The modern era is also full of dodgy theories based on limited evidence. A few years ago journalists noticed a bizarre tendency for British politicians to stand with their legs far apart like living croquet hoops. The fashion for the pose seems to have been driven by a paper from 2010 which suggested that any leader who adopted this strange stance would feel more confident and appear more powerful.
This rush to publish has led to management research being affected by the same problems as other disciplines. A bias exists to publish studies that show headline-grabbing results. “Fishing expeditions”—selective use of statistics in search of a striking conclusion—are commonplace. Results showing an effect does not exist, as scientifically useful as positive findings, are stashed away in a drawer.
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