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The Quest for Relevance: Management Research that Matters to Academics and Practitioners

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Methoden in der Betriebswirtschaftslehre

Abstract

The rigor-relevance debate in management research has been going on for decades. This entails intense discussions about whether, to what degree and how the methodological soundness of research and relevance in terms of research that matters to practitioners can be combined to achieve management research that matters to academics and practice (Andriessen 2004; Bennis/O’Toole 2005; Tushman/O’Reilly/Fenollosa/Kleinbaum/McGrath 2007). Shapiro et al. (2007) recently showed that most of the Academy of Management members asked in a survey to comment on knowledge transfer problems between practice and academia perceived a rigor-relevance gap in management research. Numerous authors discussed the problem of either focussing mainly on rigor (e.g. Hambrick 1994) or primarily addressing practical relevance (e.g. Vermeulen 2005) and mused about bridging both rigor and relevance in management research (e.g. Tushman/O’Reilly 2007; Varadarajan 2003). Furthermore, special issues of top-tier journals like the Academy of Management Journal in 2001 and 2007 or the British Journal of Management in 2002, as well as academic conferences like the annual meeting of the German Academic Association of Business Research (VHB) in 2007 addressed the “double hurdle” of scholarly quality and relevance (Pettigrew 1997; 2001). However, looking at the outcomes of these discussions, it remains evident that only little progress has been made in terms of how to bridge the gap between academic research and practice (e.g. Gulati 2007).

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Authors
  1. Christina Hoon
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  2. Stefan Krummaker
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Andreas Georg Scherer Ina Maria Kaufmann Moritz Patzer

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Hoon, C., Krummaker, S. (2009). The Quest for Relevance: Management Research that Matters to Academics and Practitioners. In: Scherer, A.G., Kaufmann, I.M., Patzer, M. (eds) Methoden in der Betriebswirtschaftslehre. Gabler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-8349-9473-8_12

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