The Research Evaluation and Globalization of Business Research

The Research Evaluation and Globalizationof Business Research

John Saunders, Veronica Wong1 and Carolyne Saunders2

Audencia, France, and Bird Cottage, Ditchling, East Sussex BN6 8TZ, UK, 1Sussex University, UK,and Audencia, France, and 2Cornell University, New York, USA

E-mail: [email protected]

There is contrast between the surge in the quality of business and management research

reported in successive Research Assessment Exercises and Britain’s inconsistentcontribution to the world’s leading business and management journals over the last 40

years. A census of top journals since 1968 shows a relative decline of the English-speaking

peoples and a rise in the contribution from parts of Southeast Asia and northern Europe.

Unlike the USA and the euro-area, where the top researchers are mainly born and researchtrained in their own country, the UK’s leading business and management researchers tend

to be non-locals trained outside the UK.

The RAE has been extremely successful. It has

evolved from a quality-assurance process to acompetition for funding, while successfully retain-ing its original function of driving up standards

through reputation incentives. (Roberts Report, inJoint Funding Council, 2003)

The surge in both the quantity and quality ofBritain’s ‘world-leading’ business research reportedin Britain’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)2008 Unit of Analysis 36 Subject Overview Report(Otley, 2009) supports Roberts’s (Joint FundingCouncil, 2003) view of the positive influence of theRAE. However, these local views contrast with aview from outside the UK of Britain’s decliningshare of papers in world-leading journals in onebusiness discipline: marketing (Stremersch andVerhoef, 2005). Extending Stremersch and Verhoef’sdata to include RAE 2008 revealed a continueddecline in Britain’s contribution to marketing’s ‘A-journals’ (Saunders and Wong, 2011). From theearliest period examined (1964–1973), when Britainaccounted for 2.2% of world output, to the periodincluding Britain’s first RAE (1984–1993), Britishmarketing academics retained their position as thethird most productive nation behind the USA andCanada. By the period including RAE 2008 (2002–2008), the share of output had declined to 0.9% andlagged behind the USA, the Netherlands, Germany,

Belgium, Canada, Hong Kong, France and Israel.Symptomatic of the decline is the finding that 82%of Britain’s A-journal marketing contributions over2002–2008 were by researchers whose country oforigin and research training was from outside theUK. A related statistic is that none of the papersover 2002–2008 was by a person whose country oforigin and research training was British. Thiscontrasts with 48% and 59% of contributors fromthe euro-area and the USA respectively who wereborn and research-trained in the country of theiracademic affiliation.The purpose of this paper is to examine if the

temporal pattern shown by Britain’s marketingacademic community is also true of other businessand management (B&M) disciplines. If the pat-terns are alike there are policy implications for thefunding of business research in the UK. Inparticular, how and why have the Higher Educa-tion Funding Council for England’s (HEFCE’s)Research Assessment and the Research Council’sresearch funding presided over a decline inBritain’s B&M research? Also, since other coun-tries have followed the UK in introducing nationalresearch evaluations (Ugolini and Casilli, 2005),have they all had a similar influence?Alternatively, if the trend in marketing publica-

tions is different from that in other disciplines,

British Journal of Management, Vol. 22, 401–419 (2011)DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00755.x

r 2011 The Author(s)British Journal of Management r 2011 British Academy of Management. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.

mailto:[email protected]

what accounts for that difference since they alloperate under the same umbrella of businessschools, universities and higher education system?We start by looking at the trends in leading

international B&M research as evaluated throughsuccessive research assessments. We then com-pare the world-leading outputs of businessschools according to the RAE with their outputsin ‘A-journals’ that are regarded as world-leadingby top business schools across the world. Next wecompare the pattern of B&M research over thepast four decades. Finally we draw implicationsfor researchers, business school deans and highereducation policy.

The RAE from 1986 to 2008

The quality of B&M research assessed during theRAE in 2008 means that its research will befunded at a rate close to the social scienceaverage. This contrasts with the RAE 2001 ‘mess’(Lipsett, 2005) where the independent calibrationof disciplines resulted in huge differences in theaverage research rating and consequent funding –a conspicuous anomaly being that the accountingand finance (A&F) panel was more generous withtheir 5 ratings than B&M.Unfortunately, B&M’s RAE 2008 success was

a pyrrhic victory, since successive funding roundshave seen research budgets for social science andB&M cut in order to devote funding to science,technology, engineering and medicine depart-ments. So violent is this change that LondonBusiness School (LBS), the UK’s higher educa-tion institution with the highest proportion of

RAE-defined world-leading output, faced thelargest cut of any institution.The pecuniary rewards for B&M’s growing

research strength in the UK may be miserly, butthere is joy in the RAE panel’s recognition of thehuge strides B&M’s research has made across theuniversity system. The RAE results suggest that,not only has B&M drawn level with social scienceas a whole, it has done so while the quality andquantity of social science research has accelerated.Analysis of the improving performance of

B&M in successive RAEs appears to vindicatethe Joint Funding Council’s claim. Figure 1shows the early stage of the acceleration ofB&M between the 1996 and 2001 RAEs, whenthe profile of research rose from being pearshaped in 1996 (with 43% of the units assessedhaving less than 50% of their output at nationallevel) to a lean, broad shouldered community in2001 (where most institutions could boast someoutput of international standing and the sub-national proportion had dropped to 21%).Generally, B&M still lagged behind the overallassessment of academic disciplines, where 80% ofthe researchers whose work was submittedreceived one of the top grades (4, 5 and 5*),with a 55% majority being awarded 5 or 5* (JointFunding Council, 2003).After the RAE in 2001, HEFCE recognized that

its incrementally adjusted approach to researchassessment had to change, not least because of theclumsy eight-point scale it invented to allocatefunding after the RAE panel’s deliberations, i.e. 1,2, 3b, 3a, 4, 5, 5*, 6*. After consultation, a newscale was devised: 0, 1*, 2*, 3*, 4*. Directcomparisons between the scales is not easy, butthe new star system stretched the old 5* and 6*

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35

1

2

3a

3b

4

5

5*

Percentage in each RAE category

RA

E c

ateg

ory

RAE 2001 RAE 1996

Figure 1. B&M improvement, RAE 1996 to RAE 2001

402 J. Saunders, V. Wong and C. Saunders

r 2011 The Author(s)British Journal of Management r 2011 British Academy of Management.

grades to focus on a more refined gradation ofleading international research.The change to the RAE’s 2008 scale to further

identify and reward Britain’s top researchers is acontinuation of plays and counter-plays byHEFCE and the researchers who comprise theRAE’s panels (Tapper, 2007).The first RAE in 1986 was a relatively low-

impact affair, where B&M did poorly with anEiffel-Tower-like distribution showing the bulkof schools at the low quality base and fewer andfewer at the tip of excellence. B&M’s poorperformance in the RAE of 1986 conformed tothe widely held prejudices within the academicworld that business research is problematic andof relatively poor quality (Wensley, 2009). Alter-natively, the poor score of B&M in the deeplyflawed 1986 RAE may have been the result of theemergent discipline’s lack of self-confidence, sinceeach panel contrived their own scales and therewas no standardization across the panels’ roughand ready lash-up of techniques (Smith, 1987).The next RAE in1989 had a funding sting in its

tail where HEFCE research funding increasedlinearly according to their five-point (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)rating scale, but with a little extra funding at thelower end to help out the many new universities.HEFCE showed less compassion after 1992, with

the lowest-rated departments receiving no fundsand the rest conforming to a linear progression. Bynow, the peer-review panels had recognized thatlittle research was at the base level, with most beingcrowded in level 3 (nationally excellent).Seeing the clumping, HEFCE split level 3 into 3a

and 3b and added a 5* for RAE 1996. This time,the funding increased exponentially with researchratings, although more and more schools receivedsubstantial research funding as the panel recog-nized that even more were showing ‘some evidenceof international excellence’.By RAE 2001, the peer-review teams realized

that so many departments were achieving ‘attain-able levels of international excellence’, commen-surate with 5 or 5* ratings, that a cliff edge offunding occurred, where funding to those rated 4or below was cut in order to fund those rated 5.Simultaneously, a new 6* category was inventedto reward those schools that had achieved a 5*

rating without reducing the head-count in theirsubmission – a tactic used by many departmentsin order to return a high proportion of inter-nationally excellent staff. After five attempts at

the RAE, the poor reception of RAE 2001 partlypersuaded the Joint Research Committee toconduct the Roberts Report to clear up ‘themess!’ (Joint Funding Council, 2003).Since funding was now concentrated in a few

top-rated departments, the greatly revised RAE2008 scale focused almost exclusively on researchbeing ‘recognized internationally’ (2*), ‘internation-ally excellent’ (3*) or ‘world-leading’ (4*) (Table 1).Once again, university researchers rose to thechallenge to produce work that the RAE peer-review panels would consider to be ofclear international standing. However, a questionmark hung over this claim. In RAE 2008, greatercare was made to ensure that panels used the samescales to assess the quality of research outputs andthat Main Panels were used to overview thestandards of Sub-panels, such as B&M. Thisstandardization did have impact, such as theresearch rating of A&F tumbling from one of thehighest in RAE 2001 to the lowest in RAE 2008.Business schools face another research assess-

ment in 2013 – the Research Excellence Frame-work (REF) – with yet a new model that nowmakes relevance an important criterion. This is amove away from the implicit belief of past RAEsthat, by increasingly focusing upon world-leadingoutput, the rest would follow (Thorpe et al.,2011). Doubtless, directors of business schoolresearch will rise to this new challenge.HEFCE’s refinement of their research assess-

ment criteria and rewards, and British research-ers’ continued ability to produce an increasingvolume of top-rated research, has been inter-preted as an exemplary case of public sectormetrics and reward systems at work (JointFunding Council, 2003). Over the decades,HEFCE had laid down challenges, setting in-creasingly higher standards of research excel-lence. These stimulated Britain’s academic

Table 1. The RAE’s revised scales

RAE 1996 and 2001 RAE 2008

5* I50%, N5 100% 4* World-leading

3* Internationally excellent

5 Io50%, N5 100% 2* Internationally recognized

4 I5 some, N5 100% 1* Nationally recognized

3a I5maybe, N466%

3b N450%

2 No50%

1 N5 0 Unclassified

Evaluation and Globalization of Business Research 403


community to become a huge body of researchersproducing reams of internationally excellent orworld-leading research. Moreover, after beingacademic laggards in the 1980s, B&M researcherscaught up with other social science researchersand surged to new peaks of academic excellence.Using a fraction of the wealth of America’sworld-class universities, HEFCE had succeededin nurturing a cadre of top, world-class research-ers in the social sciences and B&M. Do Britain’sB&M researchers deserve this accolade?

Nationally – and internationally –oriented research metrics

In order to compare B&M’s continuously im-proving research standing, as gauged by theRAE, against international metrics, we differ-entiate between internationally oriented (IO) andnationally oriented (NO) research communities.IO research communities measure research

quality based on publications in a small groupof core A- and B-journals. The A-list is largelyinvariant and unquestioned by IO researchers.For example, in marketing the American Market-ing Association’s (AMA’s) A-list includes theJournal of Marketing, the Journal of MarketingResearch, the Journal of Consumer Research andMarketing Science (Cui et al., 2008). Somemathematically oriented research groups mayadd Management Science, while Europeans mayinclude the International Journal of Research inMarketing. Both the influential University ofTexas, Dallas, database (UTD, 2009) and TheFinancial Times (2009) list of 40 journals em-ployed to compare the research productivity ofbusiness schools use the same four journals as theAMA. In their study of the global trends inmarketing publishing, Stremersch and Verhoef(2005) used this same set of A-journals.IO business schools often work with a B-list of

seven to eight journals. The length of the B-list istightly constrained, so if a new journal is addedanother drops out. There are journals outside theIO A- and B-lists. These are classed as ‘other’ –we label them O.Within top IO business schools and countries,

the A- and B-lists have teeth. Tenure andpromotions depend upon publishing in the A-listin the very top schools or the B-list in lesserschools. Some IO countries conduct university

research assessments based on the A- and B-lists.For instance, Dutch schools provide their A- andB-lists, along with the full output of the school. Inreality, all the Dutch business schools have almostthe same A-list, since any drift to be more inclusivein terms of journals reflects on the school’sresearch standing. There are Dutch marketingjournals, but these are rated as other (O).The distribution of IO schools is not purely

geographical. IO schools dominate in severalcountries. These include the USA, Canada, theNetherlands, Hong Kong, Israel and, increas-ingly, Germany. In other countries, some leadingschools are IO, e.g. France’s INSEAD andBritain’s LBS, while most are not.There is no single way in which a country’s

research communities become IO. In the USA,befitting the country’s dominant private univer-sities, it is not national policy or institutions thatdrive any research selectivity process. There areprivate rankings, however, such as ones producedby Business Week, that inform the universitymarket place. Business schools face state andprivate (e.g. the Association to Advance Collegi-ate Schools of Business (AACSB)) accreditations,but their research expectations are relativelyrelaxed. The main driving force is therefore theirability to attract high quality staff, high fee-paying students and donations that come mainlyfrom alumni. Most of America’s numerousbusiness schools have few research pretentions,but among the country’s leading business schoolsand universities there is unswerving buy-in to A-journal published output. Outside the USA, LBSand INSEAD, who compete internationally, haveindependently adopted the American model.Outside the USA, the move towards interna-

tional orientation is usually the result of nationalpolicy. The Netherlands’ rise can be traced toadapting a system of two-year-long well-funded,methodologically oriented research masters pro-grammes. From these a few students are chosento join their salaried PhD programmes. Ger-many’s sudden rise is quite different and involveda sudden reorientation towards A-journals andaway from the local journals that had historicallyfacilitated career progression. However, in bothcases their shift to international orientation washelped by strong, quantitative academic tradi-tions. That same leaning has also helped in theincreased international orientation of businessschools from the east.



In contrast to IO research communities, NOcommunities measure research excellence usingnationally defined criteria and journal lists, whichserve as a useful internal metric of internationalpublications, or even world-leading output. Forinstance, the French Grande Ecole sometimesrefers to IN (International National) journals.These are French publications that the localsjudge to be of international standing, althoughfew outside France read them. Italian publica-tions have the same problem (Ugolini and Casilli,2005). Numerous other countries have academiccommunities with similar traditions. Britain isone of them, and its Association of BusinessSchools publishes its own list (Harvey et al.,2010). That is why world-leading B&M researchmay appear to be blossoming inside the UK,while the world’s view is that it is declining. Likeother NO research communities, Britain and itsHEFCE are using a definition of world-leadingthat is not recognized in the rest of the world.This discrepancy is reflected elsewhere in thisissue of the British Journal of Management whereThomas and Wilson (2011) compare domesticallyproduced UK business schools’ rankings withone produced using the UTD database.NO research communities have a double dis-

advantage. First, IO researchers who avidly focuson what is published within their elite communityacknowledge there is little NO research. Second,the different NO communities ignore one another.Following Britain’s lead, other countries such as

New Zealand and Australia developed NO metricsof research excellence. These did not follow theBritish model in detail although they have beensimilarly inconsistent. The diversity of NO stan-dards is exemplified by New Zealand’s initialdemand that each member of staff submit dozensof research outputs to the exercise and Australia’smeasurement of research quality based on theresearch income provided by the government. So,although there is convergence in the metrics used inIO research communities, there is great long-itudinal and cross-sectional variety in the metricsused by NO research communities.Given the differences between IO and NO

measures of research quality it is unsurprisingthat the two can diverge. Figure 2 illustrateswhy Britain’s ‘world-leading’ B&M researchcould be perceived differently inside and outsidethe UK. The figure cross-tabulates publishedinformation on the aggregated results for each

business school appraised in RAE 2008 –according to the Joint Funding Council (2008)– against each business school’s output of what isgenerally regarded as the major B&M journals(see the UTD database – UTD, 2009). Manyacademics may disagree with the choice of‘world-leading’ journals monitored by UTD,but the list is very close to the A-journal listsused by leading business schools across theworld, including the Association of BusinessSchools 4* category of leading international

Scores if UTD “world-leading” output

% o

f “w

orld

-lead

ing”

out

put a

ccor

ding

to U

TD

40

1

35

30

25

were the same as RAE 2008’s

20 Scores if all a person’s

RAE 2008 output is

scored as “world-

leading” if they have one

item in the UTD list151

1

10 1

5 11 3 1 1 Number of institutions with

each combination of RAE 2008

and UTD scores1 1 2 1 1

1 2 8 3 2 1 20

17 21 9 4 2 1

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55

% of“ world-leading”output reportedby RAE 2008

Figure 2. A comparison of RAE 2008 world-leading scores with

percentage of output in world-leading journals tracked by UTD



journals (Harvey et al., 2010) and The FinancialTimes’s rating of business schools’ research.Throughout the rest of this study we use the

following terms: ‘world-leading’ to refer to out-put identified as world-leading in RAE 2008, and‘A-journals’ to refer to the top journals identifiedby UTD, the leading business schools and soforth.Figure 2 contrasts the pattern of each British

business school’s world-leading output as re-ported in RAE 2008 with the business school’sA-journal output over the RAE period accordingto the UTD database. The horizontal axis in thefigure corresponds to the percentage of eachbusiness school’s submission rated as world-lead-ing in RAE 2008, with the integers within the bodyof the plot reporting the number of businessschools within each percentage level. For example,one business school is an outlier in the top right-hand corner of the plot while 17 business schoolsfall in the bottom left-hand corner.The RAE 2008 dimension shows one school

standing above the rest with 55% of its outputrated as world-leading, three schools with 35% ofoutput rated as world-leading, four with 30%world-leading and so on. The discriminatorystrength of RAE 2008’s classification system isshown in that most business schools are assessedas having 5% or less of their output rated asworld-leading.The vertical axis in Figure 2 is the percentage of

each business school’s A-journal output over theRAE 2008 period according to the UTD database.This is derived by dividing each business school’sUTD publications over the RAE 2008 period bythe size of each business school’s RAE 2008submission. The size of each business school’ssubmission, in terms of research papers, isestimated as four times the school’s submittedfull-time equivalent staff. It shows a similar patternto the RAE 2008 results on the horizontal axis.One school is outstanding with almost 40% ofoutput in A-journals, while a clutch of three haveA-journal output between 10% and 15%. Beyondthese four schools, all others have less than 5% oftheir output in A-journals.The dark diagonal of blocks in Figure 2

corresponds to UTD and RAE 2008 equivalence,i.e. the RAE 2008 percentage of world-leadingoutput corresponded to (is the same as) thepercentage of the output in UTD’s A-journals. Itis noticeable that only for Britain’s best and least

strong research schools do the two measurescoincide. The lighter diagonal blocks represent analternative view where a single UTD A-publicationcould have a halo effect that results in RAE 2008rating three other publications as world-leading.The RAE and UTD measures agree that most

British business schools have little ‘world-leading’output and agree on a large cluster of schools ofpredominantly national standing. But there thesimilarity ends. The projections then show verydifferent stories.

� The RAE consistently scores business schoolsas having a higher percentage of RAE ‘world-leading’ output than their contribution to theA-journals indicates.

� There is a group of IO schools, led by LBS,that is in a class of its own in the UKregarding both RAE ‘world-leading’ and A-journal output. Following in the wake of LBS,there are three business schools (Cambridge,Imperial and Oxford) with a relatively high A-journal output and a high percentage of RAE‘world-leading’ output. Since HEFCE rewardsresearch based on the locally oriented RAEmetric, the exceptional international excellenceof these schools was downgraded.

� A group of nine business schools that HEFCErewarded handsomely for having 25%–35%RAE ‘world-leading’ output have less than 4%of their output in A-journals. Of these nine top-rated business schools, three had zero contribu-tion to A-journals and a further three had only1% – percentages that align with the mass ofbusiness schools that receive little HEFCEresearch funding because RAE 2008 rated littleof their output as ‘world-leading’.

� Several smaller business schools had a dispro-portionate output in A-journals but had theirefforts rewarded or recognized by RAE 2008.

According to this analysis, many of the UKbusiness schools recognized and rewarded byBritain’s HEFCE for having a high percentage ofRAE ‘world-leading’ output publish little in theA-journals, which are recognized as world-lead-ing elsewhere in the world.

Developing an A-journal data set

The first stage in this research is drawing up a listof leading journals to audit. We use the term ‘A-



journals’ to refer to a subset of internationaljournals that are consistently rated among the topfew by multiple sources. The terms ‘top interna-tional journals’, ‘A-journals’ etc. are widely usedbut inconsistently applied. For instance, theEurope-based International Journal of Researchin Marketing is often rated as an A-journal inpublished European lists (Ecole Superieure desSciences Economiques et Commerciales, 2009;Harvey et al., 2010), although left unranked inthe USA (Cui et al., 2008; UTD, 2009). Similarly,journals appear in the widely used Financial Times40 (The Financial Times, 2009) and the Associa-tion of Business School’s list (Harvey et al., 2010)that have low citation rates or are not even ratedby many British business schools. To determine asample of journals to audit, we used those thatappear in the Financial Times 40, the UTDjournal list and the Association of BusinessSchools’ list when they are corroborated by thebusiness schools that the Association of BusinessSchools report. Finally, the list was circulated tomembers of the B&M panels in Britain’s 2008RAE and the 2009 Economics and Business

Sciences Research Review Committee of theNetherlands. This process left the series of 25journals in Table 2, all with citation rates over 1.4(ISI, 2009). The difference between this list andthat used by Engwall and Danell (2011) elsewherein this issue of British Journal of Management ismainly due to our inclusion of economics, finance,operations and IT, and organization studies andhuman resource management journals. The listhere also includes Marketing Science and theJournal of International Business Studies that havehigh citation rates and are widely used byEuropean researchers.Focusing on a restricted A-journal list as is

done here, and in many of the world’s leadingbusiness schools, is controversial. It is true thatnotable papers appear in journals outside the A-list (Lee, 2011) and, indeed, most publishedpapers within A-journals are cited little. Thestature and high citation rates of A-journalstherefore depend upon them attracting a rela-tively high proportion of citation classics, such asthe British publications tabulated by Engwall andDanell (2011).In Britain, the A-journals’ leaning towards

normative and analytical theory (Thomas andWilson, 2011) also disturbs many British aca-demics who are inclined towards descriptive andcritical theory (Thorpe et al., 2011). This dichot-omy is one foundation of the current rigour andrelevance debate (Hodgkinson and Starkey, 2011;Thorpe et al., 2011) since, according to Burgoyne(2000), practitioners favour the normative andanalytical theory while academics appear to haveopposite priorities. Here, there is confusion be-tween the relevance debate in Britain and America.In the USA there is concern for the methodologicalexcesses of ‘pedantic research’ that pursues analy-tical theory to excess (Hodgkinson and Rousseau,2009; Saunders and Wong, 2011), while in the UKit is the lack of the analytical and normativeresearch that managers crave. Or, as explained byvan de Ven (2007), academics may be so myopicthat they devote little effort to transferring theirspecialist knowledge to a wider community.Our A-journal list is not definitive but represents

a set of journals that contains a disproportionatenumber of highly cited articles. It approximates thelist used by leading business schools and is acomposite of those from other organizations.The volume of output published precluded a

complete audit of the journals so a systematic

Table 2. List of A-journals audited showing their year of first

publication

Accounting Accounting Review (AR), 1926

Journal of Accounting and Economics (JAE), 1971

Journal of Accounting Research (JAR), 1963

Economics Econometrica (E), 1933

Journal of Political Economy (JPE), 1892

Finance Journal of Finance (JF), 1946

Journal of Financial Economics (JFE), 1974

Review of Financial Studies (RFS), 1988

General

management

Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), 1958

Academy of Management Review (AMR), 1976

Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS),

1970

Strategic Management Journal (SMJ), 1980

Marketing Journal of Consumer Research (JCONSR), 1974

Journal of Marketing (JM), 1936

Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), 1964

Marketing Science (MarSci), 1982

Organization

studies and

human

resource

management

Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), 1956

Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP), 1917

Organization Science (OS), 1990

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision

Processes (OBHDS), 1966

Operations

and IT

Information Systems Research (ISR), 1990

Management Science (ManSci), 1954

MIS Quarterly (MISQ), 1977

Journal of Operations Management (JOM), 1980

Operations Research (OR), 1952



sample was drawn whereby all journals wereaudited every eight years between 1960 and 2008.Information on authors’ affiliations and PhD andpre-PhD education was initially drawn frombiographic information published in the journalsbut, since this was sparse in some journals,Internet and library searches were used to gathermuch of the information. Obituaries oftenprovided information on the earlier authors.Nevertheless, lack of biographic information inthe early issues of journals, and the dearth ofalternative sources of information, meant that theamount of missing data increased with the age ofthe journals (Table 3). For this reason, 1960 wasexcluded as more than 50% of the knowledge of theauthors’ PhD and earlier education was missing.

Global changes in world-leading B&Mresearch

In their study of B&M journals in the ThompsonISI database (ISI, 2009), Mangematin andBaden-Fuller (2008) found that America’s shareof outputs is declining steadily at the expense ofcontributions from a core of European and Asianbusiness schools. Further dissection of thispattern using our data (Tables 4–6) suggests thatit is not an eclipse of America by a ‘European

model’ of business research (Antunes and Tho-mas, 2007), but rather the decline of Churchill’s‘English-speaking Peoples’ (Churchill, 1956–8)and the adoption of the ‘American model’ ofbusiness research by other countries, such asFrance, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, the

Table 3. Missing data on the authors

Year 2008 2000 1992 1984 1976 1968 1960

Affiliation (%) 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

PhD (%) 2 0 0 16 15 32 67

Pre-PhD (%) 13 20 15 31 41 50 72

Table 4. National percentage share in top B&M journals by nationality of affiliated institution and per 10 million population*

1968 1976 1984 1992 2000 2008 2008 output per 10m

Australia 1.3 0.7 1.1 0.2 0.5 1.6 22.6

Canada 1.6 5.2 5.4 4.3 3.8 5.2 48.7

France 0.5 0.8 0.8 0.9 2.4 1.7 8.3

Germany 0.2 0.4 0.4 0.2 0.8 1.7 6.7

Hong Kong 0 0.1 0.1 0.1 2.1 2.4 108.6

Israel 1.0 2.7 2.4 1.8 0.9 1.0 41.6

Netherlands 0 0.1 0.6 0.6 1.3 2.1 40.7

Singapore 0 0.1 0.2 0.1 0.5 1.4 88.2

UK 2.0 2.8 1.9 2.5 2.9 3.9 20.3

USA 89.4 83.8 84.0 86.2 78.8 71.3 73.5

Journal articles 471 947 1281 1574 2021 3214

*Shows countries with percentage 41 in 2008 or the percentage 41 on more than one occasion.

Table 5. National percentage share in top B&M journals by

nationality of PhD

1968 1976 1984 1992 2000 2008

Belgium 0 0 0.3 0.3 0.5 1.0

Canada 0.9 1.0 1.7 2.0 2.8 3.8

France 0.4 0.5 0.3 0.6 1.6 1.7

Germany 0.6 0.3 0.5 0.1 0.9 1.7

Israel 0.4 0.9 1.4 1.2 0.6 0.7

Netherlands 0.2 0.5 1.0 0.3 1.3 2.0

UK 1.1 2.2 2.9 2.4 2.6 3.2

USA 93.8 92.8 89.6 91.5 85.8 80.8

Table 6. National percentage share in top B&M journals by

nationality of first degree

1968 1976 1984 1992 2000 2008

Australia 1.4 0.6 1.2 1.6 1.0 1.3

Belgium 0 0.5 0.3 0.6 1.1 2.0

Canada 3.6 4.2 3.4 4.8 5.2 4.1

China 0 0 0 0.5 3.3 7.6

France 0.4 1.8 0.9 1.1 2.0 1.7

Germany 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.5 1.5 3.1

India 3.8 3.4 5.5 9.4 9.7 10.3

Israel 2.1 4.6 4.1 3.6 2.7 3.0

Italy 0.6 0.1 0.4 0.3 1.3 1.7

Japan 1.3 0.9 0.7 0.6 0.4 0.3

Korea 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.9 1.3 1.1

Netherlands 0 0.4 0.9 0.8 1.1 2.1

Turkey 0 0.1 0.1 0.3 3.5 3.5

UK 2.1 4.7 3.8 3.3 3.5 3.5

USA 80.7 73.2 72.6 64.7 56.1 43.9



Netherlands and Singapore. Thomas and Wilson(2011) relate these trends to individual businessschools and notice how patterns can be the resultof the productivity of a few renowned scholarsrather than broad productivity.Our results suggest increasing globalization of

authorship in the top business (and marketing)journals. Trends for country share of affiliationand pre-PhD and PhD training of authors in thesampled journals show that the USA remainsdominant but declining across the time periodsmeasured. An increasing proportion of authorspublishing in top journals are affiliated to a smallnumber of European nations and Eastern city-states. Furthermore, the European countries areproviding an increasing proportion of the PhDtraining while the supply of PhD candidates isdrawn from a wider range of developing anddeveloped economies.Through the myriad of metrics and rewards

applied by HEFCE between 1968 and 2008, theshare of output of B&M researchers affiliated toBritain remained almost unchanged, although witha productivity per 10 million population about one-quarter of America (Table 4). At one level, thisperformance is commendable given America’sdeclining share of the top journals. Looking beyondAmerica, Britain’s performance is less impressive.Behind the lead of the USA and Canada, Britain ismaintaining a steady position and holding its thirdplace. Meanwhile, coming from behind is anaccelerating group of researchers from Europeand East Asia (see Thomas and Wilson, 2011).Although publication productivity of France andGermany per 10 million of population still remainsless than half that of the UK, other contendershave a far higher productivity.The overall stability of Britain’s B&M share of

output is the sum of the changing fortunes ofeach discipline (Table 7). Remembering that theoutput in the top journals mainly emanates froma few business schools (Figure 2), the instabilitybetween audit years probably reflects staff com-ings and goings at LBS. France’s changingfortunes are similarly influenced by INSEAD.Also there could be an RAE effect in the data

since 2008 was the last year of RAE 2008 when aUnit of Assessment (UoA) would benefit themost from making last minute faculty appoint-ments. Indeed, B&M as a whole shows a surge in2008 that may be more the effect of tacticalappointments than an upswing (Table 4).

There are few countries producing PhD grad-uates who make their way into the top journals(Table 5). Among these few, all but Israel aregaining ground on the still dominant USA.Research training is expensive, and declining inthe USA, but the indications are that theinvestment is paying off across several northernEuropean countries. It is noteworthy that theSoutheast Asian nations employ productiveacademics, primarily recruiting research produc-tive PhDs rather than producing their own.Examining the early origin of top B&M

authors shows the extent that leading academicresearch depends on attracting talent from acrossthe world (Table 6). Although academics af-filiated with US institutions dominate the topB&M output, a minority of these people noworiginate from the USA. Several emergingnations – particularly India, China and Turkey– are increasing providers of raw academic talentalthough, with the exception of China’s specialadministrative region of Hong Kong, theirinstitutions contribute little to the top academicjournals. Within Europe, Belgium and Italy havea similar position although Belgium is anexporter of both raw talent and PhDs (Table 5).There is a general flow of talented candidates

from across the world (Table 6) into doctoralprogrammes in a few countries (Table 5), whothen proceed to work in a slightly larger numberof countries that publish in B&M journals (Table4). However, the use of that talent variesgeographically (Table 8). The American B&Mresearch powerhouse still trains its own research-ers, although an increasing proportion of therecruits onto their PhD programmes are fromdeveloping countries. The USA benefits in severalways in recruiting overseas talent onto their very

Table 7. UK disciplines’ percentage share of top journals

1968 1976 1984 1992 2000 2008

Accounting 1.6 3.8 0.5 1.3 0.9 3.9

Economics 1.0 4.4 6.5 6.5 4.9 3.4

Finance 0 0 3.7 0 1.4 2.3

General management 0 2.8 0 6.7 6.7 4.7

Marketing 1.6 2.5 0.4 0.4 0.8 1.4

Organization studies

and human resource

management

3.5 2.2 0.7 3.1 3.4 5.0

Operations and

management

information systems

2.1 3.2 2.4 2.0 1.1 3.6



competitive research degree programmes. First, USacademics get excellent research assistants. Second,the USA gets first choice among the researchersthey have trained and, third, US-oriented aca-demics are targeted to return home to staff theworld’s growing investment in business education.Like the USA, the major research communities

in the euro-area mostly recruit and train candi-dates from their own country, although home-grown academics are balanced by a substantialminority that are neither trained in, nor origi-nated from, the country they work in.In contrast to the USA and euro-area coun-

tries, the 2008 statistic shows that the majority ofthe UK academic community publishing in thetop B&M journals were neither born nor trainedin the UK. In this respect the UK academiccommunity is declining towards the same depen-dence on overseas talent as displayed by theSoutheast Asian city-states.Simpson’s (1946) indices of diversity provides a

summary statistic of the globalization trends ofjournals and the research teams. This index (D),which has its origins in the natural sciences,ranges between 0 (a population has no diversity)to a maximum of 1. Here

D ¼ 1�Xs

i¼1P2i

where Pi are the authors from country i as afraction of all authors in the population con-cerned (in our case, the authors publishing withina discipline each year). We also compute theaverage index of diversity of each paper per yearwithin a discipline.The level of diversity is not uniform across the

disciplines (Table 9). Marketing, along withoperations and information systems, are rela-tively more diverse, while accounting research,which may be more ‘culture’ bound, is lessdiverse. Moreover, the low score for the averagepaper diversity for a given discipline indicatesthat globalization of publications is multiculturalrather than intercultural. In other words, whilethe population of people publishing in the topB&M journals is becoming more diverse, fewresearch teams include people from more thanone country. Although an increasing proportionof the papers in leading journals are from authorsacross the world, few countries contribute morethan 1%. However, this is changing. In 1968, oursample showed only 15% of papers had authoraffiliations from more than one country. By 2008,the figure had increased to 26%.Part of the reason for the increased diversity

of publishing teams is the opportunity providedby the almost linear decline in the proportionof single authored papers, from 68% in 1968 toonly 17% in 2008 (Figure 3). Extrapolation ofthis trend suggests that sole authorship will havedisappeared by 2016!

To research evaluate or not to researchevaluate?

The period of B&M research studied covers thehuge development of university level businesseducation in Britain that followed the foundation

Table 9. Indices of diversity for journals/average across papers

Discipline 1968 1976 1984 1992 2000 2008

Accounting 0.18/0.01 0.21/0.05 0.20/0.03 0.07/0.03 0.17/0.05 0.31/0.10

Economics 0.30/0.05 0.47/0.09 0.51/0.10 0.40/0.05 0.50/0.12 0.42/0.13

Finance 0.09/0.10 0.11/0.03 0.28/0.05 0.13/0.02 0.25/0.05 0.40/0.13

General 0.05/0.02 0.19/0.01 0.09/0.00 0.22/0.04 0.34/0.10 0.39/0.15

Marketing 0.01/0.00 0.19/0.04 0.29/0.06 0.19/0.03 0.38/0.10 0.45/0.14

Organization studies and human

resource management

0.17/0.02 0.35/0.04 0.16/0.00 0.18/0.02 0.29/0.10 0.40/0.15

Operations and IT 0.28/0.03 0.41/0.03 0.39/0.07 0.32/0.07 0.48/0.11 0.45/0.14

Table 8. B&M top journal contributions 1968–2008 (and 2008

only): country of affiliation, PhD and pre-PhD compared using

complete cases only

Affiliation

country5PhD

country

Affiliation

country 5pre-

PhD country

Country of affiliation

USA

(%)

Euro-area

(%)

UK

(%)

p p67 (54) 50 (53) 34 (24)p � 28 (39) 23 (8) 10 (14)

� p1 (1) 4 (6) 15 (9)

� � 4 (6) 37 (33) 41 (53)



of LBS and Manchester Business School in the1960s (Engwall and Danell, 2011). It alsoencompasses HEFCE’s introduction and devel-opment of the RAE as a means of measuring andrewarding university research. B&M research hastherefore presided over much of the developmentof Britain’s business education.Commenting upon the RAE, the Roberts

Report (Joint Funding Council, 2003) concludedthat the process was an ‘extremely successful . . .competition for funding . . . successfully retainingits original function of driving up standardsthrough reputation incentives’, although the Re-port provided no evidence in support of the eulogy.In contrast, this analysis suggests that the processpresided over a period of stagnation. Both Britainand Australia were early into research evaluationand after decades manipulating their metrics andreward systems have just about the same share oftop publications as 40 years ago (Table 4). Theyalso display similarly low publication rates com-pared with several other countries. This perfor-mance contrasts with the huge strides in theproduction of world-leading research reported insuccessive RAEs. What could have caused thesecontrasting views? Has the RAE had simply noeffect or has it had a damaging effect on Britishacademics achieving the productivity of world-leading researchers elsewhere?The RAE’s national orientation could explain

the divergence of the local and international viewof Britain’s research productivity. Britain’s RAEis a peer assessment process where the member-ship is drawn from the academic community tobe assessed. Within B&M the British Academy ofManagement (BAM) has grown to be hugelyinfluential (Masrani, Williams and McKiernan,

2011). After consultation with BAM and otherlocal bodies, an RAE panel is largely composedof academics from institutions to be assessed bythe RAE process. The panel also includes a few‘practitioners’ who are rarely, if ever, frombusiness. Since the panel members are effectivelyrepresentatives of a discipline, within a panel asdiverse as B&M it is difficult to know thestandards being set by other panel members,never mind other panels. The determination tohave no journal list, so that each piece of researchis assessed on its own merit, adds to theopportunity for varying standards both withinand across panels.Across the whole RAE process the panels are

then brought together knowing the likely prestigeand financial implications of their decision upontheir academic disciplines, their own institutionsand their competitors. They also know that if theyare more rigorous than other panels, their dis-cipline, departments and B&M as a whole could bedamaged. Even following the surge in internationalexcellence typified by the gains between 1996 and2001 (Figure 1), there remains a feeling thatB&M’s RAE panel was harsher than other panelsand so damaged business schools’ funding andprestige within universities for years. It may not besurprising that B&M’s RAE panel found thatbusiness research had surged once again in 2008 sothat it was, this time, close to the social scienceaverage. Even then, some disciplines and panelsput in a sprint at the end so that their ratings (andfunding) kept ahead of the pack.Contrast the RAE process with the IO

approach that has accompanied the Netherlands’rise (Table 4) in the eyes of the internationalresearch community (Tunzelmann and Mbula,

19680

20

40

60

80

100

1976 1984 1992 2000 2008

Four+

Three

Two

One

Figure 3. Proportions of papers with number of authors



2003). Here, the much smaller panels arecompletely composed of researchers from outsidethe Netherlands. No journal list is imposed butthe research groups in institutions are gaugedagainst a short list of A- and B-journals that theynominate. Although the lists are independentthey are almost identical and contain no Dutchjournals. Indeed the journal publication metricthey apply is the same as is likely to be found inthe world’s leading business schools.The difference in the standard between the UK

and the Netherlands is even more striking thanthe time series suggest. For example, an analysisof the UTD database for the last RAE period(2002–2008) showed that many individual Dutch-born and trained professors in Groningen,Tilburg and Erasmus business schools had moreA-journal publications than all the British-bornand affiliated academics put together.HEFCE’s chopping and changing of their

research assessment framework and the consequentcatch-up being played by panel members caught upin the process may be damaging Britain’s B&Mresearch productivity. To find that increased pro-portions of Britain’s research output was ‘world-leading’ in RAE 2008 meant that the definition ofworld-leading had to be diluted to the point thatseveral institutions were recognized as having morethan 25% of their output world-leading whilemaking no contribution to the internationallyrecognized world-leading journals (Figure 2). Thishas two effects that are likely to damage Britain’sinternational research standing. First, several busi-ness schools were lauded and rewarded for beingworld-leading when they were not. Second, trueworld-leading research in the UK was discounted,thus damaging the reputation and funding of thefew institutions truly striving for internationalexcellence – LBS being the extreme example.Another contrast between the Dutch and

British research assessment shows naive metricscan damage research capacity. The Dutch systemexamines the productivity of research groupsover the period assessed. This means that ifProfessor Wadel were at Groningen at the startof the period being assessed, his research outputwhile at Groningen would be Groningen’s. Incontrast, in Britain’s RAE 2008, the whole ofProfessor Flash’s past research would be attachedto Poppleton business school if they wererecruited just before the RAE muster date andleft shortly after. Since this comical model was

well publicized it is not surprising that much ofthe world-leading research in RAE 2008 was bypeople who have since left (Otley, 2009).The dangers of the RAE staff count go beyond

allowing opportunistic deans to window dress forthe RAE. The risk of losing the whole of aresearcher’s output if that researcher leaves justbefore the RAE muster date reduces the incentiveto invest in home-grown talent. Equally, highprofile ‘galloping midgets’ (Keegan, Davidsonand Brill, 2005) can maximize their reward byjumping ship, or threatening to do so, as themuster date approaches.Although disliked by many academics, research

evaluations can be a useful tool for rewarding anddeveloping research potential. The wise applicationof international metrics initially in the Netherlandsand more recently in Germany has shown howthey can invigorate an academic community.Unfortunately, research metrics poorly devisedand applied can destroy the excellent and promoteunder-achievement and short-termism.One consequence of the adherence to congra-

tulatory local metrics is the encouragement of anacademic development process that hampers highacademic achievement. This is evident at all threestages of the process in the UK: research training,probation and during tenure (Figure 4).

Research training

There is a perception in the UK that big is goodand accumulating a lot of PhD students and PhDgraduates is to be admired. Indeed, the size andcompletion rate of a PhD programme is one ofthe few measures of research culture thatBritain’s RAE panels had quantified (HEFCE,2006). So extreme is the British drive for size thatit is not uncommon for some British academics tobe supervising more PhDs than are on the wholedoctoral programme of some top research groupsin other countries. Why size? Besides the RAEmetric, it can pay both schools and academic staffto increase their PhD programme. A schoolbenefits if the PhD students pay overseas fees orif they help to attract research council scholarships.Staff often benefit by research, teaching and othersupport provided by doctoral students and fromlinear work allocation models that trade-off super-vision against teaching and research output.



Several weaknesses of British doctoral pro-grammes follow from the quest for large num-bers. The first is the lowering of intake quality. Astrong American research group typically attractsabout 600 applicants for their small doctoralintake each year. Unlike the UK, the doctoralapplication process across the whole country is inphase with schools competing for the beststudents until offers close. A request for topGraduate Management Admission Test (GMAT)scores, e.g. 98% of the test-taking population inthe previous three years scoring lower than thecandidate’s numerical score (GMAC, 2009), is onemethod of sorting applicants, but the mostimportant methods are interviews and comprehen-sive application procedures. A common metricused to compare leading schools is the destinationof their PhD graduates. Thus, the intake qualityreally does count. Interestingly, one item thatAmerican schools do not request is a researchproposal – always a tricky exercise for anyone toprepare who is not already on a research degree.The cost of scholarships is one reason why

leading US business schools do not have largeprogrammes. The few successful candidates havetheir fees waived and receive generous scholar-ships. Here lies a key difference between manyBritish PhD programmes and those in ‘world-leading’ schools. In the latter, doctoral pro-grammes are small, highly selective and wellfunded. In contrast, many British doctoralprogrammes are large, less selective and havemany self-funded students.

Before the 1970s British doctoral programmeswere craft apprenticeships or ‘Sitting next toNelly’, as it was sometimes called. Researchtraining was insignificant and supervisors guidedcandidates through their project. This couldcontain the seeds of the country’s internationalacademic decline since students could obtain adoctorate while only knowing the methodologythat they used. The Economic and Social ResearchCouncil’s (ESRC’s) accredited programmes havebrought some research training into doctoralprogrammes but the intensity, duration, breadthand level that the Research Council prescribes iswell below that of leading international schools.One reason for the difference is intake quality.After carefully screening their research degreecandidates, one leading Dutch school was able torun modules on econometrics and mathematicalgame theory in the first week of their programme,a level of analysis that many ESRC accreditedprogrammes never reach.After starting at an advanced level, the taught

part of US doctoral programmes is an intensivetwo years, is heavily examined and ends with aresearch proposal. Some of the top schools,including Kellogg and LBS, start with the intentionthat only a minority of students will be allowed toproceed beyond the taught component. Fewcontinue to provide scholarships to students whoare not progressing well.Leading international PhD programmes are

elite in terms of teaching and supervision as wellas the students they accept. Courses are usually

Admin

Teaching

Scholarship

Research

support

Teaching

Publications

Candidate

RecruitSalary

Leadership

TenureProbation

Temporary

Doctoral

appointment

PermanentTraining

appointment

Supervision

Mentoring

Figure 4. The academic development process



taught in modules exclusively by professors whoare world leaders in their subject. Their flexiblemodular structure allows international scholarsto lead modules as well as relieving top professorsof a weekly ‘grind’. Similarly, the supervisoryteam consists only of professors publishing at thetop international level. Basically, across thewhole programme, A-journal output is assumed.The ESRC’s Postgraduate Training Frame-

work, with its emphasis on ‘coherent university-wide training provision in the social science’ thatbuilds ‘upon the considerable strengths thatalready exist across the social science researchbase’, is at odds with the research training of theleading international schools. Sharing provisionof research training across the social sciencescontinues to be reflected in the Research Coun-cil’s new policy on selective funding to accreditedDoctoral Training Centres (ESRC, 2011). Ratherthan working across the social sciences, theleading international schools work across net-works within disciplines. For example, althoughthe Ivy League business schools on America’s eastcoast are each hugely strong by world standards,they share resources across their marketing orfinance PhD programmes. Their students areallowed to study modules outside their discipline,and may even share some modules with a relateddiscipline, but the focus is doctoral training fortheir profession. Similarly, the Dutch schools keepstrong links across the Netherlands and world-class researchers elsewhere in the world. TheESRC’s proposal also begs a question: is there‘considerable strength’ in the social science re-search base in the UK, or is the ‘considerablestrength’ a delusion promoted by a locallycalibrated research community?Most of the inputs into doctoral programmes

suggest that the US model is better designed thanthe British version in giving the training necessaryto publish in A-journals. However, the outputexpected of US-based students may disadvantagethem. In many UK business schools there is noexpectation that all doctoral students teach. And,when there is such a demand, the teaching isoften at a low level or provides students withadditional income. In contrast, American PhDstudents are expected to give their supervisorsresearch assistant (RA) support for up to 25hours a week besides attending numerous coursesand doing their own research. Perhaps thesedemands deliver an advantage. The student RA

supports a professor publishing in A-journals, sothey learn on-the-job. Furthermore, like partici-pants on top MBA programmes, the studentslearn to work hard. There is no room forlethargic Labrador retriever or lap dog PhDstudents at Wharton (Speed and Saunders, 2002).

Probation

The fourth year of an American doctoralprogramme is about students battling to get atenure track appointment in a top institution.This is important to US business schoolsbecause a critical measure of the strength of aPhD programme is the prestige of the insti-tution where their doctoral graduates areplaced. Unlike the UK, where students trickleoff the end of the doctoral programme, USschools follow a rigid appointments cycle withthe huge summer conference-come-recruiting fairat their apex. The latter jobs ‘jamboree’ isencouraged by students not being allowed to havetheir first appointment at the institution wherethey studied for their doctorate – a tradition that isupheld in all the leading academic countries. Sincenepotism is a corruption that damages economiesand other failing university systems (The Econo-mist, 2008), it may also be damaging Britishacademic departments.America is able to attract exceptionally strong,

mature PhD candidates from across the world bythe reputation of its universities and the immedi-ate financial reward achieved by graduates. Forexample, the ‘rookie rate’ for the most sought-after ‘quants’ marketing PhD is US$150,794,among the highest in the country’s universitysystem (Cui et al., 2008). When competition isglobal, Britain’s national pay agreements andcivil service salaries, which reward age, put B&Mat a disadvantage in attracting the world’s bestPhD students and graduates. In many humanitiesand social science disciplines, however, Britain’sstarting salaries are not so different from inter-national rates, so there is more of a chance ofattracting excellent young scholars.Britain’s short probationary periods (typically

three years) for junior academic appointmentsencourage focusing on quantity, not quality. Onlythe most adept researcher teams can produce anA-journal publication within such a time frame,leading to probationers’ focus on output that can



be more quickly achieved. In contrast, top USschools set a small volume of A-journal papers asa probationary target. The average is about two,although some top schools require up to six.There are rewards and penalties for ‘rookies’making it into the top schools. Besides earning thehighest average salary (US$152,226), their teach-ing loads are relatively low. In contrast, the lesssuccessful candidates are paid less (US$103,384)and have to teach three times more. Here lies theincentive for the probationary staff in the topschools to publish. Those failing to achieve therequisite number of A-journal publications will bedenied tenure. It also means moving on to alesser institution with a lower salary and higherteaching load.

Tenure

Following their initial appointment as a proba-tioner, the young academic’s salary in the UKwill slowly increase as a reward for aging and asthe universities and colleges unions argue for auniversal cost of living rise. Some will also receivediscretionary increments or promotion. TheirAmerican colleagues are less fortunate. Untilthey achieve tenure, their salaries are likely todecline relative to the ‘rookies’. Based on theaverage of the AACSB’s 672 US members, thesalary progression based on an index of 100%new doctorates is as follows: assistant professor98%, associate professors 101% and full profes-sors 128%, although newly hired full professorscommand 170% (AACSB, 2008). America’snational Gini coefficient, the classical measureof equality, is amongst the highest in thedeveloped world (The Economist, 2009), yetAmerican academic salary differentials are lowerthan in the UK. Such low differentials are typicalof a collegial organization where a communityshares a common purpose and are generallyassociated with economic and social success(Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009).There are reasons why managerialism has

overpowered collegiality in British universities.Over the last few decades they have become state-funded institutions that are central to socialengineering and intervention in the public services.These sap energy. British business schools sharethe pain of international accreditation and mediarankings with their international competitors, but

they also face layers of internal and state bureau-cracy that are momentous by international stan-dards. The extra administrative load that Britishuniversities carry leads to the acceptance ofadministrative loads as part of career advance-ment, higher pay and pensions.

Not only research evaluation

The RAE is one national burden. The idea ofassessing and rewarding research productivity is alaudable British invention that is being followedby other countries (Tunzelmann and Mbula,2003). However, the twists and turns in the wayit is conducted distracts from building domesticresearch strengths and encourages RAE game-playing at the expense of capacity building. Wegive an example. Early RAEs evaluated the UoAbased on the research produced in the unit overthe period being studied. This is what the Dutchassessment exercises continue to do. Contrast thiswith the newly invented HEFCE model wherepersons joining a UoA in November 2007 bringwith them all their earlier output. What strategydoes the new British model encourage? Does aUoA invest in developing staff over years andaccept the danger that their whole investmentmay be lost if the person moves at the lastminute? Or, do they concentrate on buying innew hires just in time to get the full RAE reward(Saunders and Lee, 2005)? After all, from anHEFCE funding viewpoint, it matters little if thenew hire moves on; the RAE money is in the bag.We call this the Chelsea FC model of academicdevelopment depicting a team building approachthat is based on paying high salaries to buy inoverseas players rather than developing thenational game (The Times, 2008).The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) is

another HEFCE plaything. Recognizing teachingquality is laudable, but the QAA’s ever changingmethodology contrasts with the more stable peer-based approach taken by the internationalaccrediting bodies. There is a danger that eachlurch in a quality assurance process adds layers ofpractices, administration and bureaucracy thatdo not add value. Presumably, even the QAAthinks many of its methods add little value sincethey are prone to abandon past practices, such asteaching observation, each time a new fad arrives.



The methodologically flawed National StudentSurvey is now at the core of teaching evaluation.From habit British universities do many things

that are alien to systems elsewhere in the world.For example, they run halls of residence, providecareer guidance, use external examiners, havearcane and rigid examination regulations, andhave hierarchies of committees that process theminutia of courses or help to get failing studentsthrough their degrees. All are laudable activities,but distract academics from their core activity ofcreating and imparting knowledge. They createadministrators and administration for those whoshould be teaching and doing research.

Conclusion

This paper provides lessons, but also raises ques-tions for individual academics, their deans andnational policy makers. All three constituenciesface choices. They have to decide if they want toremain in their comfortable national environmentdriven by local research assessments that delivertheir locally proclaimed international standing.Individual business school academics in the

UK and other countries outside the academicelite face difficult challenges. As explained else-where in this issue (Engwall and Danell, 2011;Masrani, Williams and McKiernan, 2011), manywork with the strain of growth, while universitiestreat B&M as a ‘cash cow’ and access to researchgrants are disproportionately low. They also haveto carry an administrative burden, partly causedby HEFCE teaching initiatives and universityresponses to them. Moreover, unless trainedin a few elite schools in a few countries (Table5), they are likely to have received researchtraining of lower quality and duration thannecessary. This is reflected in the relatively lowproportion of local academics with British PhDspublishing in A-journals (Table 8). Added to this,academics often face demands to publish at avolume and speed that is inconsistent with theneeds of A-journals.Survival for individuals in this hostile environ-

ment requires research focus and collaboration.Those who wish to achieve the highest interna-tional standard in their research need to identifyand get embedded in the locus of top research interms of research groups, conferences, academicsand journals. This may be a challenging task

for those working outside the world’s leadingschools since there is no guarantee of access tolocal mentors. Two lessons are quickly learnedwithin any research-intensive community. First,top research is time consuming. Arguably, it maybe quick to ‘knock off’ a local journal paper,whereas any diversion of effort to research andpublication in the top journals consumes time. Theemphasis is quality, not quantity, as illustrated bythe long tenure periods, tight quality requirementsand low volume requirements in top US businessschools. Second, as Figure 3 shows, top research isincreasingly a team effort where researchers oftenwork productively together for decades. Thismeans earning the membership of a top teamand developing skills that other team membersappreciate. For the English-speaking peoples theirmarketable skill can be the ability to write clearlyin the language of all the world’s leading journals.For researchers from other countries, includingmany in the developing economies (Table 6), theircontribution could be derived from the excellentquantitative training at first degree level.A final lesson for individuals concerns research

supervision. Excellent research students are rareand good research supervision takes time. Britain’sdependence upon academics from outside the UKto publish in the top journals shows how few B&Mresearch students achieve top standards (Table 8).So, like publications, the focus should be upon thequality, not quantity, of research students. Thisstill leaves a problem for supervisors: the likely lackof high quality research training. Here, the activemembership of a top research community can paydividends. Even the world’s top business schoolsrealize that they cannot provide a completeresearch programme to the level required, so theycollaborate and fund their students to followexternal modules.Deans face a stark choice. Do they invest in the

slow process of building international researchersor bow to HEFCE’s encouragement of the ChelseaFC model? In making that decision they need toconsider the sustainability of the strategy theychoose. In buying international academics they arecompeting with the American schools with billiondollar endowments, in a country with lower taxrates and a lower cost of living than the UK.Also, like individual academics, deans have to

ask themselves, do I play the national game orstrive for true, unambiguous international ex-cellence? Do I wrench the school out of its



comfort zone and suffer the pain of changingwhat we are used to, in order to aim higher? Timeis not on the side of the complacent. Someleading British institutions have wakened to theinternational challenge, albeit by hiring fromoutside the UK. Decline is the inevitable con-sequence of inaction.The slashing of LBS’s HEFCE research fund-

ing shows the danger of a dean pursuing inter-national excellence in a research communitydedicated to serving nationally defined standards.By using national peer-determined measures ofexcellence, the RAE panel did an excellent job inlooking after their peers. Showing so manypeople as excellent involved equating much ofLBS’s truly internationally recognized A-journaloutput with a quota the peer-review panel definesas ‘RAE world-leading’. The scale of thismanipulation is shown in the number of RAEtop-rated schools with almost no A-journaloutput. Besides LBS, other business schools toowere caught as their efforts at truly world-leadingresearch were swamped in an avalanche gradeescalation (Figure 2). Assuming that local peer-review is to continue, it is a brave dean whostrives for true international standards in asystem dedicated to provincial excellence.HEFCE has to grasp the biggest lesson of all.

Can it accept that the past decades of itsmeddling in the university system is now destroy-ing the international standing of some academicdisciplines? Will it accept that changing researchassessment methods again and bringing relevanceto the core will consume time and creativity, butsteer the academic community away from inter-national excellence. Like the Dutch and HongKong, will it use overseas scholars to gauge theinternational research output against globallyrecognized metrics? Has it the humility to acceptthat ‘internationally leading research’ has ameaning that is not set in Bristol?It is easy to see why HEFCE backed away

from using internationally recognized metrics infavour of peer-informed methods. Many aca-demics, and probably HEFCE, know that usinginternational metrics would expose successivegenerations of the emperor’s new clothes. Ratherthan boasting an exemplary case of public-sectorintervention that squeezed increasingly over-worked researchers, international metrics wouldshow the RAE as having engineered decliningresearch quality. Perhaps they think it is better to

keep quiet and bask in the glow of Britain’sdisproportionate number of world-ranked uni-versities, rather than expose their research to trueinternational comparison. Keep quiet and every-one, the Government, Research Councils andacademics, will be happy and, just maybe, no onewill notice the delusion.We face challenges that demand us questioning

much of what we do. But there is no reason whyBritish B&M should not be world-leading in thequantity of their high-quality output. Other re-search communities have shown the way. Table 4suggests that, until three decades ago, the Nether-lands was academically barren. Their fortunes roseafter they adapted their state-funded Europeaneducational system to achieve international researchexcellence. Through this process, business schoolsin new universities, such as Erasmus and Tilburg,have grown to be world-leading. The Netherlands isnow a net exporter of its professors to leadingAmerican business schools, yet still keeps enoughstaff in their own state system to lead Europe.More recently, Germany has shot into interna-

tional research prominence. To do so, their Govern-ment concentrated resources in a few leadinguniversities and radically changed their publicationfocus. For generations the excellent research outputof German academics was lost in local journals.That has changed. The German A-journal list isnow internationally defined with all the localjournals being relegated. Such is the strength ofthe German academic training and traditions thatthe switch was manageable within a few years.Other countries that have overtaken the UK’s

academic productivity can help show the way.There is nothing magic about it; it is just abouthard work, training and appropriate incentives.On the other hand, we do have a lot of catchingup to do. Indications are that the average A-journal output of many of the full professors inthe Netherlands is more than all the academics intheir discipline with a British PhD working in theUK! Of course, each one of the Dutch academicsis not as productive as all the academics inBritain’s premier business schools since, likeBritain’s football Premier League, the UK hasbought in a lot of players from overseas. RichardScudmore, the Premier League’s chief executive,recognizes the dilemma:

If you have a toss-up over a home-grown player, we

want the clubs to have the incentive to keep the



home-grown player, where at the moment you canhave the argument that it’s cheaper to bring in

players from outside . . .. Philosophically, what weare doing is asking: ‘Is there more we could do todevelop the English talent, which would negate theneed to go abroad and look for talent? Can we do

anything to make sure that the home talent is asgood as it can be?’ (Kay, 2009)

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John Saunders is Distinguished Professor at Audencia Nantes Ecole de Management, France. Hisresearch interests include evolutionary marketing, the future of marketing and business researchpolicy. His work on marketing strategy and modelling have appeared in the Journal of Marketing,Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of International Business Studies, MISQuarterly, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Product Innovation Manage-ment, British Journal of Management and elsewhere.

Veronica Wong is President of the European Marketing Academy, Professor of Marketing at theSchool of Business, Management and Economics, University of Sussex, UK, and DistinguishedResearch Professor at Audencia Nantes Ecole de Management, France. Her research interests aremarketing strategy, the future of marketing and international new product development. Her workhas appeared in Journal of Product Innovation Management, Research Policy, Journal ofInternational Business Studies, Industrial Marketing Management, British Journal of Managementand European Journal of Marketing among others.

Carolyne Saunders is a doctoral student in marketing at the Johnson Graduate School ofManagement at Cornell University, New York State. She has an MSc in economics and businessresearch from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and an MA in economics fromCambridge, UK. Her research interests include the quantitative analysis of dynamic consumerbehaviour, and theoretical and empirical modelling of new product development. Her work hasappeared in Marketing Science.



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