Business schools and the impact agenda

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the impact agenda in the context of business schools. This includes examining the academic discourse related to the relevance and impact of business schools and understanding the lived experiences of those individual actors – business school academics – who are navigating this agenda daily. This thesis is composed of three distinct yet related papers. The first paper is a systematic literature review that synthesises the fragmented body of knowledge pertaining to the relevance and impact of business schools. By acknowledging the contribution of applying a multidimensional lens to the study of business schools, a holistic thematic framework that provides theoretical directions for the future is developed. This framework emphasises the potential of an institutional logics perspective to viewing business schools, offers a novel proposal for understanding the gap between discussions of research and education, highlights the application of a value co-creation theoretical lens when considering how business schools engage with stakeholders in research and education, and puts forward an all-encompassing stakeholder-centric definition of relevant and impactful knowledge. The second and third papers are based on semi-structured interviews with fifty-nine business school academics across ten research-intensive business schools in the United Kingdom. The second paper finds evidence for three field-level institutional logics in the business school environment: the academic profession logic, the business logic, and the accountability logic. The institutional environment is found to have nurtured an institutionally driven perception of impact among individual actors. This is the perception that impact is an elusive concept, a non-primary mission, and should be measurable to hold value to universities. This highly institutionalised view of impact was found to be exclusionary of the entire range of ways business school academics can be impactful, and as such, has consequences of how individuals identify with the concept of impact.
The third paper explores the academic environment of business schools further, finding that individual actors are constrained in enacting the subservient accountability logic due to the distinct ways in which the institutional environment manifests. The manifestations observed are categorised as metrics & monitoring, administration & bureaucracy, and workload & wellbeing. It is found that these elements contribute to a situation of bounded autonomy for participating in the impact agenda. Furthermore, when observing the academic career lifecycle, more senior academics are perceived as having a greater ability to engage with the notion of impact. This raises questions about the extent to which early career academics are able to, and can be expected to, respond to the impact agenda.

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