Please join us for Professor Matthew Cronin's Distinguished Seminar entitled 'The production and dissemination of management scholarship: A model for transforming our field'.
Abstract
Many have bemoaned the limited influence that management science has on management practice. Many have offered reasons for this (lack of relevance, abstruse writing, a focus on novelty over pragmatism), and solutions to those issues (e.g., limits on what we study, new forms of communication, misaligned incentives). What I argue is that those solutions address symptoms, not root causes. The root of the problem is the fields’ (mostly implicit) perspective on how knowledge is produced. We treat scholarly activities as portfolio of loosely coupled functions as opposed to a production system. Reinterpreting the field as a production system that should be specialized and coordinated makes it easier to identify who does what, and more importantly how these activities come together to produce and disseminate what is new, true, and important. In this talk I will describe the production system and show how it works as a value chain. This system means re-thinking many fundamental beliefs about what constitutes impact, and what constitutes translation. Yet if it works it should improve the knowledge we produce as well as the quality of the careers we have.
Matthew A. Cronin (Ph.D. 2004, Carnegie Mellon University) is a Professor of Management at George Mason University. His research examines the inter- and intra- personal processes that make collaboration more creative and effective. He is also interested in system dynamics, and the nature of knowledge creation in management research. His work has appeared in top-tier management publications, has been featured in a variety of popular media outlets, and was presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He was the 2016 Conflict Management Division Chair. He served as Coeditor in Chief of Organizational Psychology Review (2019-2022) and The Academy of Management Annals (2023-2026). He coauthored two books: The Influential Negotiator (Sage Publishing, 2020) and The Craft of Creativity (Stanford University Press, 2018), which was a finalist for AOM’s 2019 George R. Terry book award. He is currently working on a handbook for how the field of management science should operate as a production system.