Confronting the Crisis of Confidence in Management Studies: Why Senior Scholars Need to Stop Setting a Bad Example

There is an emerging crisis of confidence in management studies. This is expressed in growing disquiet about the lack of value in our research outputs and increasing frustration about the nature of teaching in business schools. This crisis of confidence can be understood as a response to a series of developments, including an apparent lack of practical or academic impact from most published research, a narrowing of focus in the field, increases in unethical behavior, the downgrading of teaching, and increased pressure in both publishing and teaching. Traditional academic values are coming into conflict with processes of rationalization in business schools and universities. The changes driving these outcomes are long-term and reflect powerful institutional pressures, rendering them difficult to change. Nonetheless, established management studies scholars have a responsibility to address them. One way they can show leadership in this regard is by setting a good example. Three suggestions can be made about how to do this: rejecting the fiction that what we do is analogous to laboratory science; rejecting the myth of what this essay calls “the heroic workaholic publishing machine;” and refusing to promote flawed approaches to assessing academic success.