Aiming for Excellence: Reflections on the Advanced Institute of Management Research and its Elite
| Published date | 01 April 2016 |
| Date | 01 April 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12147 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 27, 438–454 (2016)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12147
Aiming for Excellence: Reflections on the
Advanced Institute of Management
Research and its Elite
Stuart Macdonald,1John Steen2and Rahmat Shazi3
1School of Management, University of Leicester, UK, 2UQ Business School, University of Queensland,
Brisbane, Australia, and 3Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Perak, Malaysia
Corresponding author email: s.macdonald@sheeld.ac.uk
In 2002, the UK government launched the Advanced Institute of Management Research,
a major initiative intended to raisethe quality of research in business schools. Rather than
oering research grants in open competition, AIM deliberately funded a select fewlead-
ing lights in management. Insucient allowance was made for the ResearchAssessment
Exercise,which measured research excellence in terms of papers published in top journals.
The AIM’s elite exploited its existing publishing advantage, and AIM provided further
resources to aid their eorts. The AIM recruited willing acolytes to work with its elite in
fashioning the sort of papers required by the top journals of management – positive pa-
pers, consensual and endlessly citable. Analysis of the publishing patterns of AIM senior
fellows reveals researchcliques and publication silos rather than a network organization.
Much as the elite saw its AIM funding as recognition of its own excellence, so AIM it-
self came to be seen as acknowledgement of the excellence of management research as
a whole. That AIM existed to raise management research fromintellectual poverty was
forgotten. The AIM was wound up in 2012, having spent £30 million, most of it on the
subject’s elite. The problems that beset management research remain.
Introduction
With generous government funding, the UK’s
Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) was
launched in 2002. The AIM was wound up in
2012. The initiativewas intended to boost the qual-
ity of management research in the UK, recog-
nized as the poorest of all the country’s research
The authors are grateful to this journal’s referees and to
Geo Wood, Editor of the British Journal of Manage-
ment, for suggesting how this paper might be improved.
They also thank the many people who contributed infor-
mation during the paper’slong gestation. Given the sensi-
tivities surrounding AIM, most must remain anonymous.
However, welcome advice was received from Dimitris
Assimakopoulos, Jeremy Cheah, Sam MacAulay, John
Barber, Paula Knee and Shuxing Yin. Ozzie Jones and
Steve Conway provided encouragement when encourage-
ment was most needed. Forsins of commission and omis-
sion, only the authors are to blame.
in the social sciences. The AIM’s director con-
sidered AIM ‘an unusual, if not unique, initia-
tive’ (Wensley, 2006, p.128), but there was noth-
ing at all unusual about government intervention
to assist management research (see Ghoshal, 2005;
Whitley, 1984). In many respects, AIM adopted
a typical centre of excellence model of the sort
underpinning science and technology research
groups in New Zealand and Finland (Academy
of Finland, 2009). Where AIM really was un-
usual was in how it supported management re-
search. Other government schemes lookedto com-
petition among research proposals to decide what
research should be supported. The AIM, however,
supported the individual rather than the research
project, the argument being thatleaders in the field
would know best what research was needed. The
AIM fellows were deliberatelydrawn from the elite
of management research.
© 2015 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
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Aiming for Excellence 439
In order to support and encourage cutting edge
innovation in management research,AIM has taken
an unusual step with its Fellowship Scheme of
backing people rather than projects. (http://www
.aimresearch.org/about-aim/aim-fellows, accessed
July 2013)
The AIM strategy was bold, its success depen-
dent in large part on whether the AIM wouldstim-
ulate a spirit of noblesse oblige among the elite of
management research. There was, though, a major
obstacle. Over AIM’s lifetime, journal publication
came to be accepted as the major measure of aca-
demic performance in UK universities, overshad-
owing all other academic endeavour. Academics
ignored this reality at their peril. How was AIM
to incorporate this practical imperative within its
overall mission?
From a theoretical perspective, we can under-
stand the AIM as an elite project. Although elites
are rarely defined in the literature, Khan (2012,
p. 262) sees resources as key. Elites are composed
of ‘those who havevastly disproportionate control
over or access to a resource’. Morgan, Hirsch and
Quack (2015) also identify elites by their capacity
to exercise power and controlresources. While dif-
ferent strands of elite theory focuson resource con-
trol by the individual or the structure of relations
that confer this control, it is clear that relation-
ships and resource possession are closely linked
(Bowman et al., 2015; Mills, 2000, 2002). Through
their control of resources and relations, elites are
able to construct worlds that are disconnected
from the mainstream (Khan, 2012). The deliber-
ate creation of an AIM elite to benefit UK man-
agement research was always a bold venture in
that elites and their self-dealing can impede insti-
tutional development (Lachman, 2009). The AIM
looked to its elite to build democratic, collabora-
tive research networks, which is not the sort of
behaviour normally associated with elites (Bow-
man et al., 2015; Frank and Cook, 1995; Savage
and Williams, 2008). In an academic context, re-
sources can take many forms. Funding is an ob-
vious form, but high-calibre postdoctoral fellows
and positions of influence, such as journal editorial
membership, can also confer power on academic
elites. The abilityto influence research priorities in
a discipline, or how quality and performance are
defined, also carry an authority that can reinforce
elites.
This paper looks first at the origins of the AIM,
focusing particularly on prevailing attitudes to-
wards management research. It then turns swiftly
from the role AIM might have played in support
of industry, discovering little stomach for the task
among the elite of management research. Next, the
paper considers the leadership of the AIM and the
appointment of its fellows.A further section places
the AIM in the context of the Research Assess-
ment Exercise (RAE) and the dominant measure
of academic performance, publication in top jour-
nals, analysing in some detail the publication net-
works of AIM senior fellows. Co-authorship links
suggest that, despite lofty ambitions to be a net-
work organization, the AIM was much more suc-
cessful in serving the publication requirements of
its elite.
The origins of AIM
In the June of 2001, the Economic and Social
Research Council (ESRC), the UK government
funding body for academic research in the so-
cial sciences, announced a ‘management initiative’
entailing expenditure of £1 million in 2002/2003
and £4 million annually thereafter. The AIM was
launched in 2002, funded by the ESRCand the En-
gineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
(EPSRC)to the tune of £17 million (eventually £30
million), a vast sum in the context of the penuryaf-
flicting academic research in the UK.
Some years before, in 1993, the ESRC had
taken the unusual step of forming a Commis-
sion on Management Research (1994) to inquire
into the quality of management research in the
UK. Far fewer research proposals in management
than in any of the other social sciences were be-
ing judged worthy of ESRC funding; of one group
of 778 ESRC awards, just 19 were in management
(Caulkin, 1994): extraordinary, considering that
the subject dominated the social sciences in terms
of sta and student numbers. The Commission,
composed of leading management researchers,had
been formed to examine the weaknesses besetting
management research. Instead, its report covered
the subject’s research strengths, concluding (much
as the AIM would do) that there was nothing at
all wrong with the best management research. The
challenge was to encourage the rest to emulate the
best. The Commission’s report made little impact
(Tranfield,2002), its final lines suggesting that even
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