Management Research in the UK: A Personal View
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00768.x |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Author | Cary L. Cooper |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
Viewpoint
Management Research in the UK:
A Personal View
Cary L. Cooper
Lancaster University Management School, University of Lancaster, Lancaster LA1 4YW, UK
Email: c.cooper1@lancaster.ac.uk
Thomas Jefferson once reflected that ‘the past is
prologue’, so to understand the current state and
future development of management research in
the UK we have to briefl y explore its origins. T he
academic field of management in UK higher
education has a very recent history, in contrast
with many other academic disciplines. Indeed, the
first academic presence of management in the UK
was only in l917, at the seat of the industrial
revolution, Manchester. The Manchester Me-
chanics Institution established the Department of
Industrial Administration, whose role was speci-
fically to train engineers and scientists for poten-
tial future managerial roles, with little if any
research infrastructure or strategy. This Institute
metamorphosedinto the University of Manchester
Institute of Science and Technology in 1966 (as an
autonomous body but also as a Faculty of the
University of Manchester), at around the same
time as the Foundation of Management Educa-
tion was established to create two UK centres of
excellence in management education, the London
Business School and the Manchester Business
School – both created through private sector
funding in 1964. From 1964 onwards, the number
and range of academic development in the
management sciences escalated to the point that
by the 2009 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)
there were over 100 business and management
schools in higher education institutes, producing
thousands of undergraduates, MBAs and PhDs.
The field went through what Preston and Post
(1974) described as the three stages of managerial
development, which they referred to as the ‘three
managerial revolutions’. The first managerial
revolution was the appearance of management
itself as a specialized function within hierarchical
organizations. The second revolution, ‘professio-
nalization’, was encouraged by the growth in
industrial organizations and the complexity of
managerial tasks. The third, ‘participation’, was
‘the inclusion of persons and groups involved and
concerned with the diverse outcomes of manage-
rial activity as participants in the managerial
process’. It is this third revolution that led to the
importance of research, particularly in system-
atically evaluating what worked and what did not
work in this managerial process.
There has been a longer history of research in a
limited number of subjects allied and/or integral
to management, such as economics, finance,
occupational psychology, operational research
and the like, but as new functional areas of
interest emerged in management (i.e. marketing,
human resource management), research was
given a new impetus, stimulating interdisciplinary
work between disciplines and functions within
management and between the management
sciences and other social science disciplines. But
the real sea change occurred with the advent of
the first RAE in the 1980s. This process of
rewarding universities for research output di-
rectly had the effect of encouraging universities to
recruit and develop their researchers, and in the
naturally competitive world of business schools it
had an even more profound impact of galvaniz-
ing researchers to publish their work in the best
international journals. There were not only the
individual incentives in terms of career advance-
ment through their research output, but also by
enhancing their research portfolio it allowed
them to be more attractive to higher rated
British Journal of Management, Vol. 22, 343–346 (2011)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00768.x
r2011 The Author
British Journal of Management r2011 British Academy of Management. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
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