Scholarship with Impact
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00769.x |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Author | Andrew M. Pettigrew |
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Scholarship with Impact
Andrew M. Pettigrew
Saı
¨d Business School, University of Oxford, Park End Street, Oxford OX1 1HP, UK
Email: andrew.pettigrew@sbs.ox.ac.uk
This essay offers a personal and therefore partial
view of the possibilities of scholarship with impact.
The challenge of scholarly impact is framed in the
duality of scholarly and policy/practice impact.
This is an aspiration that not all social scientists
interested in the field of management may aspire
to. However, at a time when the British Academy
of Management (BAM) is celebrating its 25th
anniversary, it may be appropriate for some
members of our local and international commu-
nities to raise their aspirations and deliver forms
and processes of knowledge which meet the double
hurdle of scholarly quality and policy/practice
impact (Pettigrew, 1997, 2001).
The paper sets out to accomplish this task
in the following way. The first section outlines
some of the current instrumentalities facing UK
scholars of management in and around the
‘impact agenda’. Of particular interest here are
the recently published Decisions on Assessing
Research Impact, published by Higher Education
Funding Council of England (HEFCE, 2011)
for the Research Excellence Framework (REF)
2014, and the work on impact and assessment
measurement carried out by the Economic and
Social Research Council Evaluation Committee
and published in 2009 and 2011 (ESRC, 2009,
2011). The following section then seeks to con-
textualize the present instrumentalities by locat-
ing the impact agenda in the much wider, deeper
and historically embedded debates on the pur-
poses and practices of social science and manage-
ment research. Reference is made here to some of
the influences on current UK management
research and the way our fields of knowledge
are themselves a product of wider pressures to
change the character of knowledge and how it is
produced. The third section deepens our treat-
ment of impact by examining the progressive
influence of the ESRC Commission on Manage-
ment Research (ESRC, 1994); the British Journal
of Management Special Issue (Hodgkinson,
2001); the work of the ESRC (2009, 2011); and
pressure from scholars on both sides of the
Atlantic, e.g. Hambrick (1994), Pettigrew (1997,
2001), Starkey and Madan (2001) and Van de
Ven (2007). In the fourth section some of the
determinants of research impact in the sphere of
policy and practice are discussed. The fifth and
final section then offers a conclusion.
The impact agenda: current UK
instrumentalities
The recent announcement by HEFCE (2011) that
‘there will be an explicit element to assess the
impact arising from excellent research, alongside
the outputs and environmental elements’ is a
notable step forward in national policy and a
clear statement of intent for the future. The
weighting of 20% for impact alongside the 65%
for outputs and 15% for research environment is
a compromise for those who fought hard to resist
the idea of assessing impact. But the change has
now been made and there is a clear signal that the
20% will be increased in subsequent exercises.
The REF and its predecessor the Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE) perform multiple
functions. They are at once a resource allocation
mechanism to reward high research performers
and admonish the lesser performers; a quality
assessment mechanism; and crucially a potential
mechanism of culture change for all the academic
British Journal of Management, Vol. 22, 347–354 (2011)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00769.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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