The Research Evaluation and Globalization of Business Research
| Author | John Saunders,Carolyne Saunders,Veronica Wong |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00755.x |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
The Research Evaluation and Globalization
of Business Research
John Saunders, Veronica Wong
1
and Carolyne Saunders
2
Audencia, France, and Bird Cottage, Ditchling, East Sussex BN6 8TZ, UK,
1
Sussex University, UK,
and Audencia, France, and
2
Cornell University, New York, USA
E-mail: jsxtsr2@btinternet.com
There is contrast between the surge in the quality of business and management research
reported in successive Research Assessment Exercises and Britain’s inconsistent
contribution to the world’s leading business and management journals over the last 40
years. A census of top journals since 1968 shows a relative decline of the English-speaking
peoples and a rise in the contribution from parts of Southeast Asia and northern Europe.
Unlike the USA and the euro-area, where the top researchers are mainly born and research
trained in their own country, the UK’s leading business and management researchers tend
to be non-locals trained outside the UK.
The RAE has been extremely successful. It has
evolved from a quality-assurance process to a
competition for funding, while successfully retain-
ing its original function of driving up standards
through reputation incentives. (Roberts Report, in
Joint Funding Council, 2003)
The surge in both the quantity and quality of
Britain’s ‘world-leading’ business research reported
in Britain’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)
2008 Unit of Analysis 36 Subject Overview Report
(Otley, 2009) supports Roberts’s (Joint Funding
Council, 2003) view of the positive influence of the
RAE. However, these local views contrast with a
view from outside the UK of Britain’s declining
share of papers in world-leading journals in one
business discipline: marketing (Stremersch and
Verhoef, 2005). Extending Stremersch and Verhoef’s
data to include RAE 2008 revealed a continued
decline in Britain’s contribution to marketing’s ‘A-
journals’ (Saunders and Wong, 2011). From the
earliest period examined (1964–1973), when Britain
accounted for 2.2% of world output, to the period
including Britain’s first RAE (1984–1993), British
marketing academics retained their position as the
third most productive nation behind the USA and
Canada. By the period including RAE 2008 (2002–
2008), the share of output had declined to 0.9% and
lagged behind the USA, the Netherlands, Germany,
Belgium, Canada, Hong Kong, France and Israel.
Symptomatic of the decline is the finding that 82%
of Britain’s A-journal marketing contributions over
2002–2008 were by researchers whose country of
origin and research training was from outside the
UK. A related statistic is that none of the papers
over 2002–2008 was by a person whose country of
origin and research training was British. This
contrasts with 48% and 59% of contributors from
the euro-area and the USA respectively who were
born and research-trained in the country of their
academic affiliation.
The purpose of this paper is to examine if the
temporal pattern shown by Britain’s marketing
academic community is also true of other business
and management (B&M) disciplines. If the pat-
terns are alike there are policy implications for the
funding of business research in the UK. In
particular, how and why have the Higher Educa-
tion Funding Council for England’s (HEFCE’s)
Research Assessment and the Research Council’s
research funding presided over a decline in
Britain’s B&M research? Also, since other coun-
tries have followed the UK in introducing national
research evaluations (Ugolini and Casilli, 2005),
have they all had a similar influence?
Alternatively, if the trend in marketing publica-
tions is different from that in other disciplines,
British Journal of Management, Vol. 22, 401–419 (2011)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00755.x
r2011 The Author(s)
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.
what accounts for that difference since they all
operate under the same umbrella of business
schools, universities and higher education system?
We start by looking at the trends in leading
international B&M research as evaluated through
successive research assessments. We then com-
pare the world-leading outputs of business
schools according to the RAE with their outputs
in ‘A-journals’ that are regarded as world-leading
by top business schools across the world. Next we
compare the pattern of B&M research over the
past four decades. Finally we draw implications
for researchers, business school deans and higher
education policy.
The RAE from 1986 to 2008
The quality of B&M research assessed during the
RAE in 2008 means that its research will be
funded at a rate close to the social science
average. This contrasts with the RAE 2001 ‘mess’
(Lipsett, 2005) where the independent calibration
of disciplines resulted in huge differences in the
average research rating and consequent funding –
a conspicuous anomaly being that the accounting
and finance (A&F) panel was more generous with
their 5 ratings than B&M.
Unfortunately, B&M’s RAE 2008 success was
a pyrrhic victory, since successive funding rounds
have seen research budgets for social science and
B&M cut in order to devote funding to science,
technology, engineering and medicine depart-
ments. So violent is this change that London
Business School (LBS), the UK’s higher educa-
tion institution with the highest proportion of
RAE-defined world-leading output, faced the
largest cut of any institution.
The pecuniary rewards for B&M’s growing
research strength in the UK may be miserly, but
there is joy in the RAE panel’s recognition of the
huge strides B&M’s research has made across the
university system. The RAE results suggest that,
not only has B&M drawn level with social science
as a whole, it has done so while the quality and
quantity of social science research has accelerated.
Analysis of the improving performance of
B&M in successive RAEs appears to vindicate
the Joint Funding Council’s claim. Figure 1
shows the early stage of the acceleration of
B&M between the 1996 and 2001 RAEs, when
the profile of research rose from being pear
shaped in 1996 (with 43% of the units assessed
having less than 50% of their output at national
level) to a lean, broad shouldered community in
2001 (where most institutions could boast some
output of international standing and the sub-
national proportion had dropped to 21%).
Generally, B&M still lagged behind the overall
assessment of academic disciplines, where 80% of
the researchers whose work was submitted
received one of the top grades (4, 5 and 5
*
),
with a 55% majority being awarded 5 or 5
*
(Joint
Funding Council, 2003).
After the RAE in 2001, HEFCE recognized that
its incrementally adjusted approach to research
assessment had to change, not least because of the
clumsy eight-point scale it invented to allocate
funding after the RAE panel’s deliberations, i.e. 1,
2, 3b, 3a, 4, 5, 5
*
,6
*
. After consultation, a new
scale was devised: 0, 1
*
,2
*
,3
*
,4
*
.Direct
comparisons between the scales is not easy, but
the new star system stretched the old 5
*
and 6
*
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
1
2
3a
3b
4
5
5*
Percentage in each RAE category
RAE category
RAE 2001 RAE 1996
Figure 1. B&M improvement, RAE 1996 to RAE 2001
402 J. Saunders, V. Wong and C. Saunders
r2011 The Author(s)
British Journal of Management r2011 British Academy of Management.
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