This detailed introduction provides an extensive overview of Sara L. Rynes’s “Editor’s Foreword: Carrying Sumantra Ghoshal’s Torch: Creating More Positive, Relevant, and Ecologically Valid Research,” published in The Academy of Management Journal in August 2007. The foreword serves to introduce a special forum comprising five essays, all dedicated to honoring the late Sumantra Ghoshal and his profound and lasting influence on management research. The overarching goal of this curated collection, and a persistent aim of The Academy of Management Journal itself, is to facilitate and promote research that is both rigorous and relevant.
Rynes, reflecting on a conference held at the London Business School in May 2007 to honor Ghoshal, recounts how speakers shared their memories of him and his impact. From Christopher Bartlett’s opening talk, Rynes identified several key principles for which Sumantra Ghoshal served as a powerful role model:
- A deep and unwavering commitment to field research, fundamentally built upon a profound respect for practitioners.
- Active engagement and ongoing dialogue with practitioners, cultivated through activities such as public speaking and consulting.
- The understanding that teaching and research are interdependent activities, where teaching cases often serve as the initial output of field research, and subsequent steps involve taking students into the field and inviting case protagonists into the classroom.
- Utilizing the classroom as a “petri dish” for continuous innovation and experimentation.
- The imperative of maintaining academic respectability by effectively combining rigor with relevance in scholarly work.
- Building credibility with practitioners through systematically testing the relevance of theories, developing effective channels and language for communication across boundaries, and actively engaging practitioners in the academic agenda.
- Being in the front-line trenches within one’s own institution by championing field research, providing guidance and mentorship to practice-oriented researchers, and staunchly defending strong practice-oriented researchers in critical career decisions, such as tenure.
- Carrying forward Donald Hambrick’s (1994) agenda to ensure that the Academy “really matter”.
The five essays that follow Rynes’s foreword emerged from the aforementioned conference and directly address the themes of combining rigor and relevance, all in tribute to Ghoshal.
- Anita McGahan’s essay, “Academic Research That Matters to Managers: On Zebras, Dogs, Lemmings, Hammers, and Turnips,” explores Ghoshal’s question, “Where’s the sizzle?” regarding research topics. McGahan distinguishes between research projects that “sizzle” with both academic and practitioner audiences and those that “fizzle”. “Sizzlers” include studies that generate counterintuitive insights, demonstrate significant changes in fundamental practices or environmental conditions, show that widely used management practices violate important principles, suggest specific theories to explain interesting current phenomena, or identify iconic problems that open new areas of academic inquiry and management practice. An illustrative example provided is the critical issue of petroleum reserve depletion, which, despite a “green approach” by many executives, few are seriously addressing, highlighting vast opportunities for future research across numerous affected industries.
- Freek Vermeulen’s essay, “I Shall Not Remain Insignificant’: Adding a Second Loop to Matter More,” draws on Ghoshal’s advice to identify “the smell of a place” to get to the heart of a matter. Vermeulen reflects on his own career to suggest how researchers can move from the “closed incestuous loop” identified by Hambrick (1994) to a “relevance loop,” where practitioners both inform and consume research. He contends that while secondary data or surveys offer some learning, true comprehension requires a more intimate understanding achieved through close observation or interaction. Vermeulen’s piece also brings to mind Ghoshal’s “sweet and sour model of change,” positing that higher performance necessitates both developing new growth opportunities (the sweet) and cutting old ones (the sour). He explicitly states that researchers must often sacrifice something valuable to pursue more meaningful research, but finds the “sweet part”—a sense of mattering more—to be worth the sacrifice.
- Costas Markides’s essay, “In Search of Ambidextrous Professors,” is inspired by Ghoshal’s question, “Why does it have to be either-or? Why can’t it be all and all?”. Markides argues against “radical” solutions to bridge the perceived gap between academia and practice, such as drastic structural changes to business schools or their academic incentive systems. Instead, he proposes an evolutionary approach based on a combination of four simpler ideas: (1) differentiating expectations for academics at various career stages, (2) appreciating the diverse types of managerially relevant research, (3) pursuing “open innovation” by seeking help beyond school boundaries, and (4) drawing on research about ambidexterity for clues on how to foster ambidextrous mind-sets and integrative mechanisms within business schools. He suggests that if a large number of people adopt these non-radical ideas, it “could make a big difference,” leading to “a major change achieved not by revolution, but by evolution”.
- Tushman and O’Reilly’s essay, “Research and Relevance: The Implications of Pasteur’s Quadrant for Doctoral Programs and Faculty Development,” exemplifies the use of the classroom as a “petri dish” for innovation and experimentation. They describe how executive education classes and custom programs can create contexts where business school faculty and thoughtful practitioners can forge relationships that foster “virtuous cycles of knowing (faculty and doctoral student research) and doing (linking scholarly research to real-world practice)”. Furthermore, they argue that “doctoral programs should pivot on the choice of research question,” supported by student training in appropriate theoretical and methodological tools for addressing them.
- Ranjay Gulati’s essay, “Tent Poles, Tribalism, and Boundary Spanning: The Rigor-Relevance Debate in Management Research,” evokes a “Ghoshalism” about organizations often creating an internal environment akin to “downtown Calcutta in July”—a stifling climate that influences and inhibits the behavior of its people. Gulati applies this to the “tribal divisions” within business schools, where “arbiters of rigor” (often in influential roles or an “invisible politburo”) grant “badges of honor or shame” (“rigorous” or “nonrigorous”) to work, irrespective of its impact on research or practice. He argues that this “covertly tribal behavior” is often masked as impartiality and creates a debate “completely antithetical to a productive dialogue on how management researchers can embark on a more truly synergistic research enterprise”. Gulati concludes that these tribal identities are largely “socially constructed falsehoods” that impede useful and innovative research.
Rynes concludes her foreword by reflecting on Ghoshal’s own writings about making research more relevant and less destructive. Ghoshal pleaded against managers hiding behind excuses of powerlessness in the face of external forces, which he viewed as a “dehumanization of practice” and a way to free themselves from moral or ethical responsibility. Rynes extends this argument, suggesting that academics who plead powerlessness due to incentive and reward systems (especially after tenure) “dehumanize and degrade our careers and our lives”. Ghoshal’s call for change required many scholars, including younger ones, to redirect their work at “considerable risk to their careers,” with senior scholars needing to “lead the endeavor and provide ‘air cover’ for the junior faculty who choose to join in”. Highlighting Ghoshal’s “bias for action” and belief in willpower, Rynes expresses her hope that readers will be inspired to join Anne Frank, Sumantra Ghoshal, and the essay authors in making a pledge to “not remain insignificant,” but rather to “work in the world and for mankind”.
Reference: Rynes, S. L. (2007). Editor’s Foreword: Carrying Sumantra Ghoshal’s Torch: Creating More Positive, Relevant, and Ecologically Valid Research. The Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 745–747. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20159884