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To: carranza2 who wrote (87622)	3/1/2012 2:19:37 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 217773

The “tyranny” of US peer-reviewed journals February 29, 2012 11:59 am by Andrew Hill David Willetts, Britain’s universities minister, has a bee in his two-brained bonnet about flawed incentives for British business academics. Prestige in business schools comes from doing research and being published in peer-reviewed journals, he told an audience of managers, academics and members of parliament in London on Tuesday, launching a discussion of whether poor management is holding back growth. It’s a theme he’s touched on before in relation to wider scientific and academic research. Mr Willetts says that as the lead journals are US-based, they tend to be interested in sophisticated analysis of historical, mainly American, industry data: We’re rewarding British academics and British business schools for analysing American industries… It’s not at all clear to me that this the right set of incentives. This has an unwelcome tinge of nationalism but it is hard to argue with the underlying point. This month, Harvard Business Review – perhaps the best-known conduit for readable distillations of such peer-reviewed research – has majored on “ Reinventing America“, feeding off the business school’s analysis of the challenges facing the US economy. The project is “animated by a core belief that American competitiveness is not just good for the United States”, editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius writes. As I’ve said before, this may be true, but the initiative leaves no doubt that Harvard Business School sees nurturing its US economic roots as a vital part of its mission. Even assuming the incentives can be recast, however, and British business academics can somehow – in the minister’s words – “break free from the tyranny of peer-reviewed journals”, it will be hard for them to reverse history. Leading UK business schools rightly pride themselves on their global intake of students and academics. They would be better building on their headstart in the analysis of fast-growing economies outside the US. I think Mr Willetts is on stronger ground when he takes issue with the “rarefied and recherché” nature of much business research – and the way that detracts from practical management development teaching, the theme of a new Chartered Management Institute study released for Tuesday’s event. This is a view shared, for example, by US business thinker Gary Hamel, whom I interviewed last week (the full interview will appear on Monday). For Mr Willetts and British business schools, a virtuous circle of practical research, teaching excellence and copious outside funding must be the holy grail.