Management research topics: Positioning, evolution, alignment with teaching and with job market needs
Introduction
We are interested in how the topics researched evolve and whether they differ by journal prestige (as measured by impact factor). After we have assembled sets of the most popular research topics over time and by journal impact factor, we then compare the most recent set of topics to what is taught and sought as skills in business hiring. Within management education, we focus on the discipline of Operations Management (OM). That focus is driven primarily by our subject knowledge being deepest in this sub-field, allowing us to interpret the results of the bibliometric analysis.
While the term Operations Management may not have come into use until the 1970's, as Kumar and Suresh (2009, p. 3) point out, they also present that the concepts involved go back much further, as far back as Adam Smith and specialisation of labour in the 1700's. Operations can be defined as, “that part of a business organization that is responsible for producing goods and/or services” (Stevenson, 2021, p. 4).
Operations Management is a field within the business world and an area of concentration within business schools. As with many concentrations, what interests academic researchers has changed over time. Also, research and what we teach, and the skills sought from our graduates may not align perfectly. Further, as operations management can often span areas of application and use many techniques, this mismatch may be even stronger. Faculty performing research and teaching, our students, and the business people that hire them have goals and these goals interact. Let us first discuss some of their goals as individuals.
Goals (selected) of the individuals.
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Faculty member - > success in research and publishing1
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Faculty member - > educate students well.
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Business practitioner - > hire qualified staff to fill their needs.
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Student - > get a good job.
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Student - > become a valuable contributor once working.
The above are goals of individuals within our environment. Institutional goals may differ from, or may be broader than, individual goals. Trieschmann, Dennis, Northcraft, & Niemi (2000, p. 1130) state; “Business schools strive to meet two goals: Knowledge exploration through research and knowledge exploitation through instruction.” This may be a bit narrow. Were we to look at the goals stated by AACSB accredited Schools of Business we may find a few more. Many schools do list that they hope to have an impact on the (local, national, or global) business community or society at large. The institutional goals do have societal impact but are outside the scope of this paper.
The individual goals do interact. Faculty members may be interested in a successful research career with regards to publishing but also take pride in helping students become productive employees. Practitioners want their businesses to thrive. This requires productive employees. Students want to find a lucrative job and perform well once they get there.
However, even though the goals do interact, they may not appear to align particularly well. Currently popular research topics may not feature prominently in the body of material taught to students. Both the currently popular research topics and the most popularly taught topics may not be the skills most in demand in the business world. This could be a mis-match of fit or of timing. A fit mis-match would be when a popular topic in one set never shows up in one of the other sets. However, the differing lists could also be a matter of timing. Indeed, one may expect some topics to first appear in research and then later to be among those taught and sought.
To be able to assess whether there are timing differences, we will partition our bibliographic analysis for journal topics into time periods. A ‘hot topic’ 20 years ago could later evolve into a topic that is popular to teach and that has hiring interest. On the other hand, some topics that were popular earlier could fade away.
We wish also to assess whether the topic popularity in journals varies by journal prestige. We discuss measuring journal prestige below. Depending on the discipline, there could be a difference in emphasis depending on prestige. In Operations Management, many have stated that the so-called ‘top journals’ focus heavily on mathematical models at the expense of real-world application. If journal preference does vary by prestige level, faculty members may wish to take this into consideration when selecting where to submit work.
We will first review the literature discussing the several points introduced above. We will then attempt to understand what topics are most published. We will then see if these topics are core to the curricula taught in a selection of business schools and whether they relate to skills highly sought by those hiring our graduates.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. The next section reviews the literature addressing the several issues we have put forward. We then track the evolution of research topics at differing levels of academic publication. After we have gathered sets of the most popular research topics, we compare our most recent lists of popular research topics to the topics actually taught in the operations management courses in MBA2 programs. We follow this by assessing how frequently the current top research topics and those currently taught appear to be sought by those hiring our graduates.
Section snippets
Literature review
This paper uses techniques, such as bibliometric analysis, to address topics of academic and managerial interest, therefore this literature review must also cover both technique and application area. We will begin by reviewing recent work addressing research direction and whether it coincides with industrial needs. We will follow with a look at recent papers that use bibliometrics to track the evolution of publication topics.
Data collection
The focus of the data collection efforts, and the recommendations that follow, will be on operations management. This allows us to keep the scope to a reasonable size and to make specific judgements with regards issues such as keyword similarity. We suspect much of what we find in our field would transfer to other business areas. OM does have the previously mentioned advantage of taking a process view and, therefore, spanning business functional areas.
Results
We first searched for popular keywords in academic publications. Our most refined tools, the bibliographic search tools such as SciMAT or VosViewer, can search academic publications, find the popular keywords and establish links among them. With these tools, we could discover what the most popular research keywords were, how this set changed over time, and whether they differed by the prestige of the journals queried.
Once we had lists of the most popular research keywords in academic
Conclusions
In this final section, we wish to interpret the results presented above and describe further questions and inquiries.
We were interested to see whether there were noticeable differences in the popularity of topics published when segmenting publications by their SJR score and their time frame. After assessing the evolution and segmentation of research topics, we wished to see whether there are gaps (as Sinha et al. (2016) refer to them) among research, teaching, and job market demand. Pair-wise
Further questions
We are well aware that we have not discussed all of the issues that could be raised by this line of inquiry. We have only looked at what is being published. We have not attempted to gauge what topics some may feel ought to be researched. Setting a research agenda with an eye toward the goals of the employing institute, the business world, or wider society is beyond the scope of this work.
We have also limited our measure of business interest to surveying the relative frequency popular keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the support of the following: Brazilian Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) - Finance Code 001; National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Grant # 304931/2016–0 and 404682/2016–2, and the Research Support Foundation of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ), Grant # E-26/203.252/2017.
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