Business authors struggle to win recognition for work

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Emma Bell believes traditional textbooks have a powerful but under-appreciated value as a way for academics to communicate insights to a broad audience of managers.

“Unlike published research articles, which may only be read and used by a handful of people, and often use language that is hard for business professionals to understand, textbooks are read and used by thousands of students worldwide,” says Bell, a professor of organisation and leadership at the Open University.

But such efforts typically receive less recognition within academia. She argues that textbook authors “are sometimes viewed by their colleagues as doing work of less importance and lower status than academics, who get large grants and publish in ‘top’ journals”.

“It’s important to challenge these hierarchies of knowledge production and to celebrate the value of all academic work that makes a positive difference to how people think and act in the world,” Bell adds.

She is not alone. Yves Pigneur, a professor at the University of Lausanne, says that with his co-author Alexander Osterwalder he felt “if we wanted to have a real impact on practitioners (entrepreneurs, innovators, etc), we had to bring to life our ideas, previously published in articles, in a book”.

Both academics feature in a list of the leading authors of texts assigned for students on university business and management courses around the world.

The data for the list comes from Open Syllabus, an organisation that has scraped 21mn publicly available English language syllabuses from about 7,500 universities in more than 120 countries in an effort share educational resources, including 2.5mn business, accounting and finance syllabi. Bell is among the most widely referenced female academics thanks to her textbook, co-authored with Alan Bryman and Bill Harley, titled Business Research Methods, although overall the list of cited authors is heavily skewed to male writers.

Pigneur and Osterwalder’s book, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers and Challengers, ranks eighth overall. But the most widely cited author is Philip Kotler, whose work includes Marketing Management and Principles of Marketing. His influence lifts Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, where is he now emeritus professor of marketing, to the top position for business schools supporting teaching resources.

There are limitations to the Open Syllabus list. It can only gather course information that is public, and has variable coverage between different institutions and countries. Analysing the data for the FT, to identify the leading business schools with widely cited academics’ books, is also complicated by multiple editions, often by a growing number of authors; and how to attribute their affiliations as they move between different institutions.

But it provides a start in tracking and recognising those who see a value in disseminating their insights to a wider audience, despite traditional disincentives within academia. “The incentives come from the desire of academics to want this impact; The barriers sometimes come from deans or colleagues obsessed with rankings,” says Pigneur.

“If business schools want to have an impact on society as they advocate, they must accept or even encourage that the good ideas resulting from their research must take less conventional paths than articles in more or less esoteric journals. The book is a good illustration of this.”