On academic calls for more research

I read this recently in an academic paper:

For these reasons, researchers have recently called for increased attention and investigation of …

It’s a standard sentence and it always trips my bullshit meter. I can’t quite put my finger on what the problem is, but it has something to do with a polite fiction about the “the field” that I’m supposed to share. The fiction is that the field is highly rational and organized. There are certain real gaps in the field out there, and an alert researcher can spot one of these and call for increased attention and investigation. Like a factory worker empowered to shut down that assembly line when he or she spots a problem. Or an emergency worker poring through the rubble from an earthquake, who spots a half-buried arm.

Pasteur's Quadrant

Donald Stokes, in his book Pasteur's Quadrant, organizes scientific research as follows:

		Considerations of Use?
		No	Yes
Quest for Fundamental Understanding?	Yes	Pure basic research (Bohr)	Use-inspired basic research (Pasteur)
	No		Pure applied research (Edison)

For me, the interesting quadrant is the empty one, which consists of research that is neither after fundamental understanding, nor practical applicability. I think most of management research fits in that box. 

This is not necessarily intentional, of course. Putatively, management research is supposed to fall in the top left box, or, if things go really well, the top right box. But most of it clearly falls in the left column, and unfortunately not in the top row. 

The problem is that the field has become too professionalized. Academics is a career, and it is very similar to cultural industries like music and film in which people work as individuals on one-time projects or products (e.g., songs and films), and hope to get a "hit". If a person does a hit (or especially, several hits), they become stars, celebrities. And this is the principal reward that they are looking for. The problem of course, is that a hit can be hit without being a contribution to fundamental knowledge or to practical application.

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This is a blog about management studies -- research on management and organizations by scholars in business schools.