August 9, 2018
Tom Lumpkin, Director of the Tom Love Division of Entrepreneurship and Economic Development and C. S. Trosper Chair and Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Oklahoma’s Michael F. Price College of Business, recently was named in the top 100 most influential strategy authors out of a total of 6,326 authors. The article, A pluralist conceptualization of scholarly impact in management education: Students as stakeholders, was published in August by Herman Aguinis, Ravi S. Ramani, Nawaf Alabduljader, James R. Bailey and Joowon Lee in the Academy of Management Learning and Education.
The article examines the most influential authors in organizational behavior, human resource management, strategic management and general management as cited in textbooks.
With more than 6,000 citations, Lumpkin placed in the top 1.6% most influential authors in the strategy category.
“In some ways, the more interesting finding is that those who are well-cited in textbooks are not necessarily well-cited in journal articles, but that ‘textbooks influence the knowledge base of very large numbers of students who are future practitioners,’” Lumpkin said, citing the article.
The authors further underscored the role of textbooks in management education.
“Overall, an important implication for practice of our empirical results is that performance management systems for faculty that include citations in journals exclusively as a criterion for evaluating performance are not necessarily assessing scholarly impact in management education. We are aware that many faculty performance management systems include measures of teaching effectiveness in the form of student evaluations or peer class visits and assessments (Briggs, Workman, & York, 2013). But, to our knowledge, very few, if any, include measures of [knowledge transfer] in management education—as measured by the number of citations in textbooks.”
An abstract of the article follows:
Scholarly impact is typically conceptualized and measured as an internal exchange that occurs among researchers in the form of citations in journal articles. We offer an expanded conceptualization and measurement of scholarly impact by investigating knowledge transfer to a critical management education constituency: students. To do so, we investigated which sources (e.g., peer-reviewed journals, business periodicals), individual items (e.g., journal articles, book chapters), and authors are most frequently cited in 38 widely-used organizational behavior, human resource management, strategic management, and general management undergraduate-level textbooks. By extracting all endnotes and references, we created a database including 7,445 sources, 33,719 articles and book chapters, and 32,981 authors cited at least once. Results showed a weak relationship between journals, articles, and authors cited most frequently in journals and those most frequently cited in textbooks. We also found that students are exposed to knowledge and content originating both in academic and non-academic outlets. Results have implications for theory and practice regarding the science-practice gap and a consideration of students as stakeholders, the conceptualization and measurement of scholarly impact and the design of academic performance management and reward systems, and choices regarding what knowledge academics create and disseminate.
The full article is available online here, and the online supplement recognizing Lumpkin is available here.
