Relevance gap in business school research: which academic papers are cited in managerial bridge journals?

Birkinshaw, J, Lecuona, R and Barwise, T P (2016) Relevance gap in business school research: which academic papers are cited in managerial bridge journals? Academy of Management Learning and Education, 15 (4). pp. 686-702. ISSN 1537-260X

Abstract

The much-discussed ‘relevance gap’ (Starkey and Madan, 2001) between research and practice in management is a major source of concern for business schools, in terms of their legitimacy in the eyes of students, employers and funding bodies. In this paper, we frame the relevance gap as a knowledge-transfer issue, and we focus on the role of “bridging media” as one possible mechanism through which academic research is made accessible to practising managers. Specifically, we ask two questions: (1) which academic research is selected for dissemination by bridging media? And (2) how can we develop better ways of measuring this type of bridging activity? Through a preliminary empirical analysis (of the citation trails from 264 academic papers to bridge journals such as Sloan Management Review), we identify the key characteristics of papers that are picked up in bridging media, and we describe how our methodology could be extended to contribute to Aguinis et al’s (2014) pluralist conceptualization of scholarly impact