The case of innovation studies in business and management

This investigation illustrates how allegedly ‘excellence-based’ journal rankings have a bias in favour of monodisciplinary research and how this negatively affects the assessment of interdisciplinary organisations. First, we use various mappings and metrics to show how innovation studies units are more interdisciplinary than business and management schools. Second, we provide evidence that the journals in the top ranks of the Association of Business Schools’ rankings span a less diverse set of disciplines than lower ranked journals. Third, we show that this bias results in a more favourable performance assessment of the more disciplinary-focused business and management schools. Fourth, we demonstrate that a citation-based analysis of the units’ performance challenges the ranking-based assessment. We conclude that this case study illuminates a general mechanism through which unduly narrowly-conceived rankings can suppress interdisciplinary research. Introduction In a moment in which science is under pressure to be relevant to society, interdisciplinary research (IDR) is often praised for its contributions towards generating scientific breakthroughs, addressing societal problems and fostering innovation. Reasons given for these kinds of benefit include that IDR is better at problem-solving, that it generates new research avenues and is a source of creativity, thus ‘rejuvenating’ science. However, in practice IDR efforts are often found wanting, accused of being too risk averse, lacking under disciplinary notions of quality or not meeting policy expectations. Irrespective of perspective, IDR presents important downsides. These include, for example, poor career structures for academic interdisciplinary researchers, low esteem by colleagues, discrimination by reviewers in proposals or difficulty in publishing in high-ranking journals (Bruce et al. 2004, p. 464). While these institutional barriers are often acknowledged, driving mechanisms are neither well documented nor deeply understood. In this UK-based case study, we provide novel quantitative evidence of an institutional barrier to IDR by exploring the conflict between the so-called race for ‘excellence’ in academia generally – focusing particularly here on business and management schools (BMS) – and the pursuit of a specific form of IDR in departments or institutes of innovation studies (IS), in a broad definition of the field. Under current funding conditions in the UK, many IS units have been (at least partly) incorporated into BMS (e.g. in Oxford, Imperial, Manchester, Cardiff and recently Sussex). BMS face particularly acute pressure to achieve high performance in publication rankings, both for reputational purposes and due to financial incentives associated with assessment procedures of the national funding council HEFCE, now referred to as the ‘Research Excellence Framework (REF). Given the disciplinary organisation of the specific assessment panels of the REF, IDR departments are viewed in some quarters as experiencing a suppressive effect in evaluation, although such claims have been disputed (Adams et al., 2007). That evaluation of IDR is problematic is not a surprise—rather it is a natural consequence of IDR. Any evaluation needs to take place over established standards. These standards can be defined within a discipline, but what standards should be used for research in between or