My first European Academy of Management conference

Reports on my presentations at the EURAM 2016 conference on Language in Academia and the Future of Management Education & Research

Anne-Wil Harzing - Sat 4 Jun 2016 14:55 (updated Sat 9 Nov 2024 17:35)

Although I have attended the (American) Academy of Management conference since 1996, I somehow never made it to the European Academy of Management. This is not entirely suprising as the first EURAM conference was held in 2001, the year I moved to Australia. Traveling from Australia is expensive and time-consuming. So I tried to limit my conference visits to once or twice a year and focus on conferences that had plenty of sessions in my areas of interest. As EURAM is very broad and there is typically only one stream of some interest to me, I just never made it there.

However, after moving back to the UK in 2014 European travel became much easier. So when I was invited to attend EURAM with all expenses paid, I gladly accepted. In "return" I participated in one of the labs before the conference, spoke at one of the plenary keynotes and chaired a meet the editors panel. I also presented a paper first-authored by one of my PhD students - Shea Fan - that was awarded the EURAM Journal of Global Mobility Best paper award.

Lab: Language and Thinking in the Management & OS field

This Round Table aimed to clarify the relationship between language and thinking among the European field of Organization Studies and Management and to discuss the different challenges (intellectual, cultural) Europe faces to be more visible, relevant and original in this globalized world. My presentation - Language in Academia, what can we learn from research in International Business and Bibliometrics - applied my research in three different areas to the role of Language in Academia:

1. Language in International Business, dealing with country-of-origin effects, bridge individuals and power and power/authority distortion.
2. The impact of foreign language use on thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, discussing how the language of the questionnaire influences responses, how foreign language influences feeling about key business concepts and how foreign language use impacts on competitive behaviour.
3. Research on the quality and impact of academic research and bibliometrics, illustrating how Google Scholar promotes the diffusion of multilingual scholarship.

Plenary Keynote: Orchestrating the Future of Management Education and Research in Europe

There has been much criticism about the role and contribution of B-Schools in modern society, especially in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, when much blame was laid at their doors. So, what of the future? My presentation - The Future of Research careers in Business Schools: Should we be more “relevant”? - presented the case for and against relevance (in a grand total of 7 minutes!)

The case for:

1. Engagement leads to better research
2. Ranking-mania leads us astray
3. Engagement through new media is easy

The case against:

1. Has the quest for relevance gone too far?
2. Are we asking too much of (junior) academics?
3. Let’s not create opposing “camps”