In defence of the Business School: One myth and four truths

Argues we need to be prouder of being Business School academics. We deliver research that is both high-quality and societally impactful on a shoestring budget, whilst educating a fifth of all students in the UK.

Anne-Wil Harzing - Tue 29 Apr 2025 13:39 (updated Sun 7 Sep 2025 11:05)

Throughout my 35+ year academic career I have interacted with academics from a wide range of disciplines, largely because of my free Publish or Perish software, my blog which celebrated its ninth anniversary this year, and my research programme on the Quality and Impact of Academic Research. In these interactions, I have often encountered an implicit, or even explicit, assumption that Business & Management (B&M) research is inferior to research in other disciplines, and that Business Schools are merely serving as cash-cows for the rest of the university.

Based on empirical data drawn from the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), I demonstrate that, in fact, our research contribution in B&M is very strong indeed. The UK REF – a national research assessment that is conducted every 6-8 years, most recently in 2021 – provides us with an excellent basis to compare the quality and impact of our B&M research with that of other disciplines, rating as it does UK institutions’ publications, impact case studies, and research environment on a scale from 0 (unclassified) to 4 (world leading), with 1 to 3 defined respectively as recognised nationally (1), recognised internationally (2), and internationally excellent (3). The results of this assessment are publicly available and can thus be used for further analysis. They are also used to distribute QR (Quality Related) block grant funding to the UK higher education sector, an allocation of around £2 billion per year. This is distinct from direct funding for individual research projects through the various national and European research councils, charities, governmental bodies, and industry.

In this white paper, I use REF data to demonstrate that our B&M research makes the second largest contribution to research in the UK, that B&M publication quality compares favourably with that of other disciplines, and that the non-academic impact of our B&M research is widespread. In addition, I use competitive project research funding data across disciplines, the Guardian’s University Guide 2021 data on student/staff ratio and student entry tariffs across disciplines, and the UK’s HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) data on the number of (international) students across disciplines to make the case that Business School academics achieve these excellent outcomes with minimal funding and very little research time. As Business Schools, we thus provide more “value for money” than most other disciplines. But first let’s take a look at the myth.

The myth: Our research in B&M is inferior

In interactions with academics from other disciplines, I often face the assumption that Business Schools are merely cash-cows. Their international student income cross-subsidises the rest of the university, but their research is seen as inferior to that in other disciplines in terms of both quality and impact. Academics in the Life and Natural Sciences (part of the Physical Sciences in REF terminology) typically see B&M research as ‘not rigorous enough’ or don’t even consider it to be ‘proper’ research at all. Academics in the Arts & Humanities see us as the hench(wo)men of capitalism, focusing on how to make and manage money (Finance & Accounting), exploit employees (Operations and Supply Chain Management and HRM) or extract more profit from consumers (Marketing). Academics in the other Social Sciences appear to think likewise, although Economists are typically found in the Natural Sciences camp, often displaying open contempt for B&M research.

Critique of Business Schools also finds ready acceptance with the general public who think they know what Business is all about. However, their understanding of Business typically doesn't run beyond Accounting and Marketing, professions they assume could simply be learned on apprenticeship programs or ‘on the job’ without needing a research foundation. They are simply not aware that topics such as management, leadership, organisational behavior, organisational culture and change, business ethics, Human Resource Management, supply chain management, and international business are all part of both Business degrees and B&M research. [Note: I do agree that as B&M academics we could do a much better job in demonstrating the value of our research to the general public, but that’s a separate discussion and one that is relevant to some degree for all of the Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines and even some of the Life and Physical Sciences.]

Interestingly enough, as B&M academics we are often our own worst enemies. Collectively, we have have published thousands of articles with lamentations on the many dysfunctionalities in our B&M research such as our theory fetish, obscure writing, questionable research practices, fraud and misconduct, as well as the proliferation of meaningless research. Much of this work is even very highly cited, one of the early pieces – Ghoshal’s AMLE article (Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices) – has gathered more than 6,000 citations to date.

So why has this myth taken hold? Is our B&M research really inferior to that of other disciplines? Below, I provide a four-fold argument that it is not. In fact our research provides excellent value for money! So, let’s turn to the first of our four evidence-based truths, the outsized contribution made by B&M research.

Truth 1: B&M offers the second largest research contribution

To compare research contribution across disciplines, I calculated the REF Grade Point Average (GPA) across disciplines for the overall submission – including publication outputs, impact case studies, and research environment – by multiplying the proportion of research valued 4*, 3*, 2*, and 1* by 4/3/2/1. Comparing the REF GPA across disciplines (see Table 1), we can understand why some observers would argue that the Social Sciences in general, and B&M in particular, compare unfavourably with other disciplines.

Table 1: GPA and total contribution across disciplines, manually curated and calculated from original REF 2021 data. Main panel: A = Life Sciences, B = Physical Sciences, C = Social Sciences, D = Arts & Humanities.

Out of the 34 disciplines that were evaluated, B&M’s GPA is well below average; it ranks fifth from the bottom, above only Art & Design, the Performing Arts, Social Work & Social Policy, and Education. The highest ranked disciplines are all in the Life or Physical Sciences: Public Health, Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, and Clinical Medicine. That said, with a GPA of 3.11, B&M research on average is still ranked well into the ‘internationally excellent’ category (3), with elements of our research being world-leading (4).

If, however, we take the size of the various disciplines into consideration, it becomes clear that B&M is in fact making an outsized contribution to research in the UK. With no less than 108 institutions submitted in the REF, it made the largest number of submissions, twice as many as the average Unit of Assessment (UoA). With a total of 6,634 academics submitted to REF 2021, it also submitted triple the average number of academics per UoA. Hence, if we look at the combination of GPA and the size of the contribution of B&M to the UK research landscape, Business Schools in fact perform stellarly.

Business Schools provide no less than 8.4% of the sector’s total research contribution, against an average of 2.9%. With this, they rank second only to Engineering that boasted a higher GPA at 3.27, combined with the largest number of FTE staff submitted (7,432). As such, Engineering makes up nearly 10% of the entire sector’s research contribution. Combined, these two applied disciplines thus make up nearly a fifth of the UK’s research contribution, exceeding the sum of the three largest Life Sciences disciplines (Clinical Medicine, Allied Health Professions, Psychology, Psychiatry & Neuroscience).

Truth 2: B&M publication quality compares favourably with other disciplines

Let’s now dive a little deeper into the three individual components of the REF research evaluation: outputs, impact, and research environment. At first sight, the GPA for outputs presents an identical picture to that of the overall submission. At an average of 3.04, B&M has one of the lowest GPAs, again ranking fifth from the bottom, above only the Performing Arts, Social Work & Social Policy, Art & Design, and Education.

However, as for the overall submission, B&M ranks behind only Engineering in the overall size of its contribution (GPA * number of FTE submitted), with their respective contribution – as for the overall submission – at 8.4% and 9.9% of the sector overall. Of course, this may leave some to argue that research in B&M might well be plentiful, but is of much lower quality than that in other disciplines. The same arguments have been made repeatedly in the popular press for the Social Sciences more generally.

However, I think these proclamations are ill-judged for two reasons. First, as we have discussed above, on average B&M research is ranked above 3* (internationally excellent). Moreover, even 1* research is nationally recognised and might well contribute significantly to the local economy. Second, in order to compare research quality between disciplines, we need to compare apples with apples. The 108 submissions in B&M encompass nearly every single public university operating in the – heavily stratified – UK Higher Education system. Half of the other 33 disciplines submitted fewer than 50 institutions, with five (Classics, Area Studies, Archaeology, Agriculture, and Economics) even submitting 25 or fewer institutions.

This means that for B&M we are averaging the research performance of large world elite institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, London Business School and London School of Economics – who on average submitted 90FTE – with that of small teaching-oriented institutions, who on average submitted less than 10 FTE. On the other hand, for some of the other disciplines 80-90% of the submissions were by elite Russell Group institutions. This means we are not even comparing apples and oranges, but apples and aubergines!

Hence in Table 2, we compare the average GPA for the top-20 most highly ranked institutions for each of the 34 disciplines. With a GPA of 3.40, i.e. above the average of 3.36, the disciplinary ranking of B&M jumps from 30 to 13 (ex-equo with History). Hence, the best publications in B&M rank well within in the top 40% of all disciplines. After Sports & Exercise Sciences, Leisure & Tourism, B&M is also the second most highly ranked discipline within the Social Sciences and – after Art & Design and Performing Arts – it displays the third largest difference between the average ranking for all institutions and the top-20 institutions only.

Table 2: GPA for publications across disciplines, all universities and top-20 only, manually
curated and calculated from original REF 2021 data. Main panel: A = Life Sciences, B = Physical Sciences, C = Social Sciences, D = Arts & Humanities.

[Note: Some readers may wonder why Sport & Exercise Sciences, Leisure & Tourism is so highly ranked. I suggest this may be a combination of a. submissions being limited to a small number of staff (around 20 on average) and b. nine out of the ten top institutions publishing most of their work in medical journals that may be seen as more ‘rigorous’ by this UoA panel. Moreover, as we will see below, this UoA panel was by far the most lenient in its assessment of the quality of publications.]

I argue, however, that even looking at the top-20 institutions only underestimates the comparative quality of B&M research. Two studies led by Mike Thelwall’s research team – which had full access to scoring for all individual papers for the REF2021 – allow us to shed more light on this. These studies provide a cross-disciplinary comparison of a. the strictness in the judgment of paper quality, and b. differences between peer review and citation scores.

Stricter quality judgment in B&M than in many other disciplines

Some fields are “stricter” in their quality judgment than others when evaluating the same paper (Thelwall et al. 2023a). This was tested using interdisciplinary papers that were submitted to and evaluated by more than one disciplinary panel. B&M was ranked 13 out of 34 for strictness, i.e. it was stricter than 21 other disciplines.

Out of the twelve disciplines that outranked B&M for the average GPA for top-20 institutions (see Table 2) eight (highlighted in purple) were less strict in their ratings than B&M, some significantly so. On average the difference was 0.26 point, but it ranged up to 0.62 point for Sport & Exercise Sciences, Leisure & Tourism. Only four disciplines (highlighted in orange) outranking B&M for the average GPA for top-20 institutions were stricter, on average 0.11 point. Only Physics and the Biological Sciences were significantly stricter.

Engineering, which we identified above as the only discipline outperforming B&M in terms of overall research contribution, was ranked only 28 in terms of strictness, on average being 0.33 points less strict than B&M. Sport & Exercise Sciences, Leisure & Tourism, the only Social Science discipline slightly exceeding B&M in the average GPA for the top-20 institutions, was ranked 33 in terms of strictness, on average is 0.62 points less strict than B&M. Hence, when taking the relatively high strictness of its quality judgment into account, B&M research performs even better than already documented above.

Table 3: Average score gain by a UoA for articles that received different scores between UoAs. The average is across all articles with a score difference [adapted from Thelwall et al. 2023, last column has been added].

Average score gain by a UoA for articles that received different scores between UoAs.

Peer-review only disciplines are likely to be undervalued

Second, B&M was one of the 23 disciplines included in the REF that relied on peer review only, i.e. it didn’t use citation metrics to support the assessment of publication quality. I argue that peer review may apply a stricter interpretation of international benchmarks – especially for a 4- and 3-star rating – than citation-informed decision-making. Typically, articles published by academics in the Global North display citation rates that substantially exceed the world average field citation rate. Hence, using citation rates as a supporting quality signal might have led panels to assess papers to be of higher quality than they would have if they had used peer review only.

In the Australian context, Harzing (2013) argued that the use of peer review vs citation scores may well have distorted disciplinary comparisons in the country's Excellence in Research Assessment. For this white paper, a short illustration using Clarivate’s Incites service may suffice. For the three top-ranked disciplines on outputs, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics, all with a GPA of 3.40 (see Table 2), England ranked respectively #7, #10, and #13 in the world in terms of citations per paper, when excluding countries with less than 5,000 papers. For Economics & Business, disciplines which had GPAs for outputs of respectively 3.27 and 3.04, England ranked #6. Hence, even though the latter two disciplines’ publications performed better on international citations benchmarks, their quality was ranked lower in the REF than three of the Physical Science disciplines that ranked (much) lower on international citation benchmarks.

Finally, Thelwall et al. (2023b) showed that using article-level field normalised bibliometric indicators instead of the REF peer review score to assess publication quality had the strongest positive effect in Computer Science, Economics, and B&M. Moreover, in assessing the effect of using article-level bibliometric indicators rather than REF peer review scores on research that was evaluated in disciplinary panels different from the ones in which they were submitted, they found that the largest positive effects occurred in Economics and Law. This means that ‘interdisciplinary articles’ assessed in these two disciplines were given lower scores than would have been merited based on their ‘bibliometric performance’.

Many institutions may have submitted articles in Economics and Law to the B&M UoA. Many academics publishing in Economics and Law work in Business Schools. It thus makes more sense for an institution to boost a large/strong B&M submission than to make separate – much smaller and possibly weaker – submissions to the Economics and/or Law UoAs. I therefore argue that these outputs – when subsequently referred to and evaluated in the Economics and Law panels – may well have been ‘tarnished’ by their B&M association and thus received lower peer review scores from the Economics and Law panels than they would have merited based on their ‘bibliometric performance’.

In sum, there is ample evidence that publication outputs in B&M compare favourably with most other disciplines. But how about its non-academic impact? Does our research have any impact outside academia?

Truth 3: Non-academic impact of B&M research is widespread

The REF definition of non-academic impact is: “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia.” Non-academic impact was assessed through Impact Case Studies (ICS) that were required to demonstrate:

Significance = the degree to which impact has enabled, enriched, influenced, informed or changed the performance, policies, practices, products, services, understanding, awareness or well-being of the beneficiaries.
Reach = the extent and/or diversity of the beneficiaries of the impact, as relevant to the nature of the impact.

B&M academics themselves have been criticising our field for decades for its assumed lack of non-academic impact. Recently, Peters & Thomas (2020) even claimed that “there wasn’t a single 4* impact case study coming from UK business school research in 2014”. I suggest we may well be overly critical here. Peters & Thomas do not list the source of their claim in the article, so we do not know what data it is based on. However, HEFCE’s own reports show that in 2014 nearly 38% of the impact grades for B&M were at 4* (world leading), with another 43% rated at 3* (internationally excellent).

It is true, however, that we cannot unambiguously identify 4* case studies for B&M. REF does not divulge the scores for individual impact case studies. B&M was one of eleven disciplines that didn’t have universities scoring a ‘full house’, i.e. an average of 4.00 for all their case studies. However, with the 2014 top-3 institutions (Cambridge, Aberdeen, Strathclyde) scoring between 3.84 and 3.75, it is highly unlikely that there wasn’t at least one case study ranked 4* overall. For the University of Cambridge (3.84 for four case studies) and the University of Strathclyde (3.75 for eight case studies), it would seem mathematically impossible for there not to be a single case study that wasn’t scored four overall. But even if this wasn’t the case, there are still many impact case studies where the majority of the contributing sections were ranked 4 and thus had very significant non-academic impact.

In 2021, nearly 42% of the impact grades of the 504 ICS submitted were at 4* (world-leading) level, just under the average of the Social Sciences panel at 46%, which in turn was not too dissimilar from the total submission of 49%. Another 43% of the grades were at 3* (internationally excellent) level. Again, the caveat about not being able to unambiguously identify 4* case studies applies to B&M as it was one of eight UoAs that didn’t have universities scoring an average of 4.00. However, as there were five universities with an average between 3.79 and 3.70 (Middlesex, SOAS, Westminster, Exeter, and Manchester) covering a total of 30 case studies, it is highly likely that some of these case studies scored 4.0 overall. Hence, Peters & Thomas’ assessment seems overly harsh.

As Table 4 shows, the B&M panel submitted by far the largest number of impact case studies (504), nearly three times as many as the average, and at some distance from the next largest submissions in Allied Health (393) and Engineering (391). It provided nearly 8% of all ICS, with the remaining disciplines providing between 0.8% (Classics) and 6.2% (Allied Health). Although ranked sixth from the bottom in terms of GPA, its average impact was 3.24, i.e. only 0.1 below the disciplinary average. B&M also outperformed Philosophy (3.14), Social Work & Social Policy (3.14), Performing Arts (3.20), History (3.21), Geography & Environmental Studies (3.22), and is in the same league as Economics (3.24), Allied Health (3.25), Education (3.25), Theology (3.25), and Sociology (3.26). Of course, we can always improve, but I feel that the frequently repeated claim that our B&M research has little to no non-academic impact is hugely overblown.

Table 4: GPA for impact case studies across disciplines, manually curated and calculated from original REF 2021 data. Main panel: A = Life Sciences, B = Physical Sciences, C = Social Sciences, D = Arts & Humanities.

B&M also has a breadth of impact that is quite unusual. As shown in Table 5, it has submitted impact case studies in all eight impact areas: cultural, economic, environmental, health, legal, political, societal, and technological, one of only nine disciplines to do so. Moreover, it is the only discipline that has submitted a double-digit number of impact case studies in no less than six of them. With Allied Health and Psychology, B&M is also the only discipline that has more than 100 impact case studies in two different areas. Hence, B&M is contributing very significantly to the breadth of non-academic impact.

Table 5: Distribution over the different areas of impact across disciplines, manually curated and calculated from original REF 2021 data.

Note: cells with black outlines show the discipline with the largest number of case studies in the area in question. Concentration ratio reflects the % of impact case studies in the two most frequent impact themes for each discipline.

Finally, B&M is the only discipline with a significant number of impact case studies delivering economic impact. In fact, more than half of the 203 impact case studies with economic impact come from B&M, with only Economics (33) and Mathematical Sciences (15) delivering a double-digit number of impact case studies demonstrating economic impact. Half of the disciplines did not submit a single impact case study with economic impact. Even so, with only one fifth of its impact case studies demonstrating economic impact and well over two thirds of its impact case studies delivering societal impact, B&M defies the popular perception that its research is all about ‘boosting the capitalist economy’.

To illustrate the breadth of impact that B&M displays, I list the titles of the seven impact case studies that were submitted by my own university, Middlesex University, first-ranked in research impact for Business & Management.

Improving the treatment of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) staff in the NHS
Transformation of the Financing and Support for Early Stage SME Innovation
Improving the Protection of Whistleblowers
Detecting and Improving the Recovery of Unpaid Wages
Creating and Growing Social Enterprise
Encouraging Adoption of the Living Wage by Employers
Extending Maternity Protection and Reproductive Rights at Work in the Global South

The Business Schools for Good series by the Chartered Association for Business Schools featured the first of the Middlesex case studies as well as impact case studies by Anglia Ruskin University, Bath Business School,Liverpool Business School, University of Bedfordshire, Nottingham University Business School, Trinity Business School, University of the West of England, and Westminster Business School.

So, rather than adding to our endless stream of publications brandishing our theory fetish and our journals for not addressing grand societal challenges, quite possibly discouraging many passionate aspirant authors in the process, let’s spend a bit more time on actually doing this research or at least celebrating it when it is done.

Truth 4: B&M provides more “value for money” than most other disciplines

After evidencing the broad scope, quality, and impact of Business School research, let’s look at the other side of the coin: what are the resources Business Schools have at their disposure to achieve these meritorious outcomes? In the final section of this white paper, I look at the third element of the REF submission – the research environment statement – as well as the level of competitive research funding and time available for Business School research.

The research environment element of the REF assesses the vitality and sustainability of institutional research environments. It reports on a range of metrics on infrastructural support, research funding, and PhD completions, supplemented by a more narrative approach evidencing the UoA’s overall research strategy, staffing strategy, resources for staff development, as well as collaboration with and contribution to the discipline and wider society. At an average GPA of 3.24, B&M scores in the bottom quarter of the 34 disciplines on this element of the REF submission (see Table 6).

However, we can also use the research environment statement as an evaluation of “research efficiency”. Obviously, there isn’t always a direct, one-to-one, relationship between a supportive research environment and high-quality research outputs and impact. There is also likely to be a time lag between initiatives taken to improve the research environment and improved research outputs and impact. Moreover, a supportive research culture is valuable in its own right, especially if it addresses our sector's problems with harassment and bullying, questionable research practices or even outright research misconduct, if it improves research integrity and openness in research through Open Science initiatives, or if it promotes inclusion for non-traditional research(ers). Finally, high-quality outputs could be the result of external rather than internal support, or they could simply have been “bought in” by appointing academics with stellar publication profiles close to the submission deadline.

Generally, however, disciplines that have a very supportive research environment should be expected to score higher on both research outputs and research impact. Thus, disciplines that display a higher score on their research environment than on research outputs and research impact could be argued to be “underperforming”, whereas the reverse is true for disciplines that show higher scores on research outputs and research impact than on their research environment. As shown in Table 6, on average, all disciplines “underperform” significantly on research outputs (-5.5%), whereas they underperform only slightly on impact (-0.3%). Given that impact is more tightly linked to the institutional context than output, this is not surprising.

Table 6: GPA for research environment across disciplines, and % over or under performance for output and impact, manually curated and calculated from original REF 2021 data. Main panel: A = Life Sciences, B = Physical Sciences, C = Social Sciences, D = Arts & Humanities.

GPA for research environment across disciplines, and % over or under performance for output and impact, manually curated and calculated from original REF 2021 data.

Comparing its research environment to its research output and impact, B&M performs well within the top half of disciplines in terms of “return on investment” (see Table 6). Not surprisingly, some of the biggest “overperformers” are disciplines with a relatively low GPA for their environment statement such as Computer Science, Sports & Exercise Sciences, Law, and Sociology. Some of the biggest “underperformers” are disciplines with a very high GPA for their environment statement such as Anthropology, Economics, and Agriculture.

Granted, given the caveats I listed above, this analysis of over- and under-performance might seem a little simplistic. So, I would not recommend putting too much weight on it. Even so, it does provide us with some initial indications of the relationship between the “research inputs” provided in an institution’s research environment and its “research outputs” in the form of publications and impact.

However, I argue that this analysis in fact underestimates the serious lack of investment in B&M research, which I see as resulting mainly from a lack of non-QR research funding and research time. Hence, below I will discuss the two key facilitators for high-quality research and impact in more detail.

Non-QR research funding by discipline: B&M research is underfunded

Non-QR funding – i.e. funding for specific research projects, which is gained in a competitive process through submitting funding applications to the various national and European research councils, charities, industry, and governmental bodies – differs quite dramatically by discipline. Table 7 shows the average yearly funding acquired by institution for each discipline. It also reports the average yearly sector-wide funding that is acquired by discipline.

On an institutional-level, three disciplines – Clinical Medicine, Public Health, and the Biological Sciences – are awarded no less 54% of the total funding, with the remaining nine disciplines in the Life Sciences and Physical Sciences receiving another 35% of the funding pie. The 22 disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities are left to squabble for a paltry 11% of the funding pie.

Table 7: Disciplinary comparison of average yearly research funding by institution, sector, and FTE, manually curated and calculated from original REF 2021 data. Main panel: A = Life Sciences, B = Physical Sciences, C = Social Sciences, D = Arts & Humanities.

When considering sector-wide yearly funding – which takes the different numbers of institutions submitted in each UoA into account – the picture changes slightly, with Engineering joining Clinical Medicine and the Biological Sciences in the top-3 most funded disciplines. The Social Sciences and Humanities – that in terms of FTEs make up half of the academics submitted – still take home only 12% of the total amount of funding allocated in UK HE.

On average, UK institutions are granted nearly 4 million per year in competitive research funding (see Table 7). However, this ranges from 14.3 million per year for the Life Sciences, to 5.6 million for the Physical Sciences, 900K for the Social Sciences, and finally a mere 365K for the Humanities. Within the Social Sciences panel, B&M is well within in the bottom half in terms of yearly institutional funding, with only Sports & Exercise Sciences, Leisure & Tourism, and Law receiving significantly less funding. Looking at sector-wide funding B&M is doing slightly better, due to the very large number of institutions submitted in this UoA. However, it still takes in only 1.2% of the yearly competitive funding for 8.7% of the FTE submitted.

As the last column of Table 7 shows, B&M – with a sector-wide yearly average funding level of only 11K per FTE submitted – is the fifth least funded discipline, with only Communication, Cultural & Media Studies, Law, Performing Arts, and English Language & Literature receiving less funding. On average the Life Sciences receive 162K per FTE, the Physical Sciences 110K per FTE, the Social Sciences 29K per FTE, and the Humanities a mere 15K per FTE.

Obviously, this largely reflects the higher cost of doing research in the Life Sciences and Physical Sciences in terms of infrastructural investments. The Social Sciences and Humanities do not need Physics’ Large Hadron Collider or Medicine’s expensive labs. However, a substantial part of competitive research funding is allocated to buy time for research, either through research assistants or through freeing up researchers themselves from other duties. I would argue that at the level of individual researchers, research in the Social Sciences and Humanities takes up just as much time as in the Life and Physical Sciences. Hence, given the very low funding rates, researchers in the Social Sciences and Humanities typically need to rely on their institution to grant them time for research.

Research time: B&M academics have (much) less time for research

And this is where the third element of our value for money comparison comes in. Even apart from receiving less funding than most other disciplines, B&M academics arguably have (much) less time for research. As Business Schools often function as the “cash-cow” of the university, we typically have to spend (much) more time on teaching than other disciplines .

Figure 1: Contribution of the UK’s Business School Sector

Source: CABS presentation 2023

At the time the image in Figure 1 was created Business Schools taught one in six students in the UK; 2024 HESA data show this has now increased to one in five, i.e. Business Schools teach 20% of all students in the UK. Only “Subjects allied to Medicine” even reaches double digits (12.5%) and the third highest enrolling degree at 9.7% is an amalgamation of all other Social Science degrees, except for Law. B&M degrees in the UK attract nearly 600,000 students (out of a total of nearly 3 million students).

Hence, it should come as no surprise that B&M has one of the highest student/staff ratios of all disciplines; only Law and Economics register marginally higher SSRs (see Table 8). However, these two disciplines have average entry tariffs that are substantially higher than B&M (see Table 8). On this metric, B&M scores second from the bottom, above only Communication, Cultural & Media Studies, but this discipline’s low entry tariff score is compensated by a student/staff ratio that is substantially lower than that of B&M. Thus, on average, Business School academics are responsible for more students than almost any other discipline – as reflected in their high student staff ratio. They also teach students who are typically less prepared for university-level education – as reflected in their low entry tariff scores. This significantly reduces the time B&M academics can spend on research.

Table 8: Disciplinary comparison of SSRs and entry tariffs [Guardian’s university guide] and % of (international) students [HESA], manually curated and calculated. Main panel: A = Life Sciences, B = Physical Sciences, C = Social Sciences, D = Arts & Humanities.

Note: Guardian data and HESA data are not a perfect disciplinary match with REF data. This meant for instance that for B&M, I averaged B&M, Accounting & Finance and Tourism as the latter two degrees are typically included in the B&M REF submission. For Engineering, I averaged the six Engineering degrees in the Guardian data. Several other disciplines are likewise combinations of the more fine-grained Guardian data. Moreover, the Guardian didn’t include Area Studies and HESA didn’t have data for Economics, Archaeology, and Classics.

There is a third teaching-related factor that reduces research time for B&M academics. The role of Business Schools as university cash-cows means that they are required to attract large numbers of high-fee-paying international students. Compared with other disciplines B&M is by far the largest drawcard for international students. In the UK, Business Schools now teach 35% of international students and 37% of non-European students, with none of the other 33 disciplines even reaching double digits.

This has substantive consequences for the student composition in Business Schools. As Table 8 shows nearly half of the students in B&M are non-UK students, 41.7% are non-European. As international students – and especially non-European students – typically require higher levels of support in their studies, this adds further to the already very high teaching loads of B&M academics.

Finally, for those who like to rubbish B&M degrees as ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’, note that the Guardian University Guide shows that – at an average of 5.6 – the added value of B&M degrees is squarely within the range displayed by all disciplines 5.4-5.7 (on a scale of 1-10).

In Sum – Let’s take a little more pride in what we do

In this white paper, I have demonstrated that Business School research in the UK – as measured in the 2021 REF – is not as bad as many observers, including B&M scholars themselves, like to claim it is. B&M research offers the second largest research contribution in the UK when both the size and quality of its submission are considered. It also contributes significantly to high-quality research outputs (publications), whether measured through peer review or through citations. Moreover, the non-academic impact of B&M research is more widespread than that of any other discipline.

Miraculously, we have achieved these stellar results on a shoestring budget whilst also carrying by far the most demanding teaching load of all disciplines, cross-subsidising nearly all other disciplines in our universities in the process. So, rather than continuing to castigate ourselves as researchers, can we please take a little more pride in what we do and share some good news stories about our research occasionally?

References

Harzing, A. W. (2013). A preliminary test of Google Scholar as a source for citation data: a longitudinal study of Nobel prize winners. Scientometrics, 94(3), 1057-1075.

Peters, K., & Thomas, H. (2020). The triumph of nonsense in management studies: A commentary. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 19(2), 236-239.

Thelwall, M., Kousha, K., Stuart, E., Makita, M., Abdoli, M., Wilson, P., & Levitt, J. M. (2023a). Does the perceived quality of interdisciplinary research vary between fields? Journal of Documentation, 79(6), 1514-1531.

Thelwall, M., Kousha, K., Stuart, E., Makita, M., Abdoli, M., Wilson, P., & Levitt, J. (2023b). Do bibliometrics introduce gender, institutional or interdisciplinary biases into research evaluations? Research Policy, 52(8), 104829.

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Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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