A pluralist conceptualization of scholarly impact in management education: Students as stakeholders

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 (and their affiliations) 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.