A pluralist conceptualization of scholarly impact in management education

Knowledge transfer is the primary conduit through which management professors communicate what is known about human and organizational dynamics. This process has been conceptualized by the construct of scholarly impact. However, scholarly impact is often conceptualized and measured as an internal exchange, exclusively within and between communities of researchers. We investigated external knowledge transfer to a critical management education constituency: Students. To do so, we used bibliometric methods to investigate scholarly impact in management education by examining which sources, articles, and authors are most frequently cited in 38 widely-used organizational behavior (OB), human resource management (HRM), strategic management (SM), and general management (GM) textbooks. By extracting all endnotes and references, we created a database including 7,445 unique sources (e.g., peer-reviewed journals, business periodicals), 33,719 unique articles and book chapters, and 32,981 unique authors. Examples of our findings include: (a) there is no clear relation between journals and authors cited most frequently in other journals and those most frequently cited in textbooks; (b) on average, 36 percent of the most cited sources in OB, HRM, SM, and GM textbooks are non-academic; and (c) fewer than 1% of the most cited articles in textbooks overlap across the different disciplines. Taken together, our results offer novel insights based on a more pluralistic and broader approach to evaluating knowledge transfer. Results have implications for the conceptualization and measurement of knowledge transfer and the design of academic performance management and reward systems, the science-practice divide, and choices regarding what knowledge academics create.