Bump It With a Trumpet: On the Value of Our Research to Management Education

Pearce and Huang (2012, this issue) argue that management research has had woefully little impact. In support of this contention, they attempt to demonstrate that there has been a decline in “actionable” management research in selected management journals, suggest that relatively few mentions of those journals in a publication such as The Economist are evidence of lack of impact, and offer a list of questions which they believe management research could more profitably address. I fully agree with Pearce and Huang's call to explore ways to enhance the impact of management research; however, I have serious questions about the authors' assumptions, logical development, methodology, representation of data, and recommendations. As such, whether there has actually been a decline in the impact and “actionability” of management research, I can't agree that Pearce and Huang's article provides meaningful input to this issue.