There have long been calls for business schools to deal with “responsible research” with social relevance. There is now latest scope for using technology to evaluate the outcomes of their academic staff at scale, albeit with limitations.
The leading accreditation bodies for business schools – the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, Equis and the Association of MBAs – are amongst those who support social want to realize an impact. But demanding responsible research is one thing; Measuring it meaningfully and to scale is something else entirely.
By any measure, it’s difficult to digitally evaluate the originality and depth of insight of educational writing, let alone assess its ultimate impact. Academic awards and evaluations of labor don’t necessarily reflect the views of practitioners searching for practical applications. It can take a few years and significant changes for ideas to be implemented. Some of the strongest ones might ultimately prove to be flawed and even harmful, or unexpectedly useful in unexpected applications.
However, technology tools linked to large language models and artificial intelligence can not less than begin to measure the extent to which the topics researched and published by scientists align with societal goals. A framework that’s becoming increasingly popular is predicated on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – 17 goals that countries all over the world have agreed on for 2030, including eradicating poverty, providing quality education and taking motion of climate protection measures. Within the 17 goals there are 169 specific goals.
David Steingard, associate professor of management on the Haub School of BusinessSaint Joseph's University within the USA has developed one Assessment of the SDG Impact Journal to evaluate the extent to which 100 leading business school journals meet the goals. ChatSDGthe newest version, builds on the approach and shows the extent to which schools are aligning their research more broadly with the SDGs.
For its latest evaluation of what number of academics at each business school have published SDG-related articles, the FT used OpenAlex, the open access data provider. It in turn takes into consideration quite a few key SDG terms and definitions developed by the Aurora Universities Network. These were filtered to only include articles published within the FT50 list of leading journals as a measure of accuracy.
Clarivate, operator of the Web of Science journal database, is one among several business providers that also offer SDG analyses. However, like OpenAlex, it focuses on counting articles which are believed to have some SDG relevance, reasonably than attempting to match the depth of their evaluation with other articles.
For the FT, Clarivate identified leading SDG-related articles using a distinct proxy – data on “demand” or the extent of interest within the articles – by measuring the variety of downloads they generated from readers.
The hottest topics in publications highlighted in this fashion include artificial intelligence and digital innovation, each aligned with the SDGs for decent work and economic growth and for responsible consumption and production.
Wilfred Mijnhardt, political director at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus Universitygoes even further in its approach to evaluating individual journal articles. He developed one SDG Mapper Developed with an open source list of terms for the several objectives, which he used to judge the intensity of targeting of the content of every article.
For this report, he created comparative rankings for the FT50 of journals and for the broader, although broadly consistent, list of top journals assessed by the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS).
Its calculations discover several top issues, including supply chains and recycling; economic empowerment of girls; Microfinance and CO2 pricing.
However, all of those methods have their limitations. Mijnhardt's list included not less than one historically focused article that had little apparent consistency with the SDGs: an article from the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis titled “Access to Finance and Technological Innovation: Evidence from Antebellum America.”
Other articles are clearly relevant to the SDGs, however the extent to which they represent an important contributions to science and practice is a far more open debate. At the very least, they represent a brand new benchmark as academics and business schools take into consideration what to research and society looks for brand new ideas about how you can tackle problems from climate change to poverty and inequality.
Mijnhardt's FT50 evaluation
Apparel supply chains
Meltem Denizel and Caroline Schumm of Iowa State University examined fashion of their 2023 article “Closed Loop Supply Chains in Apparel: Current State and Future Directions” within the Journal of the Operations Management. The researchers examined public sustainability reports to look at low recycling rates of clothing with that of the electronics industry, where the event towards a “circular economy” without additional consumption of resources is more advanced.
They highlighted “the environmentally damaging nature” of clothing and textiles, with 120 million tonnes expected to be purchased by 2030. While the circular market could possibly be price $700 billion in the identical 12 months, most of those approaches are “unprofitable and represent only a small percentage of an organization’s annual revenue.” For example, Patagonia only offers one product that is totally circular, the Tee Cycle T-shirt.
While electronics and automobile manufacturers “remanufacture” their products with recycled products, the method for clothing stays relatively costly, inconsistent and under-regulated. Clothing stores have the advantage of with the ability to help with recycling on high streets. However, firms vary of their approach as to whether they wish to reuse only their very own materials, and there are also difficulties in separating raw materials. Comparing the differences in sourcing, remanufacturing and recycling within the clothing and electronics industries, the authors conclude that the sector “offers fruitful areas of research that may profoundly influence practice.”
Marketplace expertise
Madhubalan Viswanathan, professor of promoting on the College of Business Administration at Loyola Marymount University within the US, and co-authors including Arun Sreekumar from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, published “Marketplace Literacy as a Path to a Better World: Evidence from field experiments in Low Livelihood Access Markets” within the Journal of Marketing in 2021.
They describe multinational firms' increasing deal with subsistence marketplaces or those serving low-income communities, which account for nearly $5 trillion in spending annually. However, they argue that these consumers need “market knowledge” to participate “effectively and beneficially” as each consumers and entrepreneurs. Otherwise, they’re at a drawback – for instance, they miss out on a reduction because they can’t calculate the ultimate price.
Researchers conducted three field experiments with 1,000 people in 34 distant villages in India and Tanzania and measured the difference between control groups and people who received training programs within the areas of “Know What,” “Know How,” and “Know Why.” effect) were offered. .
They found that the result was a rise in psychological well-being and related consumer and entrepreneurial outcomes, in addition to a rise in entrepreneurial outcomes related to well-being.
By conducting this research, a whole bunch of low-income and resource-constrained people in distant areas of India and Tanzania have seen improvements of their lives and livelihoods. Many participants began to barter the value of a product or check its quality.
Mijnhardt's FT50 plus the highest magazines from CABS
Informal water sellers
Florence Dery of Queen's University, Canada, and Ophelia Soliku of SD Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies in Ghana, and colleagues examined private water sellers in low-income regions of their article “'Quenching Others' Thirst While They Suffer'” : embodied experiences of water sellers in Ghana and Kenya,” published in Social Science & Medicine.
Water tanker operators who sell from private standpipes and boreholes – and others who transport water using carts, bicycles or tricycles – play a vital role in informal settlements in low- and middle-income countries, but their very own health and well-being are rarely affected examined. The researchers examined health risks in Accra and Wa in Ghana and Kisumu in Kenya.
They noted concerns about injuries, pollution, stigma and work-life balance, in addition to the impact of harsh weather conditions, poor physical condition and abuse from customers. Water sellers complained of pregnancy complications, baldness and water-related illnesses, in addition to physical threats.
Clarify SDG selection
The influence of AI on creativity
Nan Jia from the University of Southern California, Xueming Luo from Temple University in Philadelphia and their co-authors addressed the subject “When and the way artificial intelligence increases worker creativity” within the Academy of Management Journal. They studied a telemarketing company and located that, on average, AI assistance in generating sales leads increased employees' creativity in answering customer questions on subsequent sales calls, which led to higher sales.
However, they found that the effect was much greater amongst more highly expert employees and that the role of AI was to accentuate the way in which employees interact with more serious customers. The result was that they were in a position to create progressive scripts and develop positive emotions at work, which encouraged creativity. AI support for less expert employees resulted in few improvements to scripts and increased negative emotions at work.
