Management Studies in Crisis Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research

More students study management and organization studies than ever, the number of business schools worldwide continues to rise, and more management research is being published in a greater number of journals than could have been imagined twenty years ago. Dennis Tourish looks beneath the surface of this progress to expose a field in crisis and in need of radical reform. He identifies the ways in which management research has lost its way, including a remoteness from the practical problems that managers and employees face, a failure to replicate key research findings, poor writing, endless obscure theorizing, and an increasing number of research papers being retracted for fraud and other forms of malpractice. Tourish suggests fundamental changes to remedy these issues, enabling management research to become more robust, more interesting and more valuable to society. A must read for academics, practising managers, university administrators and policy makers within higher education.

Introduction: the crisis in management studies; 1. Flawed from the get go: the early misadventures of management research; 2. How audit damages research and academic freedom; 3. 'When the levee breaks': academic life on the brink; 4. The corruption of academic integrity; 5. Paradise lost but not yet regained: retractions and management studies; 6. The triumph of nonsense in management studies; 7. Flawed theorising, dodgy statistics and (in) authentic leadership theory; 8. The promises, problems and paradoxes of evidence based management; 9. Reclaiming meaningful research in management studies; 10. Putting zest and purpose back into academic life.

Dennis Tourish is Professor of Leadership and Organization Studies at the University of Sussex. He is editor of the journal Leadership, and widely regarded as one of the leading figures in the emerging area of 'Critical Leadership Studies'. His most recent authored book was The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective (2013).