More Voices at the Top: The Decreasing Concentration of Business School Research

Increasing pressures on and incentives for business school (B-school) researchers to publish in “A-journals” have led to qualms about a scenario wherein only a few institutions account for most of these publications, thereby decreasing the diversity and influence of B-school research. We examine these concerns by constructing measures to capture the presence and degree to which seven B-school disciplines (i.e., accounting, finance, information systems, management, marketing, operations management, and organizational studies) exhibit increasing or decreasing concentration of affiliations, and testing the impact of hypothesized factors on these measures. Analyzing 33 years of publication data (i.e., 1990–2022) for 45,300 articles from 24 A-journals across seven disciplines, we find that B-school research is progressively becoming less and less concentrated, with an average decrease of 29% across all disciplines. Furthermore, not only are researchers from more institutions publishing in A-journals, but also the ability of researchers from a few B-schools to dominate the scholarly conversation within a discipline is decreasing. Finally, while we find evidence supporting both mechanisms (i.e., increasing and decreasing concentration), the factors driving decreasing concentration are eclipsing those from the alternative perspective. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this decreasing concentration for researchers, administrators, doctoral students, and our field. 商学院（B-school）研究人员在“A级期刊”上发表论文的压力和激励与日俱增,这引发了担忧：少数机构产出大部分“A级期刊”文章,降低了商学院研究的多样性和影响力。为分析这个担忧,我们通过构建指标来量化商学院七个学科（会计、金融、信息系统、管理、市场营销、运营管理和组织研究）各科的“A级期刊”发表学校的集中度程度和集中度是上升还是下降, 并检验假设因素对这些指标的影响。通过分析33年间（1990年-2022年）七个学科领域内24种A级期刊上发表的45,300篇的出版数据, 我们发现商学院研究成果的集中度在逐步下降,所有学科的平均集中度下降了29%。此外,不仅‌有更多机构的研究人员‌在A级期刊上发表论文,而且‌少数顶尖商学院的研究人员主导某一学科内学术对话的能力也在减弱‌。最后,虽然我们发现同时存在着促进集中度上升和下降机制的证据,但‌驱动集中度下降的因素超越了与之相反的机制因素‌。我们亦讨论了集中度下降趋势对研究人员、管理人员、博士生以及我们整个领域影响的理论和实践意义。