There have long been calls for business schools to focus on “responsible research” with relevance to society. Now, there is fresh scope to deploy technology to help assess their academics’ outputs at scale, albeit with limitations.
The leading business school accreditation bodies — the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, Equis and the Association of MBAs — are among those seeking societal impact, alongside organisations such as the Responsible Research in Business and Management network and the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education. But calling for responsible research is one thing; measuring it meaningfully and at scale is quite another.
It is difficult, by any yardstick, to evaluate digitally the originality and depth of insight of academic writing, let alone assess its ultimate impact. Academic awards and assessments of papers do not necessarily coincide with the views of practitioners seeking practical applications. Ideas may take many years, and be significantly modified, before they are taken up. Some of the strongest may eventually prove to be erroneous and even harmful, or unexpectedly beneficial in unanticipated applications.
However, technology tools linked to large language models and artificial intelligence can at least start to measure the extent to which the topics researched and published by academics align with societal objectives. One framework gathering increasing popularity uses the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — 17 objectives agreed by countries around the world for 2030, such as eradicating poverty, provding quality education and taking climate action. Within the 17 goals, there are 169 specific targets.
David Steingard, associate professor of management at the Haub School of Business, Saint Joseph’s University, in the US, has developed an SDG-Impact Journal Rating to assess how far 100 leading business school academic journals match the goals. ChatSDG, the latest iteration, builds on the approach to show how far schools are aligning their research more broadly with the SDGs.
For its latest analysis on how many academics in each business school have published SDG-related articles, the FT has used OpenAlex, the open access data provider. It, in turn, takes into account a series of key SDG terms and definitions developed by the Aurora Universities network. These have been filtered to consider, as a measure of rigour, only articles published in the FT50 list of leading journals.
Clarivate, which operates the Web of Science database of journals, is one of several commercial providers also offering SDG analytics. As with OpenAlex, however, it focuses on tallying articles considered to have some SDG relevance, rather than trying to compare the depth of their analysis with other papers.
For the FT, Clarivate has identified leading SDG-related articles using a different proxy — data on the “demand” or level of interest in the articles — by measuring the number of downloads they generated from readers.
The most popular topics in publications highlighted in this way include artificial intelligence and digital innovation, which align respectively with the SDGs for decent work and economic growth and for responsible consumption and production.
Wilfred Mijnhardt, policy director at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, goes further in his approach to rating individual journal articles. He has devised an SDG Mapper developed with an open-source list of terms for the different goals, which he has used to rank the intensity of the alignment of each article’s contents.
For this report, he has generated comparative rankings for the FT50 of journals and for the broader, though largely aligned, list of top journals as assessed by the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS).
His calculations identify several top themes, including supply chains and recycling; women’s economic empowerment; microfinance, and carbon pricing.
All these methodologies have their limitations, however. Mijnhardt’s list contained at least one historically focused article that had little obvious alignment with the SDGs: a paper from the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis called “Access to finance and technological innovation: evidence from pre-civil war America”.
Other articles are clearly relevant to the SDGs, but how far they are the most important contributions to scholarship and practice is a far more open debate. They at least provide a new benchmark as academics and business schools consider what to research, and society seeks new ideas on how to tackle problems from climate change to poverty and inequality.
Mijnhardt’s FT50 analysis
Supply chains for clothing
Meltem Denizel and Caroline Schumm from Iowa State University explored fashion in their 2023 Journal of the Operations Management article “Closed loop supply chains in apparel: current state and future directions”. The academics examined public sustainability reports to compare the low levels of recycling of clothing with the electronics industry, where moves towards a “circular economy” without requiring additional resource depletion is more advanced.
They highlighted “the polluting nature” of apparel and textiles, with 120mn tons projected to be purchased by 2030. While the circular market could be worth $700bn by that same year, most such approaches “are unprofitable and only account for a small percentage of a firm’s annual sales”. Patagonia, for example, offers only one product, the Tee-Cycle T-shirt, that is fully circular.
While electronics — and car producers — “remanufacture” using recycled products, in clothing the process remains relatively more costly, inconsistent and under-regulated. Clothing stores have the advantage of high-street outlets to help with recycling, but companies take varied approaches on whether they want to reuse only their own materials, as well as difficulties in separating raw materials. Contrasting the differences in acquisition, reprocessing and recycling in clothes and electronics, the authors conclude that the sector offers “fertile research grounds that have the ability to shape practice in profound ways”.
Marketplace literacy
Madhubalan Viswanathan, professor of marketing at the College of Business Administration, Loyola Marymount University in the US, and co-authors including Arun Sreekumar at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, published “Marketplace literacy as a pathway to a better world: evidence from field experiments in low-access subsistence marketplaces” in the Journal of Marketing in 2021.
They describe the increasing focus of multinational companies on subsistence marketplaces, or those serving low-income communities, which account for nearly $5trn of spending annually. But they argue that these consumers need “marketplace literacy” to participate “effectively and beneficially” as both consumers and entrepreneurs. Otherwise, they are at a disadvantage — for instance, missing out on a discount as they are unable to compute the final price.
The researchers conducted three field experiments with 1,000 people in 34 remote villages in India and Tanzania, measuring the difference between control groups and those offered training programmes in “know what”, “know how” and “know why” (understanding cause and effect).
They found the result was an increase in psychological wellbeing and related consumer and entrepreneurial outcomes, and an increase in entrepreneurial outcomes related to wellbeing.
Through conducting this research, hundreds of low-income and resource-constrained individuals in remote Indian and Tanzanian areas experienced improvements in their lives and livelihoods. Many participants began to negotiate a product’s price or check its quality.
Mijnhardt’s FT50 plus CABS’ top journals
Informal water vendors
Florence Dery, from Queen’s University, Canada, and Ophelia Soliku, from the SD Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies in Ghana, plus colleagues studied private water sellers in low income regions in their paper “‘Quenching the thirst of others while suffering’: embodied experiences of water vendors in Ghana and Kenya”, published in Social Science & Medicine.
Water tanker operators selling from private standpipes and boreholes — and others working from carts, bicycles or tricycles to transport water — have a significant role in informal settlements in low- and middle-income countries, but their own health and wellbeing are little studied. The researchers looked at health risks in Accra and Wa in Ghana and Kisumu in Kenya.
They found concerns about injury, environmental pollution, stigma and work-life balance, as well the effects of harsh weather conditions, poor physical terrain and abuse from customers. Female water vendors complained about pregnancy complications, baldness and water-related diseases, as well as physical threats.
Clarivate SDG pick
The impact of AI on creativity
Nan Jia, at the University of Southern California, Xueming Luo, of Temple University in Philadelphia, and their fellow authors considered, “When and how artificial intelligence augments employee creativity” in the Academy of Management Journal. They studied a telemarketing company to find that AI assistance in generating sales leads on average increased employees’ creativity in answering customers’ questions during subsequent sales calls, leading to increased sales.
But they found the effect was much more significant for higher-skilled employees, and that the role of AI was to intensify the way staff engaged with more serious customers. The result was to allow them to generate innovative scripts and develop positive emotions at work, helping creativity. AI assistance for lower-skilled employees made few improvements on scripts and increased negative emotions at work.