In an interesting interview Gary Bridge, Managing Director of Snow Creek Advisors, shared his thoughts on the managerial/academic divide. He is pretty critical about academia but I think he is largely right. What does he have to say about academics as thinkers, managers as doers?
Thinkers, Doers & Academic Gamesmanship
Bridge starts with the comforting thought that academics are thinkers and practitioners are doers. I’m not sure about this. Specifically, I think his description of the academic process is largely accurate. Yet, I don’t think deep thinking captures the idea. He describes:
much of what passes for theory building today is actually academic gamesmanship, where publication pages and citations are the currency of the discipline and buy academic status and rewards.
Bridge, 2017
Academics As Thinkers, Managers As Doers
This seems about right. The problem is that the games we play often aren’t conducive to deep thought. Too often research starts with “people have studied topic A, and other people have studied topic B, but no one has put them together”. Few people ask why people haven’t bothered to put them together. Finding topics to study based solely upon gaps in past research is academic gamesmanship. This isn’t about the thinker/doer divide.
His tone can seem to suggest that he doesn’t see the value of theory which he really doesn’t mean. He thinks practically useful theory is important.
It is not theory per se that I object to, it is aimless theorizing that produces papers but not genuine progress.
Bridge, 2017
I take his point but I’m still not sure aimless theorizing is the problem in much of marketing academia nowadays. I’m more hostile to the twin perils of:
- 1) aimless experimenting, and
- 2) aimless data dredging.
Often theoretical thought doesn’t really influence much. Researchers, of course, supply a theory. Yet, often academics (in my field at least) do not take the theory stage very seriously. The theory is often in the form of some plausible nonsense. This is tacked onto the beginning of a paper, even though it may be concocted long after the results are found. Theory somewhat explains the results, provided you don’t look too closely.
Putting Pressure on Academics
Bridge did not want to be mean-spirited. That said, I think it is useful for people like him to put pressure on academics. Where I was probably most disappointed was his conclusion. He says:
The “gamesmanship,” which rewards individuals but retards the discipline’s impact needs to be reconsidered; but like all transformations, those who feel like winners in the current environment will be the very last to embrace new ways…
Bridge 2017
He is surely right. As such, I would have like to hear specifics about how to improve things. People winning at the current system have no incentive to reconsider. The vague hope, therefore, that gamesmanship will be reconsidered seemed a bit woolly to me.
For more on relevance in academia see here, here, and here.
Read: Gary’s Bridge’s comments taken from The Practical Relevance of Marketing Scholarship: A Conversation Between Tom Brown and R. Gary Bridge, Written up by Mike Brady