Entrepreneurship research, and business research generally, seems like a natural fit for interdisciplinary research, but the reality is far from that. Business schools are usually made up of professors who come from core disciplines like economics, psychology, and sociology. A few professors don’t come from core disciplines, but most are them are strongly aligned with one discipline or another.
This is a shame because many business problems provide ideal opportunities to apply insights from multiple disciplines. In fact, one could argue that they need multiple disciplines to be understood at all. The financial crisis is a perfect example of this. Understanding why it happened simply cannot be explained by economics or psychology alone.
One of the core competencies of business schools is that they have all these professors from different backgrounds and are tasked with understanding very complex problems. Alas, this diversity of knowledge, for the most part, is not tapped to its full potential. It’s almost like an Apple vs Microsoft problem. At Apple, management recognizes that people want good technology, but they also want it to be easy to use, so the engineers work with the design people to solve a problem that needs insights from both. At Microsoft, the human interface team and the engineering teams do not work well together. The product speaks for itself.
At least in the faulty Apple vs Microsoft analogy, the market can speak. And it has spoken. Business research on the other hand, has no real market that will correct its flaws. Business researchers write for other business researchers and hence there is little incentive for professors to understand the real problems that business folks face. Hence, I was very interested when Fabio Rojas at Orgtheory commented on research suggesting that the natural sciences are much more accepting of crossing disciplines than in the social sciences. He suggests it’s a group identity thing and I tend to agree:
Now, the question is – why are the social sciences the exception here? Knowledge is knowledge. My hunch is that social scientists have a taste for group identity, to take an Akerlof spin on it. An anthropologist cites other anthropologists to show in-group identity, as do most other social scientists (e.g., sociologists citing sociologists/econ/etc). Citing too many articles from other fields is interpreted as not being really in the group. If it’s true, then we’re really missing out.
However, I am optimistic. They are more and more alternatives to traditional journals like SSRN and PLoS ONE. In the future, journal articles will not only be online for all to read, but they will be peer reviewed by many. Hopefully, this will encourage business researchers to reach beyond their core training and break the vicious group identity issues that they and other social sciences have.
via interdisciplinary work may not suck « orgtheory.net.
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