For decades, scholars have bemoaned the low relevancy and impact of most research in the leading journals in business, management, and marketing. The majority of the research that gets published, perhaps 70% of it, hardly has any measurable scholarly impact in terms of citations. Rather than low
relevancy, ‘Bad to Good’ posits that the deeper issue is the pervasive use of bad research practices appearing in most articles in almost all ranked journals in the sub-disciplines of business.
With the objective of reducing the high volume of bad practices in research in finance, management and marketing, the book offers tools for improving theory construction and empirical testing of theory especially by early-to-mid scholars. ‘Bad to Good’ covers 24 common bad practices,
explaining why they are bad and how to replace them with good practices.
Arch Woodside is a leading voice on how to improve business research. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the ‘Journal of Business Research’ (JBR) for forty years. In 2016 the JBR ranked first among the top-twenty journals in marketing in the Google.com/scholar h-5 index (an impact
metric) and seventh among the strategic management sub-discipline.
Considering the tangible implications the present focus on research output poses for early career researchers, it is strange that perspectives from this group are rarely, if ever, included in the ongoing debates in the field. This book aims to put these views on record. By bringing together a group
of critically-orientated early career researchers from global business schools it investigates a series of timely questions pertaining to the impact that institutional pressures have on junior academics – particularly those who conduct ‘critical’ or non-mainstream research. What is
the nature of the institutional pressure that is placed upon doctoral students to publish in certain journals or to conduct positivist research? How do students with a critical orientation resist these pressures – or why do they succumb to them? What are the implications on critical scholars
for resisting or acquiescing to these pressures and what does this mean for scholarship more broadly? Taking a narrative approach, this book will be required reading for all doctoral students as well as all those in academia dissatisfied with the current intellectual hegemony in business schools.