Making Your Research Matter:
Broadening the Meaning of Impact
Academy of Management 2021 Annual Meeting PDW
August 2, 2021, 1.00-2.30pm Eastern Time (New York time); Session 929
Organizers: Corinne Post (Lehigh); Christopher Wickert (VU Amsterdam); Jonathan Doh (Villanova); John Prescott (Pittsburgh); Andrea Prencipe (Luiss)
Distinguished speakers and panelists:
- Anne Tsui (Notre Dame)
- Dave Ketchen (Auburn)
- Oscar Holmes (Rutgers)
- Andre Spicer (Bayes)
- Dilly Fung (London School Economics)
- Alison Konrad (Ivey)
- Jamie Ladge (Northeastern)
- Gideon Markman (Colorado State)
- Phil Phan (Johns Hopkins)
- Ruth Sealy (Exeter)
Sponsor & Co-Sponsor: Organizational Behavior (OB) Division; Strategy (STR), Social Issues in Management (SIM)
Access the PDW via the AOM Annual Meeting website (session #929).
Further information about how to participate in the AOM 2021 annual meeting can be found here.
Focus of the workshop: The world is undergoing dramatic transformations. Many of the grand societal challenges we currently face underscore the need for scholarly research - including management studies - that can help us best sort out and solve them. Yet, organizational behavior scholars and management scholars more broadly struggle to produce concrete solutions or to communicate how their research can help to tackle these grand societal challenges. Many in the management scholarly community have called for a serious reexamination of the relevance and impact of our research, including AOM. This PDW aims to help scholars who want to "make a difference" by outlining how they can systematically enlarge and extend research projects to amplify their impact to address the challenges societies face. We review five forms of impact (scholarly, practical, societal, policy, and educational) and, for each, provide concrete suggestions for getting started and possible outlets (Wickert et al., 2021), thereby stimulating management and organization scholars to think more broadly about and to begin more often producing impactful research, which we define as that which influences through multifaceted forms and channels how organizations and individuals think, behave, or perform.
This PDW will be a 90-minute and interactive "Synchronous Live Presenter" session, the bulk of which focuses on interaction between: (i) participants with research ideas and projects that have the potential to be extended and amplified for broader impact; (ii) recognized scholars with expertise broadening the impact of their published work. The organizers will kick-off the PDW with a welcome and introduction. Then, four experts on writing impactful research will deliver prepared remarks, followed by Q&As. Next, we will organize participants into virtual breakout rooms, each of which will feature one or two recognized scholars who are also experts on a particular form of impact (including the panelists) and a facilitator, for a discussion on how to develop the participants' ideas for impactful research. After the completion of the round table discussions, scribes from each table will report the key learnings, experiences, and take-aways from the PDW.
References:
Wickert, C., Post, C., Doh, J., Prescott, J., & Principe, A. (2021). Management research that makes a difference: Broadening the meaning of impact. Journal of Management Studies. 58(2), 297-320.
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Christopher Wickert
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Amsterdam
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