When an A Is <i>NOT</i> an A in Academic Research, or How A-Journal List Metrics Inhibit Exploratory Behaviour in Academia
Alejandro Agafonow & Marybel Pérez
What the paper says
On account of the leverage that the Academy of Management (AOM) has, via its positioning in the highest tiers of the A-journal lists currently used to adjudicate promotions and tenure evaluations, it is urgent to assess the premises and assumptions upon which the so-called pluralist model of scholarly impact, advocated by academics with executive responsibilities in the AOM, is built. Our findings are that the pluralist model is liable to three crucial problems: ecological bias, specific knowledge and pre-emptive costs. Consistent with extant performance evaluation scholarship, promotions and tenure evaluations must build instead on: (a) a qualitative evaluation of scholarly contributions unencumbered by ordinality assumptions; (b) the narrowing of the span of control of academics, moving supervisory authority away from the line structure and back into the hands of true peers; and (c) muting the incentives that prevent academics from focusing on riskier and long-term horizon outputs, which are pillars in agreement with known accounts of how exploratory behaviour has been successfully managed at IBM, Google, the SAS Institute and Nokia, to name but a few cases. JEL Codes: 123, O31
5 citations
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.35 × 0.4 = 0.14 |
| M · momentum | 0.80 × 0.15 = 0.12 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.