Void in Management Research

With the changing landscape of economic development in rural and urban areas, the functioning, responsibility, and contribution of organisations involved in production, service delivery, marketing, and development are also changing. To address this challenge, there is a call for reorienting management education to enhance the employability of young graduates and also the effective functioning of existing and ­future organisations. The key to reorienting management education lies in creating new and relevant knowledge. The knowledge gene­ration exists as a dyad, which requires dedicated involvement of gatekeepers of management institutions and open support to access the details of organisations which practise the management in the real world.

It is a worthy and pertinent call by the scholars and practitioners of management in India to address this void. However, it does raise questions: does “the existing ecosystem in the domain of mana­gement as practice and management as research/teaching, provide enough space for the creation of knowledge which can have a shelf life of 50 or 100 years in India?” Educational institutions display ample weaknesses, which are evident from the knowledge that has been produced in the last 70-odd years. This is in spite of India having the largest number of management institutes in the world. And for this, even the best management institutions have to seriously introspect. However, there is another part to this story, which also needs deep introspection. What is the role played by organisations involved in the practice of management in social life and their participation in knowledge production and dissemination? Somehow, their role is least discussed and debated in the open—may be due to too much dependence on management institutions placing their prospective graduates in employment—when it comes to creation of knowledge in management studies.