[Ed note: This is the sixth of six articles in a virtual panel on Who should benefit from organizational research?]
by Hugh Willmott
Professor Davis asks: who should benefit from organizational research? Rather than taking for granted its beneficiaries, he usefully poses the question. To the extent that organizations research has a practical impact, it informs decisions made by business and governments, amongst others. In turn, as Professor Davis (2015) notes, those decisions ‘shape the life chances of workers, consumers, and citizens for decades to come’. This expectation provides what I commend as an answer to his question: there is potentially as large and diverse audience for knowledge of management and organization as there is diversity of stakeholders in the widely diffused practices of management and organization. The audience includes, but is not restricted to, managers.
There is perhaps some irony in how the established, critical case for challenging the role of business academics as ‘servants of [executive] power’ is now been joined by a pragmatic recognition that the audience of managers is diminishing. As Professor Davis reports, bean counters have (with scientific rigor?) assigned the status of ‘manager’ to 7 million Americans, but the number of employees who manage others is, in all likelihood, in sharp, and probably irreversible, decline. There is, then, some common ground between long-standing critics of managerialism and those now wishing to expand the audience (market?) for business academics.