We widen the scope of the impact debate by extending Boyer's theorization of scholarship through Denyer, Tranfield and van Aken's CIMO framework to propose relational management education as an intervention that creates the generative mechanism of co‐production and subsequent impact. In so doing, we propose a new conceptualization of academic impact that occurs through teaching and is situated within a community of inquirers. We offer a critique of current thinking, dominated by the idea that the research paper is the most appropriate unit of analysis by which to measure the excellence and impact of research. We examine the notion of the gap between academics and practitioners and argue that the impact agenda should be widened to include a consideration of how management academics can become impactful through their teaching of practitioners, broadly defined to include the whole range of learners associated with business schools. We propose that for management research to have the potential to change these practitioners, an engagement with knowledge is needed, and that this involves more than translation but the creation of new ideas. Such impact can be brought about by a disruption of, and challenge to, thinking engendered by an approach to management education that we term relational.

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We trace the origins and development of the management learning movement that has come to be closely associated with the journal Management Learning and explain how ideas that shaped the creation of business schools influenced the inception of this field. We then examine themes and trends that have been prevalent in the field in the second half of the journal’s 50-year history, through an analysis of its coverage over a 24-year period from 1994 to 2018. During this time, there has been a marked shift away from an applied focus on manager and management development towards a more theoretical perspective of the field, in keeping with trends in academic journals more generally. We focus on the journal’s contribution to the scholarship of management and organisational learning through an analysis of both strong and weak themes and its most cited papers. Finally, we propose ways in which our analysis of the past might offer new ways of thinking about our scholarship and we propose a future direction for the field and the journal that connects to the original intentions to shape organisational practice in order to address broader issues of social and economic exchange.

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