Taking urgent action to combat climate change is a pivotal Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). Since it is closely intertwined with the other 16 goals, it is frequently characterized as a ‘wicked problem par excellence.’ Interdisciplinary research, i.e., research crossing disciplinary boundaries, offers promise for grappling with wicked problems, but also entails significant challenges to researchers. In this study, we use bibliometric methods to understand how management scholars have, over the course of four decades, straddled disciplinary boundaries and what impact their efforts have had on top-tier climate change research appearing in Science and Nature. We find that management scholarship on climate change (1) has grown significantly since the mid-2000s, (2) features substantial engagement with an interdisciplinary knowledge base, and (3) fails to attract the attention of climate change research within top-tier interdisciplinary journals. We discuss these findings with reference to the ongoing discourse on raising management scholarship's relevance and impact.
Knowledge co-production within academic-practitioner research collaborations is a promising means to address the pressing issue of research impact. Yet current theorising is hampered by a limited appreciation of power in the relationship between research partners. In this study, we explore various types of power and their effects on knowledge co-production in government-funded research collaborations. Drawing on interviews with academics and practitioners working on Australian Research Council Linkage Scheme projects, we initially document the prominence of structural and normative types of power, alongside resource power. We further show that both structural and normative power fail to conform to key principles of knowledge co-production. As a result, many of the projects studied fell short of the knowledge co-production ideal. Our investigation leads us to identify a boundary condition: knowledge co-production theory in its current form is bounded by resource power conditions. Our expanded perspective provides for an elaboration of knowledge co-production theory. We also explore the implications of our findings for business schools in search of impact.
As climate change pervades natural and social systems, the integration of social sciences in interdisciplinary climate change research is crucial but often lacking. In this study we use bibliometric analyses of management research on climate change to understand how management scholars have navigated interdisciplinarity, and what impact their efforts had on top-tier climate change research. We find that management scholarship (1) features substantial engagement with an interdisciplinary knowledge base through backward references, and (2) fails to attract the attention of climate change research in top-tier interdisciplinary journals, as evidenced in very low and stagnant forward citations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.