Identifying Research Topic Development in Business and Management Education Research Using Legitimation Code Theory

Abstract

Although the volume of business and management education (BME) research has expanded substantially, concerns remain about the field's legitimacy and its ability to attract new and dedicated scholars. An obstacle that may impede field development is lack of knowledge about influential works and authors to frame topical areas of inquiry and future research questions. We used citation analysis to track the development of BME research by uncovering 100 highly cited articles that revolve primarily around four research topical areas: (a) Entrepreneurship Education, (b) Distance Education/Online Teaching and Learning, (c) Business Student Ethics, and (d) Characteristics/Critiques of Business Schools. We then used legitimation code theory to categorize these articles on the basis of richness of knowledge ideas (Knowledge Code), the reputation of scholars (Knower Code), the combination of knowledge

What, Who, or Where? Rejoinder to “Identifying Research Topic Development in Business and Management Education Research Using Legitimation Code Theory”

“…Articles dealing with ethics are more likely to be published in unranked, 2 and 3 star journals, whereas articles dealing with a critique of business schools were largely published in 4 and 5 star journals. As Arbaugh et al (2016) show, the latter topic was also more likely to be tackled by prominent authors. Another way of looking at this is verifying whether the article in question was one of the author's top-3 most highly cited papers.…”

“…Arbaugh et al (2016) classified topics into five areas: Ethics, Distance Education, Entrepreneurship Education, Business School critiques and Other. Of these five topics, a descriptive analysis showed that articles relating to Business School critiques had a significantly higher level of citations, articles relating to Ethics a significantly lower level, and the other three topics displaying similar citation levels.…”

“…I thus recoded the topics into Ethics (1), Other (2), Business School critiques (3). Arbaugh et al (2016) operationalized author profile as each article's most highly cited author's h-index in Google Scholar. As Arbaugh et al (2016) did not use publication outlets in their categorization of articles, they didn't operationalize the standing of journals.…”

“…Arbaugh et al (2016) operationalized author profile as each article's most highly cited author's h-index in Google Scholar. As Arbaugh et al (2016) did not use publication outlets in their categorization of articles, they didn't operationalize the standing of journals. Hence, I classified the journals in their sample based on their ranking in the 2015 Academic Journal Guide published by the British Association of Business Schools.…”

“…Development in Business and Management Education Research Using Legitimation Code Theory Arbaugh, Fornaciari and Hwang (2016) use citation analysis -with Google Scholar as their source of citation data -to track the development of Business and Management Education research by studying the field's 100 most highly cited articles. The authors distinguish several factors that might impact on an article's level of citations.…”