Shooting for the Moon: How Academicians Could Make Management Research Even Less Irrelevant

By publishing a special issue on “The State of Practice,” JBP takes an important step to bridge the science/practice gap, but it is only a step and will not alone span this gap. On the academic side, currently dominant cultures and incentive systems all but guarantee the irrelevance of most scholarly work to anyone except other scholars. On the practice side, managers rarely frame their dilemmas and decisions in ways that lend themselves to scholarly inquiry, find little reason to subject their own research to the peer review process, and rarely look to academia for practical insights. The present article focuses on why this gap persists, and the kinds of fundamental shifts that would be required to address it. It begins by framing the structural nature of the current science/practice gap in business psychology, and then promoting the study of this gap as critical in its own right. From there a framework of research questions is provided that can inform efforts to bridge the science-practice gap.