Dennis Tourish says, in relation to business school research, that ¡°the triviality that pervades much of the scholarship in our field¡­takes the status quo for granted, asks few critical questions of business practice, and largely ignores the most important issues facing business and society¡± (¡°Rank irrelevance¡±, Opinion, 19 March).

Having disinterestedly copy-edited well over 100 business school research papers over the years while working in a highly ranked business school, I offer some thoughts on possible reasons why such research might ignore ¡°the most important issues¡±, in a spirit that Tourish might approve of.

Career-building in the modern university requires ambitious academics to publish in journals, which usually entails a focus on prior publications learned via doctoral study and research, resulting in a commitment to the body of literature that supports their area of specialisation.

Grounding research in a body of literature ¨C in the social sciences ¨C ensures that editors and peer reviewers can justify the acceptance of work for publication.

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The authoring process thereby becomes tied to a framework embodied within past publications, acting as a constraint on creative thought and action. This is not to say that prior research should be ignored ¨C far from it. But rather that the effort required to get ahead of the mass of extant literature in which a researcher¡¯s thought is already embedded likely requires an almost superhuman effort nowadays. Such a move is likely to be too big a risk before tenure is achieved ¨C and after which, it is usually too late.

Perhaps we have to await a few more advances in artificial intelligence.

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Paul G. Ellis
Business school tutor and academic copy-editor
London and Chichester