Should academic research be relevant and useful to practitioners? The contrasting difference between three applied disciplines

ABSTRACT

Many within and outside of academia argue that research conducted in our universities should have impact on society, especially research from the applied fields. One discipline attracting disproportional criticism over the relevance of its research is business schools. While anecdotal evidence surrounding the practical usefulness of business schools research is growing, empirical support for the problem is limited. This study explores the issue from the perspective of accounting practitioners by examining their sources of information, including the use of articles from academic accounting research journals. The issue is further examined by comparing accountants with practitioners from two other applied disciplines, engineering and medicine. A survey of 560 practitioners was undertaken and the data analysed using both descriptive and regression methods. The study found that accounting practitioners’ perception of academia and use of academic research is very low, and when compared with engineers and medical practitioners, the differences were found to be statistically significant. Due to a disconnect from the real-world of practice, academic business researchers and business schools become increasingly vulnerable to adverse research funding decisions in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Research-practice gap
• academic research
• business schools
• public funding
• comparative study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Kym Fraser http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3590-0597

Xin Deng http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2149-0240

Frank Bruno http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1805-0036

Tarik A. Rashid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8661-258X