The Manifold Impacts of Management Research

Management scholarship's apparent lack of impact is a misconception based on the presumption that impact involves a direct and visible influence of papers or research projects on management practice. Theory‐building impacts management practice in diverse, sometimes indirect and unnoticed, manifold ways. Supported by intermediaries such as management education, the media, and consulting, impacts emerge through interest‐driven knowledge production that contributes to the wider uptake and reproduction of management theory's main ideas and assumptions. We draw on Jürgen Habermas's theory of knowledge and human interests, aiming to expand how impact from scholarship can be understood, and what forms it might take as part of the kinds of knowledge‐constitutive interests that are pursued through theory‐building. We elaborate these different forms, building a pluralist framework of what we call ‘programmatic’ and ‘hybrid’ types of impact. We advance the argument that diverse knowledge‐constitutive interests pursued through theory‐building contribute to our field's impact on management practice in distinct, yet complementary ways.