Understanding research culture and American universities
Outside of my bachelor's degree, I have no other relevant knowledge of the culture of academia and was interested in some insight from people who might have some background in it.
I was looking at the business school (undergraduate/graduate) faculties of Georgetown and the University of Virginia. I spot checked and it looks like about 90% or so of faculty members in the business schools have a PhD in some relevant field but about 70% have no material non-academic work experience. Intuitively, this is perplexing because as most of us know that in corporate business (not really entrepreneurship so much) experience trumps both academic knowledge and also pure intellectual horsepower. By far my best business teacher in college was the guy with no PhD but he had 30 years of successful business strategy experience--and he taught business policy and strategy at the college.
Intuitively one would think that a top business program would want mostly 50+ year-old retired industry experts.The idea that a person with a PhD in organizational behavior with no relevant experience teaching, say, an executive MBA course seems almost, I don't know, insulting?
It looks like most business faculty spend about 5-6 hours/week in lectures, 1 hour in office hours, 2 hours preparing, and the rest of their time conducting research. In the sciences I can understand the research focus--the sciences have almost infinite knowledge to obtain. In economics, finance, organization, etc. it seems to me that at best research has diminishing marginal returns with regard to accrued knowledge and at worst it has finite returns.
So my question is to those in the know, what's the academic culture of business schools? Why is research so fundamental to the business school culture? My assumption is that research is a d*ck measuring contest among top schools, which is how rankings are measured (amount of research, publications, etc.) and everyone wants to be the top dog. Is that assumption off base?
