Social Sciences & Humanities
Business & Management research: journals, data, standards and funders
Business and management research studies how firms, nonprofits and public bodies are organised, led, financed, audited and held to account. The work runs on a small set of shared infrastructure: firm-level and market datasets such as Compustat and CRSP, working-paper servers such as SSRN and RePEc, accounting and assurance rules set by the FASB and the IASB, with audits overseen by the PCAOB.
Most of the field's scholarly life sits in a few large societies. The Academy of Management, founded in 1936, publishes eight journals including the Academy of Management Journal and Academy of Management Review. The Strategic Management Society, the Academy of International Business, the American Accounting Association and the Association for Information Systems each anchor a specialism with its own journals and conference.
Research administrators meet the field in three places. First, funding: the ESRC in the UK and the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate at NSF fund management research, and the Research Excellence Framework shapes how UK business schools allocate effort. Second, oversight: survey, interview and experimental work with people falls under the Common Rule (45 CFR 46) or a local ethics committee, and studies of listed companies must respect disclosure rules such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and its internal control requirements. Third, quality signals: AACSB accreditation shapes school-level expectations, while preregistration, registered reports and the Open Science Framework are increasingly used to address replication concerns.
This page covers the discipline as a whole. Strategy, organisations, human resources, accounting, marketing, operations, entrepreneurship, technology, information systems, international business, public and nonprofit management and sustainability each have their own specialisation pages with the databases, standards and journals particular to them.
New to the field? What is Business & Management? →
Reviewed 5 November 2026 by CASRAI Editorial Board
- Academy of Management(read 5 November 2026)
- SSRN (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- IFRS Foundation: about us(read 5 November 2026)
- AACSB accreditation(read 5 November 2026)
- Compustat (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- Strategic Management Society (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- Economic and Social Research Council (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- Management science (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- Common Rule (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- RePEc (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- Center for Open Science (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- American Accounting Association (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- Academy of International Business (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- Association for Information Systems (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- Center for Research in Security Prices (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- Research Excellence Framework (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
- National Science Foundation (Wikipedia)(read 5 November 2026)
Field at a glance
Journals
- Academy of Management Journal, Review, Annals and sister titles
- The Academy of Management publishes eight journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Review, Discoveries, Perspectives, Learning & Education and Annals.Website ↗
- The Accounting Review and Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory
- American Accounting Association journals; it also publishes Accounting Horizons and Issues in Accounting Education.Website ↗
- Strategic Management Journal
- Published since 1980 by Wiley-Blackwell; sister titles are Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (2007) and Global Strategy Journal (2011).Website ↗
- Journal of International Business Studies
- The Academy of International Business journal, published since 1970; the academy also publishes the Journal of International Business Policy.Website ↗
Societies
- Academy of Management
- Founded in 1936; more than 21,000 members in over 120 countries; its annual meeting draws nearly 10,000 attendees.Website ↗
- Association for Information Systems
- Established in 1994; runs the International Conference on Information Systems and publishes JAIS and CAIS.Website ↗
- AACSB
- Business school accreditor founded in 1916 as the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business; about 900 member institutions.Website ↗
Funders and programmes
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
- UKRI council founded in 1965 as the Social Science Research Council; annual budget of 134 million pounds in FY2024/25.Website ↗ · Our guide →
- NSF Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate
- One of NSF's eight directorates; its fields include management, economics, psychology and sociology.Website ↗
- Research Excellence Framework
- UK assessment of outputs, impact and environment run by the four funding bodies; REF 2029 submissions fall in autumn 2028.Website ↗ · Our guide →
Archives, facilities and data
- Compustat
- S&P Global database on active and inactive companies; annual data from 1950 and quarterly data from 1962.Website ↗
- CRSP (Center for Research in Security Prices)
- Founded at the University of Chicago in 1960; first database covered NYSE monthly prices from 1926; Morningstar acquired it in February 2026.Website ↗
Standards and formats
- FASB Accounting Standards Codification (US GAAP)
- Issued in 2008, it reorganised thousands of pronouncements into roughly 90 topics and is authoritative GAAP for nongovernmental entities.Website ↗
- IFRS Accounting and Sustainability Standards
- The IASB's standards are required in more than 140 jurisdictions; the ISSB, created in 2021, sets sustainability disclosure standards.Website ↗
- Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002
- Signed 30 July 2002; Section 302 requires officer certification and Section 404 requires a management report on internal control.Website ↗
- COSO Internal Control - Integrated Framework
- Published 1992 and re-released 2013 with five components and 17 principles; the ERM framework followed in 2004.Website ↗
- Common Rule (45 CFR 46)
- US ethics standard for human subjects research covering consent and IRB operation; a significant revision took effect in July 2018.Website ↗ · Our guide →
Preprints and indexes
- SSRN
- Repository for working papers created in 1994 by Michael Jensen and Wayne Marr; owned by Elsevier since May 2016.Website ↗ · Our guide →
- RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)
- Volunteer-run decentralised database begun in 1997 that links over 4.4 million items, served through IDEAS and EconPapers.Website ↗
- Open Science Framework
- Run by the Center for Open Science (founded 2013); a preregistration server is available for registered studies.Website ↗ · Our guide →
14 pages across 3 topic areas
Research Methods & Statistics
- Commodity Flow Survey (CFS): Design, Variables and Data Access
What the U.S. Commodity Flow Survey measures, how it samples establishments, and where researchers get and cite its microdata.…
- Conjoint Analysis for Research Surveys: Profiles, Utilities, and Relative Importance
How to build attribute-and-level profiles, collect ranking/rating data, estimate part-worth utilities with dummy-variable regression, and calculate re…
- Public Policy vs Public Administration: What Is the Difference?Comparison
Public policy asks what government should do and whether it worked; public administration asks how programs are organized, managed and delivered. A si…
- Sustainability Reporting: Frameworks, Contents and the EU CSRD Timeline
Sustainability reporting compared across GRI, IFRS S1 and ESRS, with report contents, an emissions-intensity example and the EU CSRD timeline.…
- What Is Accounting Research? Fields, Methods, and Funding
A plain-language guide to accounting as a profession and an academic field: its subfields, research methods, standard setters, societies, journals, an…
- What Is Management and Business Research? Fields, Methods, and Funding
A plain-language guide to management and business research: its subfields, methods, societies, accreditation, journals, funders, and links to research…
- What Is Marketing Research? Fields, Methods and Ethics
Marketing research is the scholarly and applied study of consumers, markets and firms. This guide covers the academic field, its methods (surveys, con…
- What Is Operations Research? Research Areas, Funding, and Career Paths
Operations research applies mathematical modeling, optimization, and statistical analysis to resource-allocation and decision problems. Learn its sub-…
- What Is Partial Least Squares Regression? Definition, Formula, Example
PLS regression defined, with the first component worked by hand (n = 5) and runnable R and Python code; also separates PLS-SEM and the least squares l…
- What Is Public Administration? Field, Methods, and Careers
A complete introduction to public administration as a field: how it differs from public policy and political science, its subfields, methods, MPA trai…
- What Is Supply Chain Management Research?
Supply chain management research studies how goods, information, and money move through networks of organizations. Subfields, methods, societies, jour…
Grants Management & Research Funding
- American Accounting Association (AAA): Sections, Journals and Membership
American Accounting Association: its 17 sections matched to journals, membership categories, dues structure and how to join, as described on aaahq.org…
- Form 990: Who Files, Which Form, and How Grant Seekers Read It
Form 990 explained: who files, which version applies, what happens if a nonprofit does not file, and which parts of a funder's return matter to grant…
Technology Transfer & Innovation
- University Spinout Companies Explained: Definition and Formation Process
What a university spinout actually is, how it differs from an ordinary startup or a straight licensing deal, and the formation process from invention…
