What Is Management and Business Research? Fields, Methods, and Funding

Management and business research is the scholarly study of how organizations work: how they are led, structured, staffed, financed, and held accountable, and how they compete, cooperate, innovate, and sometimes fail. It is a large and applied corner of the social sciences, housed mostly in business schools, and it draws on economics, psychology, sociology, statistics, and information science at once. This guide explains what the field covers, how its subfields divide the work, which methods it relies on, who the major scholarly societies and accrediting bodies are, where research money comes from, and why research administrators and technology-transfer offices keep meeting business-school faculty in their work.

One note on vocabulary before starting. The word “management” appears all over CASRAI’s coverage of grants management, data management, and project management. Those are operational topics inside research administration. This page is about something different: management as an object of academic study, and the research discipline built around it.

What Is Management and Business Research?

At its simplest, the field asks empirical and theoretical questions about organizations and the people and markets around them. Why do some firms outperform others in the same industry? What makes a team trust one another, or stop doing so? How do incentives change behavior? How should a supply chain, a hospital, or a software project be organized? Why do some new ventures survive while most do not? What do investors, regulators, and auditors actually learn from financial statements?

Three features set it apart from the neighboring disciplines it borrows from:

• The organization is the unit of interest. Economics tends to model markets and individual choices, psychology tends to study individuals, and sociology tends to study society. Management research puts the firm, the team, the nonprofit, or the institution at the center, and asks what happens inside and between them.
• It is explicitly applied. Business schools exist partly to educate practicing managers, so there is a standing expectation that research findings speak to practice. The Academy of Management describes its own journals as advancing “theory, empirical results, implications for public policy, and education in the field of management.” Whether the field delivers on that expectation is itself an ongoing debate among its scholars.
• It is multi-method and multi-disciplinary by habit. A single department may include a labor economist, a social psychologist, an operations modeler, and an ethnographer. They publish in different journals and argue about what counts as good evidence.

“Management research,” “business research,” “business administration,” and “management science” are used loosely and sometimes interchangeably. A rough guide: business administration usually names the degree and the school (the BBA, the MBA, the doctoral program); management names the academic field of study about organizations; business research is the broad umbrella that also includes accounting, finance, and marketing; and management science in its narrow sense means the quantitative modeling tradition, which overlaps heavily with operations research.

The Major Subfields

Business-school research is organized into functional areas, each with its own journals, conferences, and training pipeline. The main ones follow.

Organizational Behavior and Human Resources

Organizational behavior (often shortened to OB) studies individuals and groups at work: motivation, leadership, teams, negotiation, justice and fairness, diversity, stress, and how people respond to incentives and feedback. It leans on social and cognitive psychology, and its closest relative outside the business school is psychology. A related branch, human resource management, studies hiring, compensation, performance evaluation, and labor relations. A sister tradition, organization theory, works at the level of whole organizations, asking how structures, routines, and institutions form and change, and has strong roots in sociology.

Strategy

Strategy research asks why firms differ in performance and how they sustain advantage: the role of resources and capabilities, industry structure, diversification, alliances, mergers, and corporate governance. It combines economic reasoning with case-based and large-sample empirical work.

Operations and Supply Chain Management

Operations research in the business-school sense covers how goods and services are produced and delivered: inventory, scheduling, queuing, logistics, quality, and supply-chain design. This is where the quantitative modeling tradition is strongest, and it is closely connected to the mathematical field described in CASRAI’s guide to operations research.

Marketing

Marketing research studies how consumers decide and how firms position products, set prices, and communicate. It has a behavioral wing (consumer psychology) and a quantitative wing (choice modeling, pricing, and analytics). The statistical machinery for studying stated preferences, such as discrete choice experiments and conjoint analysis, was developed and refined heavily in this setting.

Accounting

Accounting research studies how financial and managerial information is produced, audited, regulated, and used. Empirical accounting often analyzes large archival datasets of company filings; behavioral accounting uses experiments with auditors, managers, or investors; and analytical accounting builds formal models of reporting and incentives.

Finance

Finance research studies how capital is raised, priced, and allocated, covering asset pricing, corporate finance, banking, and financial markets. It overlaps almost completely with financial economics and is often taught in either a business school or an economics department. For the broader parent discipline, see What Is Economics?. This page describes the research field only and does not give financial advice of any kind.

Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Entrepreneurship research looks at how new ventures are founded, financed, and grown, why most fail, and how established firms innovate. It is the subfield that connects most directly to university spin-outs and licensing, which is why it matters to technology-transfer offices (see the research-administration section below).

Information Systems

Information systems (IS) research studies how organizations design, adopt, and use information technology, covering topics such as enterprise software, platforms, digital security behavior, and the effects of automation on work. It has two traditions: a behavioral one that asks how people and organizations use technology, and a design-science one that builds and evaluates new technological artifacts. It overlaps with information science and computer science but keeps an organizational focus.

Other Areas

Business schools also house research on business ethics and corporate responsibility, international business, public and nonprofit management, healthcare management, and organizational sustainability. The boundaries with public policy and health services research are porous, and scholars frequently work across them.

How the Field Developed

The field grew out of practical concerns rather than a single founding theory. Early twentieth-century writing on “scientific management” tried to analyze work systematically to improve productivity. Mid-century research on workplace behavior, often associated with the human relations movement, shifted attention toward motivation, group dynamics, and informal organization. Later decades brought contingency theories of structure, institutional and resource-based views of the firm, behavioral approaches to decision-making, and, in parallel, the growth of quantitative management science during and after the Second World War, when operations research became established. Today the field is more empirical and more statistical than its early decades, with growing use of causal-inference designs borrowed from economics and large-scale digital data. This summary is deliberately general; consult a field history or the Academy of Management’s own materials for specific dates and figures.

Research Methods

Because the field spans so many subfields, no single method dominates. The common approaches are below.

• Surveys and questionnaires. The workhorse of organizational behavior, marketing, and much of strategy and entrepreneurship research. Typical designs ask employees, managers, or consumers to rate attitudes and behaviors, then relate those ratings through regression or structural models. Their well-known weaknesses are common-method bias, low response rates, and self-report error, all of which reviewers scrutinize. See CASRAI’s dictionary entry on survey research methods.
• Case studies and qualitative research. In-depth studies of one or a few organizations, using interviews, observation, and documents, are central to theory building in strategy, organization theory, and entrepreneurship. Their strength is rich description of process and mechanism. Their limitation is generalizability, which good qualitative work addresses through careful case selection and transparent analytic procedures.
• Archival and secondary data. Accounting, finance, and strategy researchers routinely analyze company filings, stock prices, patent records, and government statistics. These datasets are large and observed rather than produced by the researcher, so identification of causal effects is the main challenge.
• Laboratory and online experiments. Behavioral researchers in OB, marketing, and accounting randomly assign participants to conditions to test cause and effect. Online participant panels have made such studies cheap and fast, but also raise questions about participant quality and replicability.
• Field experiments. Randomized interventions in real organizations, such as changing a scheduling policy or an incentive scheme in some units and not others, give stronger external validity than lab studies but require access, partner buy-in, and ethical review.
• Causal-inference designs with observational data. Methods such as difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity are now standard in strategy, finance, and accounting papers that need to argue for causation from natural variation.
• Mathematical and simulation models. Operations, analytical accounting, and parts of strategy and marketing build formal models and optimization methods, or agent-based simulations, to derive or explore results that data alone cannot show.
• Mixed methods and meta-analysis. Many programs combine, for example, interviews that generate hypotheses with a survey that tests them, or pool results across many studies statistically. For the broader methodological toolkit, see CASRAI’s research methods hub.

Two methodological debates run through the field. One is the replicability of behavioral findings, which has pushed journals toward preregistration, data and code sharing, and transparent reporting. The other is the “rigor versus relevance” tension: whether the strictest empirical standards produce findings practitioners can actually use.

Societies, Accreditation, and Journals

Academy of Management

The Academy of Management (AOM) is the main scholarly society for management researchers and educators. Its own site states that it has supported researchers and educators since 1936 and describes a membership of more than 20,000 across 120 countries. Members organize into divisions and interest groups by topic, and the society holds an annual meeting whose papers are collected in the Academy of Management Proceedings. AOM publishes nine journals; the best known are the Academy of Management Journal (empirical research), the Academy of Management Review (theory), Academy of Management Discoveries, Academy of Management Learning & Education, and Academy of Management Perspectives.

AACSB

AACSB, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, describes itself as the global standard-setting body for business education. It accredits business schools, and says its network spans more than 1,000 accredited schools in over 100 countries and territories. It describes accreditation as a mission-driven, peer-reviewed process centered on continuous improvement against its Global Standards for Business Education. AACSB is an accrediting body, not a research funder or a journal publisher, but its standards shape how business schools treat faculty research, which is one reason research output carries weight in business-school hiring and promotion.

Other Societies and Journals

Each functional area also has its own societies, such as those in marketing, accounting, finance, operations, and information systems, along with discipline-specific journals and conferences. Widely read journals across the field include Administrative Science Quarterly, Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, Organization Science, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Marketing, The Accounting Review, and The Journal of Finance. Many business schools rank journals in internal lists to guide tenure decisions, and those lists differ by school and country, so a researcher should check the local list rather than assume one.

Who Funds Management and Business Research

Business-school research is funded very differently from laboratory science, and much of it needs little external money: archival or survey projects often cost mainly faculty time and data access. External support comes from several sources.

• National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) is the main federal home for basic research on organizations and decisions. Its Decision, Risk and Management Sciences (DRMS) program states that it supports research directed at increasing understanding and effectiveness of decision making by individuals, groups, organizations, and society, and its description lists management science and organizational design among its areas. Program structure and solicitations change over time, so confirm current names, deadlines, and eligibility on the NSF site. See also CASRAI’s entry on the National Science Foundation.
• Other federal and mission agencies. Agencies fund management-related questions inside their own missions, for example healthcare delivery, workforce, defense logistics, or small-business innovation. The programs for small firms, covered in CASRAI’s comparison of SBIR vs. STTR, are commercialization funding rather than basic research funding, but they matter to entrepreneurship researchers and the ventures they study.
• Private foundations. Foundations with interests in work, innovation, or institutions fund some business-adjacent research. Priorities change, so check each funder directly.
• Industry and data partnerships. Many studies depend on a company that provides access, data, or a site for a field experiment. These arrangements are usually governed by data-use or research agreements, which is where research administrators become involved.
• Institutional funds. Business schools commonly support faculty research through summer research stipends, endowed chairs, and school-level research centers.

For the full funding lifecycle on the administrative side, see CASRAI’s grants management hub.

Training and Careers

The research-oriented path runs through the doctoral degree. A business PhD is typically organized by area (for example management, marketing, accounting, finance, or information systems), with coursework in theory and methods followed by a dissertation. It is distinct from the professional doctorate or the MBA. The MBA, a professional degree for practicing managers, is not itself a research degree, though MBA programs are where much applied research is taught and where many faculty teach. Doctoral graduates mostly enter business-school faculty positions, with others going to research roles in industry, consulting, government, and think tanks. Faculty careers follow the usual research-university structure of assistant, associate, and full professor, with tenure decisions weighted heavily toward publications in the area’s leading journals.

Where Management Research Meets Research Administration

Business-school faculty are researchers like any others, and the administrative questions are familiar, with a few distinctive wrinkles.

• Human-subjects oversight. Surveys, interviews, and field experiments with employees or consumers involve human participants. Many such studies qualify for exempt or expedited review, but the determination belongs to the institution’s review board, not the investigator. See CASRAI’s comparison of exempt vs. expedited IRB review.
• Company data and confidentiality. Studies that use proprietary company data raise questions about confidentiality, publication review rights, and data ownership, usually settled in an agreement negotiated before access begins.
• Commercialization and spin-outs. Entrepreneurship and innovation scholars study the very processes technology-transfer offices run. Faculty may also found or advise ventures, which raises conflict-of-interest questions. CASRAI’s technology transfer hub, the dictionary entry on technology transfer, and the guides on entrepreneurial resources for university spinouts and how tech transfer offices evaluate and price a license cover that ground.
• The profession of research administration itself. Research management is also a studied subject: how offices of sponsored programs are staffed, structured, and measured is organizational research in its own right. CASRAI’s research administration hub and the overview of research administrator jobs describe the profession from the practitioner side.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between management and business administration?

In everyday use the terms overlap. “Business administration” usually names a degree program or school (for example a BBA or MBA), while “management” names the academic field and the practice of directing organizations. Research in both is housed in business schools.

Is management a science?

It is a social science in method: it forms theories, tests them against evidence, and publishes in peer-reviewed journals. Like other social sciences, it cannot usually run controlled experiments on whole organizations, which is why it leans on surveys, archival data, field experiments, and causal-inference designs.

What is organizational behavior?

Organizational behavior is the subfield that studies individuals and groups inside organizations: motivation, leadership, teamwork, decision-making, and workplace attitudes. It draws mainly on psychology.

What is management science?

In its narrow sense, management science is the quantitative tradition that applies mathematical modeling and optimization to managerial decisions, closely related to operations research. Loosely, people also use the phrase for management research in general, so context matters.

Is an MBA a research degree?

No. The MBA is a professional degree for practicing and aspiring managers. The research degree is the doctorate (a PhD in a business area, or a professional doctorate in some programs).

What does AACSB accreditation mean for research?

AACSB accredits business schools against its published standards through a peer-reviewed process. It does not fund or conduct research itself, but its standards influence how schools evaluate faculty scholarship.

Who funds management research in the United States?

Basic research on organizations and decision-making is supported mainly by NSF’s SBE directorate, with additional support from mission agencies, foundations, industry partners, and the researcher’s own school. Always confirm current program details directly with the funder.

Why do grants-management pages use the word “management”?

Grants management, data management, and project management are operational functions within research administration, not branches of management research. Management research may study them, but they are different topics.

Related CASRAI Resources

This guide is part of CASRAI’s Branches of Science series. Closely related discipline guides include economics, operations research, behavioral economics, psychology, sociology, public policy, and statistics. For the administrative side, start with the research administration, grants management, and technology transfer hubs.