Gapping the Relevance Bridge: Fashions Meet Fundamentals in Management Research

Abstract

The much lamented ‘relevance gap’ is as much a product of practitioners wedded to gurus and fads as it is of academics wedded to abstractions and fundamentals. The gap persists because practitioners forget that ‘the’ real world is actually ‘a’ world that is idiosyncratic, egocentric and unique to each person complaining about relevance. Greater attention to the conceptual underpinnings of fads and egocentric perception suggest the existence of more fundamental barriers to effectiveness such as ceilings on improvement, weak situations, ambiguous signals, non‐obvious adaptive forms and preoccupation with vision. Joint practitioner‐academic effort devoted to questions of how events come to be seen as ‘real’ could re‐bridge a gap whose nature has been misidentified.