Tent poles, tribalism, and boundary spanning: The rigor-relevance debate in management research

A long-standing debate among management scholars concerns the rigor, or methodological soundness, of our research versus its relevance to managers. This issue has evolved into an “either/ or ” argument in which specific studies, research-ers, journals, and even institutions or programs are quickly categorized into “silos. ” I argue that this debate is largely socially constructed by forces both internal and external to business schools. Further, it is perpetuated by tribes that form around rigor and relevance, sequestering themselves into closed loops of scholarship and dismissing the work of outsiders on the basis of their inclusion—or exclu-sion—of theory or of practical applications. Exclu-sionary behavior even occurs within the two tribes