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Report Salutes 2 Profs as Influential Management Scholars

A recent management study has ranked two UT Dallas Naveen Jindal School of Management professors as among the most influential scholars in their field.

Professor Gregory Dess

Dr. Gregory Dess is a widely cited business strategy scholar.

Dr. Gregory Dess and Dr. Mike Peng are among the most highly cited management scholars of the past three decades, according to the paper to be published soon in the journal Academy of Management Perspectives.

Dess holds the Andrew R. Cecil Endowed Chair in Applied Ethics in the Jindal School, and Peng holds the Jindal Chair of Global Strategy. The two were both named Distinguished Scholars by the Southwest Academy of Management two years ago.

The journal named Dess, a business strategy expert and coordinator of the Jindal School’s Organizations, Strategy and International Management area, as the 20th-most-influential scholar in the world.  The rankings emphasized two measures:  the number of scholarly journal citations, regarded as a key measure of academic impact; and the number of Web references indexed by the Google search engine, used as a measure of impact outside academic circles.

“The academy combined both the academic citations and the Google pages to come up with each scholar’s number,” Dess said. “The fact that I was ranked so high on the list of academic citations didn’t surprise me, but I was pretty surprised about the high ranking on the non-academic list. I had published some non-academic articles, and I guess maybe the articles and books had more impact than I thought they did.”

Dess’ most highly cited publication is an article that earned him and his co-author a Foundational Award in 2009 from the Academy of Management, which praised it as a “classic and highly influential contribution to entrepreneurship research that serves as a legacy for scholarly work in the field.” The article, “Clarifying the Entrepreneurial Orientation Construct and Linking it to Performance,” has been cited on Google Scholar nearly 2,800 times since its publication in 1996.

Professor Mike Peng

Dr. Mike Peng is a specialist on international strategic management.

Peng, an expert on international strategic management, was ranked as No. 4 on the list of most influential management scholars who have received their degrees since 1991. The rankings measured impact inside and outside the academy.

“It is gratifying to be Greg’s colleague and to be both contributing to UT Dallas’ rising reputation – and to be recognized by the external community. As scholars, we view our foremost responsibility to be advancing the spirit of scholarship. We do not deliberately try very hard to influence practice or policy, but we believe that if we do our scholarship right and have sufficient confidence, patience and some humor, our work will be noticed by the external stakeholders of management research,” Peng said.

In fact, he pointed out, the two of them published an influential paper about this very point two years ago. “In the Spirit of Scholarship” was published by the Academy of Management Learning and Education and featured in The Economist.

Peng is one of the most prolific scholars in global strategy. Both the United Nations and the World Bank have cited his work, and he has published more than 90 articles in academic journals and written five books.

Peng said his textbooks, used by undergraduates and MBA students in 30 countries, as well as the fact that he is sought out for external speaking engagements, contributed to the high non-academic ranking of his work.

The full report is available for download (pdf) at the Academy of Management Perspectives website.

 

Media Contact: The Office of Media Relations, UT Dallas, (972) 883-2155, [email protected].

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