This article chronicles the inspiring journey of Anne Tsui, a leading management scholar and advocate for responsible research. Born in China and educated in the U.S., Tsui overcame challenges to pursue a transformative academic career. Her contributions span three phases: pioneering organisational behaviour and HR research in the U.S., advancing Chinese and international management at HKUST, and championing the Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM) initiative. Guided by her vision of research serving society, Tsui emphasises inclusivity, sustainability, and humanity in business education and research. Her story exemplifies resilience, compassion, and purpose in advancing meaningful academic impact.

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Introduction

This paper results from a number of conversations and interactions between Howard and Anne over the last decade. It is not a comprehensive review of Anne’s work (for that see Tsui, 2022b) but a story about an authentic and compassionate scholar with an overarching vision encompassed in a quote she draws from Albert Einstein, and shares often with students: “Concern from making life better for ordinary humans must be the chief objective of science. Never forget this when you are pondering over your diagrams and equations!”

During a recent Zoom call, Howard as a strategic management scholar, asked Anne if she had formally planned her life, career, purpose, and goals. Her answer was that the journey was more like “the science of muddling through” without a view of her final destination, following a relentless academic passion, determination and drive, towards a much clearer vision of “still muddling but not yet through.” Howard asked her questions such as ‘Why’ did she choose an academic career? What societal issues or topics did she aim to attack and solve? And how did she tackle the ‘peaks’ and ‘troughs’ of a career? Her responses revealed how much she felt that life experiences involve serendipity, randomness, opportunities, luck, and personal choices interacting in practice to offer interesting strategic pathways. However, Anne stated clearly that, if opportunities arose by chance or serendipity, she also engaged in careful preparation to judge if she should accept the opportunity and what capabilities and skills would be needed to be successful. In each situation. she analysed the available opportunity, problem or project by considering who might benefit from the new opportunity and whether a retreat existed if the opportunity did not yield the expected outcomes. Thorough preparation and careful implementation were essential ingredients for successful outcomes.

The purpose of this essay is to provide a brief account of how Anne grew from her humble beginnings and origins in China and Hong Kong to a life of academic and institution-building achievements with a reputation as a leading scholar in management research, education, and the social sciences.

Humble Origins and Beginnings: Birth in China, School in Hong Kong in the 1960s, University and Degrees in the United States in the 1970s

Anne was born in a small village on the outskirts of Shanghai. Her father left for Hong Kong as a political refugee after China became a republic in 1949 ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. A few years later, with luck, Anne and her mother left China and were smuggled into Hong Kong (then a British Protectorate). In Hong Kong, Anne attended primary and secondary school and then a community college where she studied to be a primary school teacher. During this period, Anne’s mother died, and her father was too poor to afford Anne’s entry to university. Inspired by high school classmates who entered universities either in Hong Kong or overseas, Anne decided to apply and was accepted by the University of Minnesota (Duluth) (UMD) with a small scholarship that did not start until the second semester. She did not realise that Duluth was a small campus. It was the Minneapolis campus that had the greatest cadre of international students. On arrival in Duluth, given the relative absence of international students, Anne immersed herself in the US culture and quickly understood the different instructional methods and American customs.

She got a job in the UMD library, and a part-time job as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant, as well as a local cafeteria, both downtown. These jobs not only gave her extra money but, even more importantly, provided an awareness of the everyday features of American culture and customs. She had to endure the -40°F weather, while waiting for the bus at 11pm to go back to the dorm after her work in the downtown restaurants, she said, “this experience built my character.”

After graduating from UMD, she then enrolled in the master’s degree at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis campus. During the second year of her studies, she worked as a research analyst at the University of Minnesota Hospitals system. She did a research study on the reasons for and costs of nursing turnover. She wrote up her study and submitted it to the journal Hospitals, published by the American Medical Association. It was accepted for publication upon first submission and provided her with a tremendous boost to her confidence as a researcher.

After three years at the UMINN Hospitals, she joined the very advanced HR (human resources) research team at the Control Data Corporation (CDC), Minneapolis, headed by Dr Tornow an I/O (Industrial Organisation) psychologist. The team was staffed mainly with PhD graduates from the Industrial/Organisational Psychology programmes at the University of Minnesota. She participated in the design of a performance evaluation system for line managers in CDC. This research experience and enjoyment of working with a strong research team was the catalyst for Anne to decide that she wanted to do a PhD. Two years later, she joined the PhD programme at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

Her initial motivation for the PhD programme was not an academic life. In fact, she had planned to return to CDC after her degree. In her words, “I wanted a PhD because I could not answer many of the line managers’ questions about how to manage a team, how to motivate employees, and how the team should be structured for optimal interaction and performance.” She believed that the doctoral education would prepare her to be a better human resource professional. However, after the first term at UCLA in behavioural sciences she was simply overwhelmed not only by the richness of learning in the doctoral programme but also its resonance with her passion for research.

 Embracing the Joy of Doctoral Studies at UCLA and Southern California, 1978-81

Anne arrived at UCLA in September 1978, and very quickly, she realised how much involvement in research activity would be the motivation and driving force in her life. She felt like a ‘kid in a candy store’ being exposed to a wide-ranging intellectual feast served up, and orchestrated by, a range of organisational behaviour scholars, including Charles O’Reilly, Bill McKelvey, Bill Ouchi, Tony Raia, Barbara Gutek, also Chet Schriesheim and Mary Ann Von Glinow at the University of Southern California (as well as their colleagues at USC). These first-rate academics were not only excellent teachers and mentors but also provided a ‘factory of ideas’ for students to explore and encouraged them to study what interested them and what had practical impact. They devoted their energy and passion to academic pursuits and the identification of knowledge that was always related to some practical problems in society as a whole. It was from these origins that Anne decided that the academic environment would provide her with the opportunity to serve society effectively. Her dissertation topic on how to define, and evaluate, the effectiveness of middle managers in an organisational context was influenced by her practical experience working in HR and applied management projects in the UM hospital and CDC, in Minneapolis. Her dissertation idea was structured around the concept of ‘reputational effectiveness’ – defined as the reputation of being an effective manager from observing the perspectives of the supervisors, peers and subordinates. This idea was tested at the individual manager level. Anne decided to examine the role of the human resource (HR) department’s effectiveness also from a reputational perspective as her post-dissertation research project.

During the completion of her thesis Anne decided not to return to CDC but instead to pursue an academic career. Her reasoning for this decision was similar to all decisions throughout her career, “If I work for a company, my influence is limited to this company. If I am a professor and researcher, my influence could be much greater.” She joined the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University in North Carolina in the fall of 1981 as an assistant professor.

Building the Foundations of an Impactful and Meaningful Career in the US (1981-1995) in the Field of Traditional Organisational Behaviour (OB) and Human Resource Management (HRM) Research

Anne took to heart a piece of advice from one of her mentors during the doctoral programme. It was to pursue a research programme rather than writing individual but disconnected papers. One’s intellectual contribution and reputation depend on having published multiple papers on the same topic, preferably some first-authored or single-authored. She published more than six papers from her dissertation project, most of them in the top journals in management. Her next project on the reputational effectiveness of HR units also resulted in several papers in top journals. From these two research programmes, she earned a reputation for having made an intellectual contribution to the problems of defining and evaluating the effectiveness of middle managers and support or staff functions in an organisation. Her promotion to tenure was based primarily on her publications from these two research projects.

Anne shared with Howard that her tenure review occurred in the so-called ‘golden age’ of business school research, approximately 1960-1990 (Augier and March 2011). At that time, promotion decisions were determined not with journal lists and counting the number of publications, but mainly through a comprehensive examination of the nature of the problems that were studied and the quality of the published work (usually, but not necessarily, in the best publications – whether first tier or second tier). Most of the papers and research projects Anne worked on reflected contemporary management issues in the US and that had meaningful and practical implications. She pointed out that the advent of the ‘rankings era’ in business schools (e.g. Business Week, Business School Rankings, 1987, and subsequently the Financial Times in 1999) ushered in a major change in research culture, namely the principle that research faculty should be directed to publish according to a journal list(s) which give priority to publishing novel ideas or contribution to theory. This led to Don Hambrick’s concerns expressed in his 1993 Presidential Address at the Academy of Management meeting ‘What if the Academy actually mattered?’ (Hambrick, 1994) in which he challenged the academy to pay more attention to the world outside of the academic ivory tower. Despite Hambrick’s passionate call, the gap between academic research and management practice – often described as the so-called rigour-relevance gap – widened over time (Tsui, 2013).

Anne’s papers over the 1981-1995 period, when she was a faculty member at Duke (1981-1988) and UC Irvine (1988-1995), had a distinctly practical focus. They covered three main areas, namely, reputational effectiveness, relational demography (the issue of diversity – age, race, gender, education, etc.), and changing employment relationships in the context of major organisational change and disruption in corporate America.

After working on reputational effectiveness as the first major theme, her second major research theme in this period was on issues of relational demography and diversity (see her paper, Tsui, Egan and O’Reilly, 1992). This research asked a single question ‘What are the consequences of being different from others on specific demographic attributes such as race and gender, whether the ‘other”’ is an individual such as a supervisor, or many people in a large organisational unit with several hundred employees?’ The main hypothesis was that people use demographic characteristics such as age, gender, race, job tenure, education, etc., to define psychological groups and derive a positive self-identity when they are in the presence of similar others. Those most different from others in a social group would be least attached to this group, measured by the level of psychological and behavioural commitment, absences, and turnover intention. Her research results confirmed these expectations on both the dyad level (difference from the supervisor) and unit level (different from others in a small or large work group). Being most different from others is associated with the lowest level of affect or attachment to the group. However, the research also produced a surprising finding. The impact of being different on commitment was greater for men and white employees than for women and non-white workers. This challenged a fundamental assumption of diversity research (at that time), namely, that the effect of diversity was felt more acutely by women and ethnic minorities. This finding attracted much media attention because of the ‘politically incorrect’ nature of the research finding yet it was also awarded the Outstanding Publication in Organizational Behaviour (OPOB) award from the OB division of the Academy in 1993 and the prestigious Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) Award for Scholarly Contribution in 1998 (i.e. the best article in ASQ over a five-year period).

The third major research theme in this period is the nature of employment relationships during a turbulent period of corporate downsizing in the US in the late 1980s which created unbalanced working relationships (e.g. employers wanted much more from employees while employees received much less in terms of wages and benefits). The paper from this research (Tsui, Pearce, Porter and Tripoli, 1997) received the best paper award from the Academy of Management Journal and the Scholarly Achievement award from the Human Resource Division of the Academy, both in 1998. This is an example of phenomena-inspired research providing insights about how to manage during periods of organisational change. What characterised Anne’s OB HR research was an underlying desire to solve the pressing societal management problems which would offer clear insights and solutions for practising managers.

Chinese and International Management Research (1995-2011)

During her time at UC Irvine Anne taught a summer course in 1992 at HKUST (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), a new university founded in 1991. She taught at HKUST again the following summer and took a sabbatical there in the fall of 1993 (from UCI). The Dean of the Business School at HKUST convinced her to be the founding Head of the Management Department. For Anne, who was born in China and had spent 12 years of her formative childhood in Hong Kong, this invitation was like a ‘homecoming’ opportunity – but with a significant career trade-off – namely, either continuing a secure, vibrant research career at UCI or becoming an ‘institution builder’ at HKUST. She decided to test the Hong Kong opportunity and negotiated a two-year ‘no pay leave’ from UCI. While HKUST was a serendipitous opportunity from her viewpoint, it turned out to be a ‘turning point’ – a pivot – towards a distinctive ‘institution-building’ orientation and a new purpose for her academic journey. She chose to join HKUST permanently in 1995 and fully commit to an exciting, homecoming, institution-building project (‘building the bricks of HKUST’ and ensuring its organisational and societal impact in the China context during the transitional period of Hong Kong’s return to China). It was a challenging endeavour which demonstrated how Anne’s relentless drive, inspiration, and determination to succeed would lead to the growth of HKUST’s reputation as a path-breaking university in management education and Chinese management research.

The following is a summary of Anne’s achievements during this Chinese and International Management Research Phase (1995-2011), including the eight years at HKUST:

First, she developed a vibrant Chinese management research programme at HKUST. Collaborating with the Head of the Economics Department at HKUST, they wrote and received a large grant to train over 150 young management academics, in leading Chinese business schools, about empirical research methods in management and the social sciences. The grant also permitted significant funding for research projects about Chinese management from economic, management, and sociological perspectives. It supported several research conferences which in turn led to a series of edited research books (Li, Tsui and Weldon, 2000; Tsui and Lau, 2002; Tsui, Bian, and Cheng, 2006). In addition to earning a reputation as a leading international management research scholar with specific expertise in leadership and management in China, the vibrant Chinese management research programme also enabled her to attract good faculty recruits for HKUST and thus build a strong management department faculty.

Second, she saw the opportunity to build a Chinese Management Academy (along the lines of the Academy of Management in the US). Her vision allowed her to establish the International Association for Chinese Management Research (IACMR) in 2002 and the new Chinese journal, Management and Organisation Review (MOR) in 2004/5. Anne had transformed herself from a traditional OB/HR scholar in the US to a leading international and Chinese management scholar whose drive and expertise enabled her to build a first-rate management department at HKUST, facilitated significant societally oriented management research activities with her founding role in IACMR and MOR. She soon earned a global reputation as an outstanding administrator and leader for Chinese management in HKUST and the professional organisations she founded. Her determination to build these institutions was the result of recognising and leveraging the serendipitous and perhaps risky opportunities of a leading management school in HKUST and having an awareness of the void in research capabilities among Chinese scholars and interest in the internationalisation of the Chinese business schools.

Third, along with institutional building work, Anne also managed to build a stream of research in the Chinese and international management fields. This included papers on global management knowledge and indigenous management research (Tsui, 2004), cross-national and cross-cultural organisational behaviour research (Tsui, Nifadkar and Ou, 2007), the need to move from homogenization to pluralism in international management research (Tsui, 2007), and the cultural contingency of social capital in Chinese high-tech firms (Xiao and Tsui, 2007).

In the Tsui (2004) paper she outlines three types of international management research, namely context-free (general or universal), context-bounded (contingent, cross-cultural or cross-national research) and context-specific (indigenous or local research). These topics as well as the examples referenced above, define Anne’s much broader intellectual identity in international management with an emphasis on methodological issues in research and the philosophy of science.

During her continued exploration in this wider field Anne noticed and became even more concerned about management research that increasingly emphasised theory and elaborate statistical methods alongside an ever-decreasing attention being paid to the nature of the problem being addressed. This development suggested a further widening of the ‘rigour-relevance’ gap in the field noted first by Hambrick (1994) and followed by other AOM Presidents such as Michael Hitt (1998), Andy Van de Ven (2002), Angelo DeNisi (2010), and more recently Anita McGahan (2018). Anne noticed this rigour-relevance gap in Chinese management research as well, due to the imitation by Chinese scholars of the research practices in the Western world, especially in the United States. She considered this disregard for practice and overwhelming preference for attention to theory and methods by journal editors as a loss of scientific autonomy among the authors. She pointed out the danger of this problem to her Chinese colleagues in her 2009 editorial in the Management and Organization Review, ‘Editor’s Introduction – Autonomy of Inquiry: Shaping the Future of Emerging Scientific Communities’ (Tsui, 2009).

The desire to address this problem was the primary reason for her accepting an invitation to run for Executive Officer of the Academy of Management in 2008. It is a five-year progression with being the Programme Chair Elect in 2009, Programme Chair for the 2010 AOM meeting and the President of the Academy of Management in 2012. Anne was successfully elected and hoped that she could use the AOM platform to introduce the much-needed changes in the research culture and practices in business schools, not only in the US, but worldwide due to the tendency to homogenize (Tsui, 2007).

Academy of Management Presidency and the Founding of the Responsible Research in Management (RRBM) Community (2011-present)

During this period, Anne focused on promoting the concept of ‘responsible research’ as one of the important directions for management research. She proposed transforming management research towards producing credible and useful knowledge to inform policies and practices for better business and a better world, both globally and locally.

Anne began this movement with the 2010 Academy of Management meeting in Montreal, Canada for which she served as the Programme Chair. For that annual meeting, she chose the theme ‘Passion and Compassion in Management Research and Practice’ with the goal tof encouraging and inspiring the ‘academy’ to focus on solving the world’s wicked problems. Anne proposed this theme to the 20-member Board of Governors of AOM before finalising it. While most of them were encouraging, one of them privately told Anne that this topic seemed rather ‘girly’. Anne was not deterred and tickled by the fact that this fellow board member was a diversity scholar.

In 2012, Anne gave her Presidential Address entitled ‘On compassion in scholarship: Why should we care?’ (published in AMR, Tsui, 2013). It was her passionate statement about her vision for ‘responsible research’. This speech encouraged members of AOM to care about the needs of stakeholders beyond the ‘financially oriented’ shareholders. It stressed that AOM members should care about the suffering in this world and on the planet. These included issues of poverty, inequality, work stress, discrimination, and threats to the natural world (which in turn influences the human world) such as the disruption to ecological balance due to climate change and over-exploitation of natural resources like fishery, forestry and fossil harvesting. She reminded our research community of our responsibility to step out of our ivory towers and turn our attention to the world around us.

When preparing for the 2010 annual meeting of the Academy, Anne convinced the editor of the Academy of Management Review to publish a special issue on the theme of compassion. She invited four leading scholars to co-edit this special issue. The issue was published in AMR in the October 2012 issue (Rynes, Bartunek, Dutton and Margolis, 2012) with the title of ‘Care and compassion through an organizational lens: Opening up new possibilities.’ During her year as the Chair of the AOM Board of Governors, she also managed to lead the board to approve a new journal, Academy of Management Discoveries, an empirical journal focusing on reporting discoveries of emerging and interesting empirical phenomena without being encumbered by the need for theories. It is a response to the criticism by Hambrick (2007) on the field’s fetish preoccupation with theory at the expense of exploring and reporting issues that defy theoretical explanations.

During her five-year term in the leadership role on the Governance Board of the Academy of Management, she was not able to shift research attention from the primacy of theories and shareholders to new and wicked problems in the world and from a focus on advancing the value of shareholders to the well-being of other stakeholders. However, she planted the seed for a global movement on responsible research.

This global movement began with a serendipitous opportunity when she presented a keynote address at the 50+20 Conference at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University on 17 July 2014 (Tsui, 2014). After the talk, a gentleman approached Anne and introduced himself as one of the directors at EFMD – the European Foundation for Management Development. He, Ulrich Hommel, invited Anne to write up the talk for the EFMD magazine, Global Focus (the article was published in the January issue, Tsui, 2015). Ulrich also asked Anne to gather a group of scholars to solve the ‘problem’. Anne was not sure about this invitation and expressed two concerns. First, it is a multidisciplinary problem within the business school. Any solution must be acceptable and supported by all the major disciplines, i.e., accounting, finance, management, marketing, and operations. Anne would need EFMD to help in reaching out to the leading scholars in each discipline to join this project. Second, EFMD must treat this project as community service in support of the business research community and not solely an EFMD project. Further, she said that it would be important, in addition to EFMD, to include a few other institutions that are crucial for business schools, such as AACSB and PRME. Ulrich agreed. Anne said she needed some time to think about it. That September, Anne went to the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana (there is a similarly named university in Australia) as a visiting professor. She engaged in a deep reflection about this invitation for three months. With the guidance of a Catholic priest, she concluded that this was a project worth working on, regardless of the outcome.

Beginning in January 2015, Anne and Ulrich started assembling a group of leading scholars globally in the five core disciplines. They invited at least two scholars in each discipline. By August 2015, they had 18 scholars, 12 of whom met in Vancouver, Canada to kick-start the formation of the Responsible Research in Business and Management network.

Inception and Growth of the RRBM Community (2015 – 2024)

In her article entitled ‘Reconnecting with the Business World: Socially Responsible Research’ (Tsui, 2015) her clear vision is expressed in a quote from this paper (p. 39), “all parties in the research enterprise can contribute to the pursuit of socially responsible scholarship by remembering the goal of science: the discovery and application of true knowledge to improve the human condition.”

By the end of 2015, a global team of 24 business academic scholars (including Howard and Anne) representing five major disciplines, along with four institutional partners (AACSB, EFMD, Aspen Business and Society group, and PRME) began to craft an RRBM Position Paper, building on the initial working document written by Anne and Ulrich to recruit like-minded scholars. The paper outlines two major crises threatening the credibility of management and business research. The first is the familiar ‘rigour-relevance’ gap – the usefulness crisis – and the second is the prevalence of questionable research practices that render the results of published empirical findings untrustworthy and non-replicable – the credibility crisis. The position paper begins with Vision 2030 and offers seven principles to guide research design that will improve both the usefulness and the credibility of the research findings.

With 28 co-founders and 85 co-signers of the RRBM declaration and vision document – the RRBM Position Paper was completed in 2020. By 2024, the RRBM Vision has gained support from well over 100 universities and 2000 academics who have endorsed the RRBM Position Paper. The RRBM Working Board undertook a few actions to recognise and encourage responsible research. One of the first initiatives was the Responsible Research award to recognise published papers that are exemplars of responsible research, first in the management discipline, followed shortly by marketing and operations management, and most recently accounting. The first Responsible Research summit was held in the Rotterdam School of Management in July 2019. This was followed by several online summits due to the Covid pandemic. In 2022, the in-person Summit resumed at the Wharton School, followed in 2023 at INSEAD. The 2024 summit was in Cambridge and Cornell New York will host the 2025 summit when RRBM will celebrate its 10th anniversary. In 2021, RRBM launched the Dare to Care Doctoral Dissertation Scholarship and the Zoom-based course Philosophical Foundations of Responsible Research. In 2022, the RRBM Honour Roll was introduced, recognising published articles that focus on the ‘usefulness’ dimension of responsible research and which exemplify Principle 1 – service to society, and Principle 6 – impact on stakeholders.

After seven years, Anne stepped down from the RRBM Working Board on 30 June 2022. In 2022, she published three papers about the progress made by RRBM. In Tsui (2022a), she catalogues the ‘small wins and bold actions’ over the first seven years of RRBM. In the Tsui, Bitner and Netessine (2022) paper, published in the first annual research volume of Global Focus, the three authors analysed 108 papers and 15 books in management, marketing, and operations management that won the Responsible Research award. The third paper with Peter McKiernan (Tsui and McKiernan, 2022) clarifies the meaning of scientific freedom and scientific responsibility. Aligning high and low levels of freedom and responsibility, Tsui and McKiernan identify four types of research, one of which fits RRBM’s definition of responsible research. They suggest a set of light and heavy actions to shift the research ecosystem towards responsible research, focusing on benefits to society. The paper concludes with a set of scientific norms to guide researchers who aspire to make their research more responsible and impactful.

In recent years, Anne has devoted most of her energy to developing responsible research awareness and skills among young scholars. She initiated the Dare to Care Doctoral Dissertation Scholarship and was able to convince a donor (who wishes to remain anonymous) to support the scholarship, up to seven a year for three years at $10,000 for each scholarship, with the possibility of renewing this support after three years. At the same time, she was able to gain the collaboration of a colleague, Don Lange, at the business school of Arizona State University to offer the Philosophical Foundation for Responsible Research to doctoral students worldwide on Zoom, free of charge, for both the instructors and the students. Her colleague Xu Huang at the Hong Kong Baptist University agreed to welcome students in Asia to participate by Zoom in this course at his school. From 2021 to 2023, more than 50 students have taken this course. Students expressed extremely positive reactions to the learning. In Spring 2024, Anne helped the RRBM Working Board to conduct a pilot survey on research culture and practices, as perceived by scholars in all academic ranks and across all five disciplines, globally. The highlights of the results were shared and discussed at the 2024 Responsible Research Summit at Cambridge University, UK. Anne hoped to have a systematic assessment of the progress of RRBM in the ten years since its founding to learn what worked or did not work and to identify new initiatives, directions and priorities for the next ten years.

Reflections and Conclusions: The Future of Responsible Management Research and Education in a Challenging World

After 43 years of an academic career since her doctoral degree, Anne believes that her career is ‘still muddling but not yet through’. She considers this third phase of her research career to be the most important in terms of its meaning and its impact. Even though RRBM is still a work in progress with much more needed to realise Vision 2030 as articulated in the position paper, there is hope that the future of business education and research is good. RRBM now has many advocates who are working to bring humanity and caring into the business school education and knowledge-creating activities. These communities share a common vision: that business schools are and can be even better agents of positive change in our world.

There are many movements dedicated to transforming business education toward a better world, caring not only for shareholders but all stakeholders. Among many, she pointed to three examples. One is the Network for Business Sustainability, founded in 2008 by Tima Bansal. It is sustainability for a better world by drawing attention to both the human and the natural ecology and their interaction. Michael Pirson started the humanistic management network in 2004 and formalised it into the International Humanistic Management Association in 2016. Two years ago, he created the Humanistic Leadership Academy (HLA), working with business school educators and business leaders to develop humanistic leaders of the future. Most heartening is a group of young scholars who created the Impact Scholar Community, a network of young scholars supporting each other to follow their heart in their research and teaching careers.

While sharing a common passion, these communities also share a common frustration. Most business schools still use publications in a defined list of journals (e.g., FT50) as the main criterion in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. Some of them manage their career by choosing to work in schools that value meaningful research, while others use a two-pronged strategy of both publishing to meet evaluation criteria (though the topic may not be meaningful to them) and publishing on topics they care about. Some are successful in being able to work on meaningful topics and successfully publishing them in the top journals. Most of the winners of the Responsible Research Award belong to this group. As the number of responsible research scholars increases over time, they will begin to take positions of power and introduce the necessary changes toward responsible research. We have hope in the young scholars

Å. Howard asked Anne to reflect on the question “What should, or could, be done to improve business school curricula and drive a more inclusive, collegial framework for the future of management education?” Anne replied, in her usual humble way, that she is not a management education expert. Her career focus has been primarily on research which produces the stock of knowledge to be taught to students in business schools and to practicing managers. However, she believes that the same question that she encourages scholars to ponder about business research can be asked of business education, i.e., the why, what, and how of business education. What is the purpose of business education in this challenging world, e.g., why should business schools exist? What knowledge and skills are important for students to have when they go into organisations and make decisions with the potential to do either good or harm to the world (or at least to customers and employees)? What methods of teaching or pedagogy are appropriate where the students’ attention is increasingly captured by social media and artificial intelligence is disrupting the learning process?

Anne echoed the voice of others that management education can no longer be ‘business as usual’ because the world is facing unprecedented challenges. At a more existential level, the future or sustainability of humanity is at risk for all the reasons that we read and hear about every day. This is why all the nations of the world responded affirmatively to the call by the United Nations to commit to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Beyond the government, businesses are considered an important, if not the most important, actor in the implementation of these SDGs. Anne would like to see the SDGs included in the curriculum in all business schools with earnestness. This is, of course, the mission of PRME – Principles of Responsible Management Education. There are 16,000 business schools and programmes worldwide, however only about 5% (over 800) have joined PRME. It is urgent that all business schools adopt PRME with the same zeal as seeking AACSB or EFMD accreditation.

Anne further reflected on the business school’s ideology of shareholder primacy. This ideology is exclusive, catering to the 1% of wealth-holders of the world. Business schools must be inclusive to reflect the pluralistic nature of humanity and recognise the contribution of all stakeholders engaged in business activities. All stakeholders should receive equal attention and care. Business is an instrument for a better world for all, not only for those with capital. After all, the business school is an educational institution, and should serve as a role model of inclusivity and collegiality, creating knowledge and systems that will enable businesses to be agents of positive change in rebuilding our fractured world. Business schools must be the source of hope for the future. This is the aspiration of RRBM as articulated in the Vision statement, “In 2030, business and management schools worldwide are widely admired for their contributions to societal well-being. Business and management scholarship has been central to solving society’s challenges” (Co-founders of RRBM, 2017, 2020).

Does her gender play a role in her career? Anne’s answer is no. She even believed that her ethnic background was not at the top of her mind throughout her career. If anything, her accent, and imperfect English played to her advantage. Early in her career, she would apologise to the executive students about her poor English and accent. They told her that they appreciated her background. She made them listen more intently than they would otherwise. However, the reality of gender inequality is not lost on Anne. In 2024, according to a study by AACSB, women occupied 30% of the dean positions, and only 25.7% of full professors were women. To the extent that women tend to be more nurturing, better listeners, and more compassionate toward others, they may be better equipped to introduce or support humanistic values into the business school culture. This would provide a hospitable setting for curriculum reform and changes in research priorities to support the needs of a changing world facing existential challenges on many fronts.

Anne is quick to point out that she is not saying that women should replace men in leadership positions in business schools. She is simply expressing her wish for more attention to gender equality in hiring and promotion decisions. Gender imbalance in leadership positions is not unique to business schools. It is widespread in business and government organisations too. Attention to gender equity should be a goal for all human groups so that every man and every woman can have a fair playing field on which to rise and shine.

In conclusion, Anne wished that her life’s story may serve to encourage young scholars to enter the academic career with both a clear head and a good heart. As a social scientist and an educator, there is an immense opportunity to make a difference. We have the freedom to choose what we want to study and how we want to teach. We are governed by the rules and values we set for our profession. Collectively, we have the power to have positive, negative or no impact on the world through what we study, write, and teach. This awesome responsibility is also our opportunity. Life is too precious and too short to live without a purpose and meaning. Let us grasp the freedom we have in this career and work together toward a profession of great impact and importance in our communities, local or global. She hopes young scholars can imagine how their life could unfold meaningfully by being attentive to the purpose and opportunities of an academic career. She concluded with another Albert Einstein quote “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.”

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References

Augier, M. and March, J.C. (2011). The Roots, Rituals and Rhetorics of Change: North American Business Schools After
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