A Long and Winding Road: IBAR and the Foundations of Research in Irish Business and Management¹

From the establishment of Faculties of Commerce in colleges of the National University of Ireland (NUI) in the early 1900s, joined in 1925 by a School of Commerce at Trinity College, research-based publishing in business and management was for long periods both limited and dominated by economics – then, as now, a core component of business education.² The former Principal of the pioneering Rathmines School of Commerce, first Professor of Commerce and Dean of the Faculty of Commerce at University College Dublin (UCD), George Oldham, had been influential in persuading the Dublin Commission that established the NUI to include commerce degrees in NUI Colleges – following the recent examples of UK and US universities.³ Oldham had been active in home rule politics and had strong cultural interests. Following the death of Charles Oldham, Bernard (Barney) Shields was appointed to the Chair of Commerce at UCD and became Dean of the faculty of Commerce. Also at UCD, Tom Kettle became the first Professor of National Economics. A Chair in Political Economy was also instituted. Kettle, killed on the Western Front, combined academic work with home rule politics and journalism. His successor, George O’Brien, Professor of National Economics (and subsequently Political Economy) at UCD from 1926 to 1961, was a major economic historian, who published on Irish and international economic history – though he viewed his role as teacher as of paramount importance.⁴ O’Brien was a major contributor to debates on public policy and to nation building and was a long-serving Dean of the Faculty of Commerce.

Economics at the Queen’s Colleges in Cork, Galway and Belfast originated in early chairs in Jurisprudence and Political Economy. Cork’s early economists, Timothy Smiddy and his successor John Busteed, were Professors of Economics and Commerce. Both followed the general pattern for the new state’s first-generation economists by engaging in nation building and public policy. On leaving University College Cork (UCC), Smiddy served as Ireland’s first diplomatic representative to the US and later as High Commissioner in London.⁵ Busteed established a Bureau of Economic Research at UCC, supported by local business and the Cork Chamber of Commerce.⁶ The small Cork Faculty also formed an alliance with the Cork Municipal School of Commerce to extend instruction to such areas as shorthand and typing courses.⁷ It is notable that Busteed is described by John A. Murphy as ‘brilliant and unorthodox’. He supported adult and worker access to university education and played a role in unifying the two rival Irish trade union congresses in 1959.⁸ Economics at Galway had been pioneered during the nineteenth century by the stellar John Cairnes, who became Professor of Political Economy and Jurisprudence in 1859 at The Queen’s College.⁹ University College Galway (UCG, now Galway University) appointed Barney Shields as Professor of Commerce and Accountancy in 1914 - the first chair in the UK to include accountancy in its title.¹⁰ Shields was also appointed the first Dean of the Faculty of Commerce at UCG. Shields’ chair was later enlarged and retitled the Professorship of Economics, Commerce and Accountancy.¹¹ Following Shield’s subsequent departure to UCD, Francis McBryan was appointed Professor of Economics, Commerce and Accountancy at UCG in 1919. McBryan has been described as ‘essentially a commercial teacher’, who had taught office routine, business methods, commercial arithmetic at Omagh Technical College and also served as Principal of Ballina Technical School prior to the Galway appointment.¹² At Queen’s College Belfast a Chair in Jurisprudence and Political Economy was established in 1853 and a Chair in Economics in 1908.¹³

Trinity College Dublin (TCD) began experimenting with business-focused programmes in 1906, offering a Diploma in Economics and Commercial Knowledge.¹⁴ In 1926 George Duncan became Professor of Political Economy in the School of Commerce at TCD, established in 1925, with support from the Dublin Chamber of Commerce. Duncan was influential in establishing economics as a major subject in the university and later became a founder of the Irish Management Institute (IMI).¹⁵ Duncan’s Trinity predecessor, C.F. Bastable, had been appointed to what was a part-time chair and also doubled for a time as Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Economy at Queen’s College Galway.¹⁶ In 1962, the School of Commerce replaced the School of Business and Social Studies and a Department of Business Studies was established.¹⁷

The relative salaries of the early holders of chairs in commerce was indicative of the valuation of business subjects within universities. Oldham’s UCD salary was 25 per cent lower than the salaries of the holders of the two Faculty chairs in economics.¹⁸ At UCG the newly installed Professor of Commerce and Accounting was paid less than 60 per cent of the holder of the Chairs in Greek or Latin.¹⁹

The successors of these early economics pioneers shared many affinities with their predecessors. James Meenan, who succeeded George O’Brien as Dean of the Faculty of Commerce at UCD from 1961 to 1973 and Patrick (Paddy) Lynch, Professor of Political Economy, were active in economic affairs and public policy. Both also served as directors on multiple boards. Paddy Lynch was influential as a government advisor and was pivotal in national education policy through his seminal 1965 OECD report Investment in Education. Lynch played an important role in the development of postgraduate studies at UCD, pioneering a broad perspective on business education that long afterwards crystalised in currently popular modules in Business and Society. James Meenan wrote the major textbook, The Irish Economy since 1922.²⁰ Paddy Lynch, in collaboration with John Vaizey, published Guinness’s Brewery in the Irish Economy – by far the finest business history in a small and generally undistinguished Irish genre. David O’Mahony, appointed Professor of Economics at UCC in 1964, had undertaken seminal work on Irish industrial relations, including a pioneering study of wage rounds in Ireland, while working earlier at the Economic (and Social) Research Institute.²¹ At TCD, Louden Ryan was a high profile contributor to public policy, while Dermot McAleese, his successor as Whately Professor of Political Economy, conducted important work on trade and on aspects of foreign direct investment in Ireland.²² At UCG, Liam Ó Buachalla was appointed to the Chair of Economics, Commerce and Accountancy in 1953 in succession to Francis McBryan. A former cooper²³ and IRA volunteer, Ó Buachalla had been a commercial teacher and specialised and published at UCG in the economics of the Gaeltacht.²⁴

It is notable that the early economist leaders of faculties and schools of commerce so frequently and strongly engaged with the worlds of politics, journalism and economic affairs. A number were educated in law or the humanities and often trained as barristers. Some are described in the Dictionary of Irish Biography as ‘self-taught’ in economics. A number undertook graduate education in economics in the UK, Europe or the US. Their work appeared in both Irish and UK journals and their books were published both by Irish and UK publishers. In some instances promising or distinguished early careers in academic publishing trailed off as other duties and responsibilities gained momentum. The culture of commerce education of the time may also have played a role in the early peaking of research. George O’Brien observed of his early career and subsequent priorities:

I had shown that I have the capacity to write bulky learned volumes if I wanted to, and there was no necessity to continue repeating the demonstration. I was like a dog that has shown that he can walk on his hind legs. He is not compelled to pass through life as a perpetual biped.²⁵

Many economists remained active within and contributed to the proceedings and journals of scholarly bodies, in particular the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland. For some at least the Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland (JSSISI) appeared to serve almost as a surrogate economics and business journal. Their scholarship and writings were confined in the main to macro-economics and finance. All were (Irish) men.²⁶ Few showed much evident interest in industrial or business economics, or in the activities of firms, their managers or workers. They generated little primary research data.

For a long time, few specialist business, finance or management positions were created across the universities and those that were created were mainly held on a part-time basis.²⁷ At UCD, provision had been made for lectureships in accountancy and in banking and finance. The first Faculty of Commerce comprised holders of positions in economics and these areas, as well as in law, history and European languages.²⁸ A part-time chair in accountancy was created in 1962. It would be close to half a century before specialist positions were created in marketing, operations, industrial relations/personnel or other areas of business and management. At UCD, George Oldham and Barney Shields covered industrial relations as well as a range of other areas in their commerce courses.²⁹ Shields published a book on industrial organisation and remained unusually productive in publishing during his career.³⁰ While little specialist instruction was available in industrial relations, a rich vein of published work on Irish labour history existed within and outside the academy.

The limited development of business and management education in part reflected the low status of commerce within and outside the universities. George Duncan’s School of Commerce in Trinity appeared to have gained little cachet within Trinity College.³¹ With UCC in mind, John A. Murphy observed that businessmen traditionally had little respect for academic courses in commerce and noted pleas for the ‘poorly regarded BComm degree ‘to be given a chance’.³² On Barney Shields’ retirement from UCD 1951, the Chair of Commerce went unfilled, reportedly reflecting the hostility of UCD President Michael Tierney to business education, as well as the indifference of its economics professors.³³ Tierney held to the view that Commerce might have been better omitted from the university at its foundation.³⁴ UCD’s later transformative Dean of Commerce, Michael MacCormac, described the prevailing posture towards business education within the college:

People felt that there was no real theoretical basis for business or commerce or whatever it was called. The subject with a good theoretical basis was finance but it had not been introduced. People tended to think of accounting. The economists felt that it was all rubbish. That it wasn’t a real science.³⁵

During the early decades of the twentieth century, modest numbers of students undertook degrees in commerce.³⁶ By the mid 1920s, for example, 40 graduated with degrees in commerce. The number of student enrolments still made Commerce the third largest UCD faculty by student numbers.³⁷ Numbers were to remain modest up to the 1960s and 1970s. Mired in underdevelopment, Ireland had no compelling story to present to the international scholarly or policy communities. Walled in by protectionism, business methods and practices in firms across a range of sectors were frequently backward and inefficient.³⁸ In line with international practice, university pedagogies within business education were primarily teaching-based. Little postgraduate education was undertaken. While Commerce may have been an outlier in the precedence of teaching over research, it was hardly an extreme outlier. The research productivity of the early economists was uneven. Within UCD, history was viewed by some as the ‘star’ department. Yet, early renowned history professors became known more as teachers than as researchers. Although some, in particular Robert Dudley Edwards, changed the character of history teaching and were involved in establishing a journal, forged international research connections and pioneered the establishment of archives both within UCD and nationally.³⁹

Funding for business research, whether by foundations or government, was virtually non-existent. Lecturers in business and management had professional backgrounds as practitioners and possessed no research training. There were few career incentives for publishing research.⁴⁰ The community of commerce educators was small and was smaller still in business subjects. The main publishing outlet for such business-related research as was undertaken was the Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, with some articles also appearing in the IMI’s journal, Irish Management, launched in 1954, in the Jesuit quarterly, Studies, the Catholic social studies journal, Christus Rex, and the Institute of Public Administration’s journal, Administration, founded in 1953.

Given the small scale of the Irish market for business students or readers, the paucity of scholarship on business subjects and the poor performance of Irish enterprises, cocooned by protectionism, publishers, international or Irish-based, saw little promise in Irish research studies or even in textbooks. Businesses, managers and public policy makers also showed little interest in business research or publishing. As Joe Lee has written ‘the bulk of Irish businessmen provided no market for business ideas, much less for ideas in general’.⁴¹ While first- and second-generation economics professors held positions on important committees of inquiry established by the independent Irish state, Ronan Fanning concluded that they nevertheless had little real influence over government policy. This was attributed, in part, to the grooming in conservative Whitehall public administration of early senior civil servants in the Departments of Finance and Industry and Commerce, and, in part also, to the orthodox and anti-protectionist postures of many of the economists themselves.⁴² The exception was Paddy Lynch, who, prior to joining UCD, had served as economic advisor to Taoiseach John A. Costello in the First Inter-Party Government. Lynch was instrumental in the government’s introduction of a capital budget in 1950, injecting an element of Keynesian economics into Irish economic policy, which, according to Fanning, presaged Whitaker’s Economic Development white paper and subsequent Programmes for Economic Expansion.⁴³

Things began to change in the 1960s and changed significantly from the 1970s. The Irish Management Institute (IMI), founded in the early 1950s as an executive education and training provider, initiated a programme of research in the 1960s and 1970s. An IMI researcher, Brefni Tomlin, later to become the UCD Commerce Faculty’s first lecturer in behavioural science, conducted survey research on the incidence of managers in various functions in firms in Ireland.⁴⁴ This was followed by subsequent IMI studies that revealed a growth and diversification of specialist management positions as the economy grew and became more open.⁴⁵ The Institute of Public Administration (IPA)’s book series and the IPA’s journal, Administration, carried studies in some business subjects, particularly industrial relations.⁴⁶

Wider efforts to professionalize Irish management also led to a stream of research studies. The catalyst had been the provision of Marshall Aid and Ford Foundation funding to Ireland. The Marshall Aid Programme, focused on European reconstruction after the Second World War, included a Technical Assistance and Productivity Programme. Recipient countries were encouraged to establish national productivity centres. By a circuitous route, and drawing on European funding, Ireland established a productivity body in 1959: the tripartite Irish National Productivity Committee.⁴⁷ As well as supporting education on productivity for managers and trade union officials, funding was provided for academic research in the human sciences. This was overseen by a National Joint [Tripartite] Committee on the Human Sciences and Their Application to Industry. The Committee included senior social scientists. UCD Professor of Psychology, Feichin O’Doherty, was the Committee’s chair. Charles McCarthy, subsequently Professor of Business Studies, an industrial relations academic at TCD, succeeded O’Doherty as chair. The Irish National Productivity Committee and its allied agency, the Irish Productivity Centre, supported research and published a series of research monographs. A study of trade union organisation was undertaken by Brian Hillery at UCD. A study of industrial relations in firms was conducted by TCD business lecturer, Geoffrey MacKechnie. UCD’s Professor of Social Science, Conor Ward, undertook a study of housing relocation. At UCG, sociologist Michael D. Higgins (President of Ireland, 2011-2025) completed a study of the motivation of workers on Galway Docks. A study of organisational behaviour was undertaken by researchers at the IMI.⁴⁸ A study of the motivation of Dublin busmen - Dublin Bus’s parent company, CIE, was then the largest employer in the Irish Republic - was commissioned from the Tavistock Institute, London – famous for developing the ‘socio-technical perspective’ on work motivation.⁴⁹ It is notable that most of the studies were conducted by social scientists working outside commerce faculties or schools of business.⁵⁰ Master’s research projects were also supported and published, including a study of the working conditions of electricians.⁵¹ This stream of research was supplemented by a small number of studies funded from other sources. These included Conor Ward’s community ‘manpower surveys’ and a seemingly controversial study of Industrial relations in Aer Lingus (Ireland’s national airline), undertaken by James Kavanagh, Conor Ward’s predecessor as Professor of Social Science at UCD.⁵²

Attempts by the Committee on the Human Sciences to obtain state funding for an Institute of Industrial Psychology did not materialise in the face of government indifference and public service cynicism.⁵³ The Jesuit-run Catholic Workers’ College (CWC), established in 1951 partly as a counterweight to the trade union-run People’s College, also sought state support for an advisory and research programme to complement its teaching programmes in industrial relations. The CWC’s proposal again failed to attract government support and the CWC remained an influential teaching institution.⁵⁴ Renamed the College of Industrial Relations and subsequently National College of Industrial Relations, the Dublin-based college expanded its student body to about 1,300 by the mid 1960s and later offered the first Irish degree programme in industrial relations.⁵⁵ Funding from the Ford Foundation was obtained by the state to establish the Economic Research Institute (later Economic and Social Research Institute) (ESRI) in 1960. Besides David O’Mahony’s research on industrial relations, studies of views on pay and pay differentials were led at ESRI by the distinguished Edinburgh University economic psychologist, Hilde Behrend.⁵⁶ A highly impressive study of abiding quality and relevance, Wage Inflation and Wage Leadership: A Study of the Role of Key Wage Bargains in the Irish System of Collective Bargaining, was conducted at ESRI by Oxford industrial relations academic, Bill McCarthy in collaboration with Jim O’Brien and Vincent Dowd.⁵⁷ The ESRI’s third Director and former Montague Burton Professor of Industrial Relations at Cardiff University, Michael Fogarty, investigated industrial relations and industrial disputes in the Electricity Supply Board and in the banks.⁵⁸ Fogarty also conducted pioneering research at ESRI on Irish entrepreneurs.⁵⁹ Trinity College labour economist, Charles Mulvey, also conducted an investigation into disputes in Bord Na Móna.⁶⁰

These developments marked a step change in Irish business research. For the first time empirical research based on primary data collection, most often conducted by trained social scientists, applying standard research methodologies, became available to business educators, their students and to public policy makers. Most of the research focused on industrial relations, personnel management, industrial psychology and work-related issues. It was ironic that funding associated in one way or another with improving productivity, economic performance and management had little impact in incentivizing research in other areas of business or management. Business administration, operations management, banking and finance, marketing, corporate strategy and accounting seemed largely inert to the new stream of research funding.⁶¹ To a significant extent this was a reflection of the modest numbers and limited research training of business educators in these fields of management. These areas also remained largely outside the ken of the ESRI, which, industrial relations aside, focused on economic and subsequently social concerns.

The inertness of business and management education to research was to change quite radically with the sharp expansion of numbers attending university from the 1970s.⁶² Faculties of commerce and schools of business grew in terms of student and faculty numbers. National Institutes for Higher Education (NIHEs) were created at Dublin and Limerick, later becoming the University of Limerick and Dublin City University, and significant departments covering business education developed in the Regional Technical Colleges, later Institutes of Technology/Technological Universities. In 1974, the IMI opened a purpose built campus at Sandyford, Dublin and expanded its executive programmes. IMI Director, Ivor Kenny, began an interview-based stream of research on business leaders that was sustained across succeeding decades. The largest expansion occurred at UCD. Under the Deanship of Michael MacCormac, Professor of Business Administration, one of the first MBA programmes in Europe was established in 1966 and the first Master of Business Studies (MBS) programme was also launched. Funding from business was obtained to create a series of chairs. Chairs in Marketing and Industrial Relations were established in 1974. Chairs in Banking and Finance, International Marketing and Corporate Planning were added.⁶³ The part-time Chair in accounting became full-time and a chair was created in Management Information Systems. These chairs became the fulcrum for newly established academic departments, offering specialist master’s degree programmes and expanding the range of management areas encompassed by undergraduate programmes in Commerce. At UCG, the retirement of the long-serving Professor of Economics, Commerce and Accounting, Liam Ó Buachalla, led to the creation of three chairs in economics, in business studies and in accounting and finance. Jim Doolin, Professor of Business Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Commerce, introduced a new MBA Programme at Galway in 1972.⁶⁴ In 1980 Allied Irish Bank funded a Chair in Management at UCC. An MBA programme followed in 1981. New chairs, departments, programmes and courses led to appointments to lectureships across a range of areas and, for the first time, to the promise of university academic careers and career progression in business and management subjects. The expansion and diversification of commerce faculties and business schools also heralded appointments of academics trained in leading universities and graduate schools in the US and UK, as well as in Irish universities. Not all of the new appointees opted to prioritize research, focusing on creating new courses and degrees. Developments on the supply-side of business education matched an expansion on the demand-side following the advent of free secondary education and the priority now accorded to education in economic development.⁶⁵

This was the context out of which IBAR emerged in 1979. The appointment of a cadre of young academics at UCD’s Faculty of Commerce was the catalyst for the creation of IBAR. John Murray (later appointed professor at TCD), Frank Bradley, Bernard Moran and Aidan Kelly, founding Editor of IBAR, were among those who provided support for a new journal. Soundings had been made by Aidan Kelly to explore whether an Irish industrial relations journal might be feasible. Consultations with stakeholders, which included the scholarly and influential General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Donal Nevin, indicated that such a periodical would not be viable. The group behind IBAR were conscious that many colleagues in situ at UCD, senior to them in both age and grade, had little background or formation in research or publishing. Even the economists, with some stellar exceptions, were seen to have published little. PhDs in business and management subjects were becoming more numerous, providing a supply of empirical research on Ireland that might support a new publishing outlet. Locally, a group of new academics appointed at UCD were trained in ivy league and elite business schools in the US and Europe, with strong research cultures, including Cornell, Chicago, Wharton, Harvard, MIT and Cambridge.

Soundings on establishing a journal were made with some other universities, to create wider inter-institutional support for a new periodical. Little came from these. Instead, the journal received financial support from UCD Faculty of Commerce Dean, Michael MacCormack and was launched in 1979, the only existing Irish business periodical was Management, published by the IMI. This periodical, in which some members of the UCD group published, was focused more on commentary and on practitioners than on management research or on business academics. The principal objective of IBAR’s founders was modest. They sought to provide an outlet for sound empirical research in the main on Ireland, hoping to attract, as well, submissions from established international researchers by using their networks and contacts. In the process, the group aimed to contribute to academic career development in business schools, not least in UCD.

IBAR was established as a twice-yearly periodical. Editorial board members included academics from universities and institutions within Ireland, as well as established international academics. Journal subscriptions were set at a nominal level. University libraries were approached to take the journal. Some large companies also took out subscriptions. Issues could carry advertisements and sponsors were listed. Inevitably many early contributors were UCD academics, but in time the journal attracted a wider pool of authors. Early issues carried papers on a wide range of business and management subjects. From the start, early career academics began contributing papers to IBAR, some publishing for the first time in the journal. The peer review process met with push back from some who were unfamiliar with receiving and being required to respond to blind peer reviews.

The journal was printed by Dublin firm Mount Salus Press. Printing costs were significant, each issue costing in the range of IR £2-3,000 – the current equivalent of between €13-20,000 per issue.⁶⁶ Some 25 per cent of the costs came from subscriptions. Grants and financial support from UCD were essential to the operation of IBAR. Editing, distribution, promotion and billing were handled within UCD.

The editorship passed within UCD from Aidan Kelly to Teresa Brannick.⁶⁷ Teresa Brannick is credited with expanding and improving the journal, using her contacts within the wider social sciences community to increase the range of submissions, particularly attracting relevant papers from psychology and sociology. IBAR’s founding Editor considers that the journal achieved its major objective of providing a platform for early-career academics to publish their research and progress their careers as business and management researchers.

While the national impact of IBAR was substantial and lasting, the international impact of the journal was constrained by Ireland’s economic stagnation during much of the journal’s sojourn at UCD. Ireland was associated during the 1980s and into the 1990s with chronic economic and business underperformance. Little was seen to be learned from Irish business or from Irish management research.

We conclude with an overview of developments since the emergence of IBAR. Prolonged fiscal austerity in the wake of economic stagnation curtailed the further development of business and management education and research during the1980s. At UCD retrenchment measures led to a reduction in academic staff numbers, including the loss of a number of leading lights of the Faculty of Commerce. The perils of indefinite stagnation however also fostered plans to establish a graduate school of business that came to fruition in the Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School in 1991. One of the new graduate school’s divisions was the Business Research Programme. Established with initial funding from Atlantic Philanthropies, the new division created a structured doctoral programme, attracted corporate donations for doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships and undertook a series of research studies funded by the state, external agencies and donors. At Limerick, Joe Wallace and Paddy Gunnigle pioneered research and teaching in industrial relations and human resource management, creating a new and highly productive academic department that would become the cornerstone of the subsequent Kemmy School of Business. AT NIHE Dublin, the foundations were laid for significant subsequent developments in business education at Dublin City University (DCU). At the College of Marketing and Design, Aidan O’Driscoll founded the Irish Marketing Review, with support from the Marketing Institute Ireland. At Queen’s University, the Department of Business Studies was wound down as part of the changes arising from the creation of the New University of Ulster. The Ulster Polytechnic, to which business at Queen’s was transferred, had been engaged in professional and industry-level education and training. Queens Business School subsequently re-emerged and grew significantly as a centre for research and education.

Notwithstanding the expansion that had occurred during the 1970s, monographs and textbooks conversant with Irish business and management research had yet to appear at a significant scale. AT UCD, graduate texts in industrial relations comprised UK classics, such as Allan Flanders’ Management and Unions: The Theory and Reform of Industrial Relations, the Report of the ‘Donovan’ Commission on Industrial Relations and investigations into industrial disputes in the ESB and the Irish Banks. Personnel management teaching was heavily reliant on George Thomason’s narrowly descriptive, colourless and research inert work, A Textbook of Personnel Management. The first Irish textbook on industrial relations, Industrial Relations in Ireland: Contemporary Issues and Developments, edited within UCD, was printed on the presses of a local newspaper in Drogheda and published inhouse in 1987.⁶⁸ While some business lecturers at UCD - doubtless like their peers elsewhere - possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of business in Ireland, few undertook published research.

The 1990s heralded the most radical transformation to date in Irish business and management education and research. Staff and student numbers continued to expand, widening the range of undergraduate and graduate course and programmes offered. Departments and schools grew, or were created, across institutions and became more diverse by gender and by the national/regional backgrounds of newly appointed faculty. Of major significance, retirements and new appointments led to cohort replacement, which fundamentally altered the demographics, competencies and priorities of academic staff. As was seen earlier, established staff retiring from academic positions often possessed professional backgrounds in management or accounting. Their replacements and new appointments more often came from backgrounds in the human sciences. Alternatively, they had undertaken graduate and PhD programmes grounded in social science methodology after undergraduate degrees in business, science or engineering. While it might be overstating developments to speak of the human sciences ‘colonising’ business and management teaching and research, the influence of sociology, social psychology and organisational behaviour on the field was and remains profound.⁶⁹

Research and publishing - both national and international - grew dramatically. The first Irish series of textbooks and monographs in management, Irish Studies in Management, appeared in 1997 under the academic editorship of Bill Roche. Major Irish publishers initially showed little interest in academic business publishing or sought to cherry pick textbooks. The Irish Studies in Management series, published by the Smurfit School at UCD in association with the new Irish publisher Oaktree Press, led to some 20 books, encompassing research-based monographs and textbooks spanning a wide range of business and management disciplines.⁷⁰ At UL, Paddy Gunnigle and colleagues published the first textbook on personnel management in Ireland, to be followed by a textbook on industrial relations, written in collaboration with Joe Wallace.⁷¹ Both major textbooks would subsequently appear in multiple editions. Under Gunnigle’s leadership, UL participated in successive waves of CRANET surveys of human resource practices and in an important comparative project on HRM in multinationals.⁷² The UL Department emerged as a major centre for publications on HRM and employment relations and became a conveyor belt of research and academic and leadership talent in these fields.⁷³ At UCC Edward Cahill published a pioneering study of corporate financial turmoil in firms: Corporate Financial Crisis in Ireland.⁷⁴ A stream of research-intensive textbooks focused on practice and on developments in Ireland would follow in the 2000s.

Paralleling these developments, Irish-based scholars published prolifically in international peer-reviewed journals, as well as publishing monographs and handbooks with the world’s leading university and commercial academic presses. Behind developments at home and internationally were the changing training and career priorities of academics. Universities and institutes of technology, latterly technological universities, began to assign clearer priority to scholarship and research in university appointments and promotions procedures. Compared with the past, when opportunities for promotion or appointment to chairs were very limited, and promotion criteria were often notoriously opaque, the advent of transparent and research-focused internal promotion to personal chairs, as well as the creation of more chairs in business and management, greatly expanded opportunities. Inter-university mobility also increased with expansion. Journal rankings began to drive publishing activity and shape academic careers – not in all respects a positive development, as the ending of the Irish Journal of Management shows. Business schools and their parent universities also became subject to league tables, incorporating research output, that significantly impacted on student demand, especially at graduate level. Business schools in some instances ranked highly in European and global league tables – sometimes ranking more highly than their parent universities. The commerce ‘ugly duckling’ of the university world could, it seemed, become a ‘swan’! And the swan was now lucrative and merited being nested in opulent digs. External or internal funding allowed a number of business schools to relocate to architecturally impactful modern or refurbished ‘signature’ buildings, such as Limerick’s Kemmy School, Galway’s J.E. Cairnes School, UCD’s Quinn (undergraduate) School, Queen’s Riddel Hall facility and Trinity Business School. Cork Business School’s planned city-centre development will continue the impressive expansion of business schools’ architectural footprint. While such facilities have become ‘table stakes’ in international business education, business schools’ occupancy of prestigious university sites nevertheless seems to symbolize the new value and cachet of management education and research.

Business school academics became frequent and influential media commentators, members of state committees and councils and governments advisors. Doctoral programmes grew significantly beyond the ‘cottage industry’ they had long been in business education. A professional doctorate (DBA) programme in business and management was pioneered by Waterford Institute of Technology/South-East Technological University. Complementing the growing availability of advanced academic and research training, the Irish Academy of Management launched initiatives to provide support for PhD students and early career academics, beginning with a seminar hosted by UCD in 2014.

While funding for primary business and management research from government departments and agencies remained on the whole fitful, the creation of the Irish Research Council (now Research Ireland) created opportunities for postgraduate, postdoctoral and advanced research funding. Though business schools were not notably successful in obtaining research funding from the new state-funded Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions, UCG was an exception, obtaining funding for a Centre for Innovation and Structural Change, which became the platform for the development of the Cairnes School of Business and Economics. Later, the European Research Council provided very significant highly competitive funding for research in the social sciences and business schools, permitting scholars in Ireland to lead and collaborate in major international and comparative research projects on fundamental issues. A striking feature of business research in Ireland is the extent to which, until recent years, the performance and role of business in Ireland’s economic underdevelopment and development was conducted in the main by social scientists, working outside business schools. At UCD, the economic historians Mary Daly and Cormac O’Gráda published major works on business in Irish economic development.⁷⁵ At UCC, the historians Andy Bielenberg and Raymond Ryan surveyed the role of industry and business in Independent Ireland.⁷⁶ Other important books came from sociologists and political scientists Denis O’Hearn, Tom Garvin and Seán ÓRiain.⁷⁷ The expanding research programme of the EU’s Dublin-based, European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) drew in Irish researchers, though to a quite marginal extent. The absence of critical mass in Irish business schools meant that primary research contracts were generally awarded to groups of researchers in UK and Continental European institutions.

With so much scholarship on Irish business and economic development occurring outside business schools, it appeared to the authors of this article that research on Irish business and management was bypassing research and education within Irish business schools. Notable exceptions were studies of business in Irish economic development and the experience and revival of firms in Ireland following the global financial crisis, conducted by scholars at Trinity Business School and at UCD’s Smurfit School.⁷⁸ Large recent awards by the European Research Council to Roland Erne (new economic governance) and Susi Geiger (the organisation and shaping of markets) at the UCD College of Business indicated significant progress in creating research critical mass.

In conclusion, this picture of exceptional development since the 1990s needs to be tempered by recognizing remaining challenges and some new pressures. In a keynote address to the inaugural conference of the Irish Academy of Management in 1996, one of the authors (Roche) addressed priorities for the business and management academy in Ireland.⁷⁹ Some of these continue to be pertinent. Major deficiencies remain in the public data infrastructure for business and management research in Ireland. While the CSO collects data on macro-economics, labour markets, business costs and productivity, little high quality public data is collected on business or management practices. Nor is public funding made available for this purpose. It is 30 years since a multidisciplinary team at the UCD Smurfit School conducted a large well-resourced survey of management practices in workplaces in Ireland.⁸⁰ No comparable survey has since been undertaken. Surveys by individual scholars on the whole remain limited by modest resources, small sample size, problems of representativeness and by their necessarily narrow scope.⁸¹ The poor infrastructure for business and management data stands in sharp contrast to the excellent public data regularly collected and made accessible in such areas as income distribution, inequality, educational attainment, health and illness and ageing.

While the strong expansion of PhD programmes is a major step forward, little cooperation has developed between institutions with respect to pooling PhD modules and training resources, particularly in increasingly sophisticated research methods. It seems sub-optimal for different institutions to continue to provide technical training in research to small numbers of research students, when so much more could be achieved by pooling resources, facilitating student mobility and access to specialist methodological expertise.

Finally, scholars in at least some areas of business research appear to have become increasingly focused on accessing and analysing international (especially US) databases. Their rationale is that research based on these types of data is required for publications in ranked journals. It has also been remarked to us that the inclusion of country names, especially the names of small countries such as Ireland, in the titles of published papers, reduces downloads and citations - impairing the progress of early-career academics. Such developments threaten to erode incentives for research on business and management in Ireland. It is important that individual scholars, especially those enjoying seniority, the institutions in which they work and the scholarly bodies in which they collaborate, seek to counter incentives that threaten research on Ireland across a range of Irish business and management areas. Moves to support research on Ireland might start with implementing, not simply endorsing, the DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and Leiden Principles, when assessing candidates for appointment and promotion; by disavowing the ‘bean counting’ of publications, or by focusing narrowly on journal metrics. The key is to reward and promote balanced and broad portfolios of research and publications, valuing monographs and papers based on primary research scholarship and championing funding decisions consistent with the same and similar research assessment frameworks as DORA. Otherwise, the academy faces progressively less research on Irish business and management – other than research in which Ireland is reduced to values on sets of comparative variables in international datasets. This is not to disavow comparative research, which in general has served Irish scholarship well. Nor is it to question the value of research on international or US datasets. It is however to caution against reductive research in which Ireland is reduced to values on sets of variables in international datasets, or simply ignored as of no relevance in scientific terms or benefit in career terms. It is evident that Ireland can and does inform and enrich international scholarship on business and management models, their economic and social underpinnings and their outcomes. Business schools in Ireland with international and global ambitions should not lose sight of this in a scramble towards reductive pseudo-globalism.

Continuing to value and reward detailed primary and context-rich research scholarship on Ireland, of the highest quality and impact, is the greatest tribute that can be paid to the vision and pioneering work of those who edited and contributed to The Journal of Irish Business and Administrative Research and the Irish Journal of Management.