A view from the frontline: creative ideas for implementing a social impact research mindset in business schools

Introduction

The academic landscape is experiencing an accelerating shift toward accountability, driven by a growing demand for universities to demonstrate a genuine social license. In the upcoming special issue partnering with the ABDC, "A View from the Top: Business Dean Perspectives on the Future of Social Impact in Business Schools," institutional leaders provides a macro-level roadmap for embedding social responsibility into higher education governance and strategy. In that issue, Business school deans outlined essential visions for structural change, cross-sector partnerships, and the integration of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into institutional DNA. However, the problem arises in how to implement these high-level executive strategies and in the operational realities faced by the academics tasked with executing them. the tension between scholarly and social impact places pressure on an academic’s time and works against the social impact imperative of all business schools.

To convert the top-down institutional mandates into lived realities and address the scholarly/social impact tensions, we now focus on the academic frontline. This special issue, "A View from the Frontline: Creative Ideas for Implementing a Social Impact Research Mindset," serves as a direct, ground-level response to the Deans' perspectives. We invite business scholars, early-career researchers, and educators to share the creative, agile, and resourceful ways they are actively cultivating a social impact mindset. by exploring how frontline academics navigate the systemic tensions in modern higher education, such as balancing traditional publishing metrics with real-world translation, this issue aims to uncover the grassroots innovations shaping the future of business research.

While the focus on social impact in business schools is not new (Dyllick, 2015), business schools are increasingly judged not only by scholarly productivity, rankings and enrolments, but also by whether they can demonstrate a credible contribution to society (ABDC, 2026; Phillips et al 2026). This shift reflects a broader legitimacy challenge in higher education, as external stakeholders increasingly expect business schools to show how their teaching, research and engagement create value beyond the university itself. Accreditation bodies such as AACSB have elevated societal impact to a core outcome that business schools must evidence across teaching, scholarship, and engagement (AACSB, 2023). At the same time, work on Australian business schools shows that business deans continue to navigate a persistent tension between revenue-generation and broader public value claims, suggesting that social contribution has become integral to how business schools justify their place in society (Hogan et al., 2021; Phillips et al 2026). More recently, Russell-Bennett and Reid (2026) argue that business schools must restore their social licence by demonstrating that their research creates value for communities rather than remaining confined to academic audiences.

Within this debate, AACSB (2023) uses societal impact as an umbrella term encompassing long-term positive change across teaching, research and engagement, whereas Russell-Bennett and Reid (2026, p. 5) develop a more specific definition of social impact in business research as the “creation of value for people through business scholarly activities resulting in intentional improvement in micro, meso or macro economic, human and environmental phenomena over time”. This distinction clarifies that social impact is not synonymous with managerial usefulness alone, nor should it be reduced to dissemination activities. Rather, dissemination and engagement are stages in the pathway to impact, not impact itself (AACSB, 2023; Parkinson and Naidu, 2024; Russell-Bennett and Reid, 2026). Reinforcing this point, Haenlein and Jack (2025) argue that influencing managers or wider audiences may be valuable without necessarily constituting broader social change.

Despite the institutional shift towards social impact, the research environment within business schools continues to privilege forms of scholarship that are more readily measurable (publication counts, citations, funding) than they are impactful (real-world change) (Kohli and Haenlein, 2021; Tourish, 2020). The cost of business school research is substantial, yet much of it travels little beyond academic journals or specialist audiences (Haenlein and Jack, 2025). Surveys of business and management scholars similarly suggest widespread support for research that creates value beyond academia, but much weaker institutional support when it comes to tenure, promotion, resources and recognition for such work (Haley and Jack, 2023). At the same time, journal and career systems still reward publication counts, citations and journal prestige, often encouraging quantity-oriented heuristics rather than a sustained focus on social problems (Kohli and Haenlein, 2021; Haenlein and Jack, 2025).

This structural misalignment is especially important for understanding the frontline academic experience. If business schools are now expected to deliver social impact, the key question is no longer whether such impact is sought after, but how individual scholars can enact it under conditions that remain only partially supportive (Kabadayi and Jason-DiBartolo 2022). A simple yet comprehensive framework argues that academics are more likely to work on important problems when three conditions are present: awareness of important problems, ability to investigate them appropriately and motivation to pursue them despite the risks and constraints involved (Kohli and Haenlein, 2021). This framework repositions the frontline challenge as more than a simple managerial problem. It suggests that impactful scholarship also depends on engagement with stakeholders, conceptual and methodological confidence, and institutional contexts that do not penalise work on real-world problems simply because such work is harder to publish in traditional forms (Kohli and Haenlein, 2021).

The recent special issue in Journal of Social Impact in Business Research, A view from the top: Business Dean’s perspectives on the future of Business Schools, has a collection of frameworks and observations about how business schools can create social impact. While these contributions provide important institutional perspectives, further work is needed on how social impact is enacted by academics, research teams and educators in everyday research, teaching and engagement contexts. There is a need for research that translates institutional ambition into practice.

Emerging work in the Journal of Social Impact in Business Research indicates that such operationalisation is beginning to take shape. Russell-Bennett and Reid (2026) note that early contributions to the journal shift attention from theory building alone towards solution building, practical frameworks and cross-sector collaboration. The editorial highlights mechanisms such as engaged scholarship, collaborative problem formulation, practical toolkits, AI-supported review processes and institutional innovation as pathways through which business research can create social value (Russell-Bennett and Reid, 2026). These developments suggest that social impact in business research is already under way and is no longer only a matter of rhetoric or accreditation discourse (Kabadayi and Jason-DiBartolo, 2022).

However, business schools are at different stages in embedding social impact within their research cultures, incentive systems and institutional practices. Some academics pursue social impact in spite of limited resources, workload recognition or reward-system support, while others work in environments where leadership, infrastructure, recognition and workload models actively enable the time-intensive work of collaboration and change. This range of experiences provides fertile ground for learning. Further work is needed to consolidate transferable guidance on how socially impactful scholarship can be designed, resourced, legitimised and sustained across diverse institutional contexts. This special issue addresses moves from the institutional macro-level of impact to the micro-level of academic implementation. Rather than asking how business schools should articulate social impact strategically, it asks how frontline academics develop a social impact research mindset in their everyday research, teaching and engagement practices. In doing so, it seeks to advance theory on the conditions, practices and mechanisms through which impact is enacted, while also building a set of creative and replicable models that academics can adapt within their own institutional settings.

The special issue in an official initiative of the ANZMAC Marketing for Social Impact Special Interest Group (MSI-SIG).

References

AACSB (2023), AACSB and Societal Impact: Aligning With the AACSB 2020 Business Accreditation Standards.

Australian Business Deans Council (2026) The societal impact of business school research: a scholarly, organisational/governmental, and societal impact approach. Societal Impact White Paper, January 2026. Melbourne: Australian Business Deans Council (BARDsNet). Available at: https://abdc.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/ABDCSIF-Whitepaper-January-2026.pdf 

Dyllick, T. (2015). Responsible management education for a sustainable world: The challenges for business schools. Journal of Management Development, 34(1), 16-33. Haenlein, M. and Jack, A. (2025), “Measuring the long-term impact of business school research on academia, teaching, society and decision makers”, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Vol. 42, pp. 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2024.10.009. 

Haley, U.C.V. and Jack, A. (2023), Measuring Societal Impact in Business and Management Research: From Challenges to Change, SAGE Business White Paper, London, https://doi.org/10.4135/wp230103. 

Hogan, O., Charles, M.B. and Kortt, M.A. (2021), “A View From The Top: Deans on Australian Business Schools”, Economic Papers, Vol. 40 No. 1, pp. 1–13, https://doi.org/10.1111/1759-3441.12290. 

Kabadayi S, Jason-DiBartolo G. An exploratory study of how business schools approach AACSB’s societal impact standards. Journal of Education for Business. 2022;97(8):521–30.

Kohli, A.K. and Haenlein, M. (2021), “Factors affecting the study of important marketing issues: Implications and recommendations”, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Vol. 38 No. 1, pp. 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2020.02.009.

Parkinson, J. and Naidu, J. (2024), “Driving and evaluating social impact in health marketing”, Health Marketing Quarterly, Vol. 41 No. 2, pp. 113–129, https://doi.org/10.1080/07359683.2024.2363568.

Phillips C., Sanders, K., Taylor, T. and Falshaw, C. (2026) Commentary: The Australian Business Deans Council’s Perspective on the Future of Societal Impact, Journal of Social Impact in Business Research, Vol 2(5) Forthcoming

Russell-Bennett, R. and Reid, M. (2026), “Editorial: social impact in business research”, Journal of Social Impact in Business Research, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1108/JSIBR-12-2025-0131.

Tourish, D. (2020), “The triumph of nonsense in management studies”, Academy of Management Learning & Education, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 99–109, https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2019.0255.

List of topic areas

We welcome conceptual, empirical, and pedagogical submissions that address the implementation of a social impact mindset on the academic frontline. We particularly encourage submissions that move beyond advocacy to offer clear mechanisms, practical frameworks, evaluative approaches or replicable models for enacting social impact in research, teaching and engagement. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Frontline research methodologies: Creative approaches to co-designing research projects with vulnerable communities, non-profits, or grassroots social enterprises.
• Navigating institutional tensions: Strategies used by individual academics to align real-world social impact translation with traditional university publishing expectations and career progression metrics.
• Resourcing and sustaining social impact scholarship: Innovative models for funding, resourcing, and sustaining impactful social marketing research.
• Pedagogies of social impact: Teaching models, assessment designs, work-integrated learning, live cases, client projects or experiential learning approaches that help students develop social impact capabilities.
• Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration: Approaches for working across business disciplines and with fields such as health, education, environment, public policy, or social work to address complex social problems.
• Cross-sector translation from the bottom Up: Actionable case studies of how frontline scholars successfully translate academic theory into immediate policy briefs, community toolkits, or local behavioural interventions.
• ECR and HDR empowerment: Creative mentorship frameworks and collaborative structures that support early-career researchers and PhD students in pursuing impactful, SDG-aligned research pathways.
• Building communities of practice for social impact: How academics create peer networks, interdisciplinary networks, and communities of practice that sustain impact-oriented work beyond isolated individual effort.
• Organisational partnerships and social innovation: Practical models through which academics work with firms and organisations to co-create social innovation initiatives that generate measurable social value while remaining academically informative.
• Digital, data and AI-enabled social impact: Responsible uses of AI, analytics, digital platforms or evidence synthesis tools to support social impact research, engagement, implementation or evaluation.

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jsibr 

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jsibr 

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to ““Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 01/08/2026

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 28/09/2026

Email for submissions: udo.gottlieb@qut.edu.au