Three questions about evidence based management

The last few days, I have had pleasant email exchanges with Dennis Tourish (University of Kent) and Mark Learmonth (University of Nottingham). Dennis will join in the EBM debate later and Mark still defends his arguments against the emerging evidence based management movement. He also sent me a few articles. Since he published his short paper in ORGANIZATION, he has become a little milder. I've invited him to respond on the blog and share his current views with the rest of the readers.

After reading several publications, there are actually three questions which fascinate me about the evidence based management movement. Please share your thoughts in the comments or write your own posting.

1. What is the core idea and purpose of EBM? What would be the benefit for organizations and society as a whole if management would be based more on evidence?
2. What progress has the EBM movement currently been making? Is there evidence of evidence based management getting a foothold in organizations?
3. What is future for EBM in (research and practice)?

Readers who have written articles on evidence based management (published in academic journals or still in the process or otherwise), please share them with me. I'd like to make a repository with interesting articles on evidence based management.

Food for thought: Mark Learmonth's view on evidence based management

In my exploratory search for the state of the art of the evidence based management movement, I stumbled on this short paper by dr. Mark Learmonth, Associate Professor in Organization Theory at the University of Nottingham. This is a must read for all the evidence based management enthusiasts. Maybe not always what you want to hear or read, but definitely food for thought on the freedom of conducting research and the politics which are involved in securing research grants and the pursuit of a academic career. Although, criticizing the EBM proponents by challenging their intellectual credibility does not make his case stronger. In the abstract of his contribution which is called Evidence-Based Management: A Backlash Against Pluralism in Organizational Studies?, he states:

The rise of ‘evidence-based management’ (EBM) is read as the latest form of resistance to pluralism—one that might prove particularly hard to refuse given the popularity of many other forms of evidence-based practices. So I explore the prospects for EBM within organization studies and some of its implications for those who value the continuation of pluralistic forms of analysis in organizational research. 

In 1993 Jeffrey Pfeffer bemoaned the proliferation of theoretical perspectives in the field of organizational studies. He advocates the paradigmatic unity which was enforced by a group of scholars who imposed their views in the field of economics. This was a good thing, because it enabled coherent research and more advancements in the field of economics. Organization studies could benefit in the same way. His appeal fell on deaf ears and it seemed that the pluralists of methodology in social sciene had won the battle. Learmonth is still not convinced. He worries that the evidence based management movement is a political project and that the emergence of the evidence based practice will lead to methodological fundamentalism. In social science, he says, evidence is never just there for the researcher to find it, it is always necessary to construct the evidence in some way, a process that is inherently ideological and always contestable.

Update: I reread the short paper and distilled the main arguments made by Mark.

• Evidence based management limits (what counts as) legitimate research methodologies (leads to fundamentalism).
  
• What works tends to assume elite definitions of effectiveness.
• Evidence based management has a top management bias.
• Evidence is not objective or neutral.This leads to philosophical discussions on science.
• Evidence based management is a political project.
• Evidence based management threatens funding for independent research.

I wonder if he still feels so strongly about the points he's made. Maybe he'll respond.