Abstract
The role of research as a basic function of Universities and as leaven of the educational process is enhanced in the European context by a number of intergovernmental agreements and declarations, from Bologna Magna Charta Universitatum of 1988 to more recent events including Bologna Process and EU objectives for 2010. The schemes of quality assurance are becoming a powerful engine promoting the improvement of research outputs. But this result is guaranteed by the coherence of the measurement criteria with the intrinsic characteristics of each fields of studies. This paper offers a critical view of the case of research and studies on management, starting from the point that managerial behaviour has to cope with ambiguity, uncertainty, fuzziness and opens a very broad interpretative space for the actors. Instead, management as a social science is deeply influenced by a tendency towards obedience to an overarching science and technology orientation which influences the governance of all research activities, privileging ‘positivist’ social science and thereby overlooking the potential utility of interpretative and reflective social science and their associated qualitative methods. Evaluation practices of research in this area should consider the vision of art, craft and science as the three very relevant components of management, going on with the talk of Arthur Koestler, Donald Schon and Henry Mintzberg, and being linked also to the thought of a former Italian philosopher, Carlo Cattaneo. In this way, evaluation can assume the right focus on the essential transformative nature of quality, rather than fitness-for-purpose gloss which impoverishes the full potential of academic research in the field of social sciences. The paper concludes outlining some organisational aspects of management research activities and a frame of reference for developing researchers’ skills and competencies.