Published on: April 20, 2026 at 9:43 am
Scholars need to make their work intelligible and appealing to people outside their academic circles for politicians, businesspeople, and other decision-makers—as well as the public—to understand and deal with the social and economic issues facing the country. Academy of Management Scholar Howard Aldrich of the University of North Carolina argues that it will require researchers to implement different ways of communicating facts and evidence so that non-academics can glean actionable business insights from their findings.
“In the U.S., most people don’t get a very strong economic education,” Aldrich says. “And then on top of that, there are lots of sources of disinformation, which makes it much easier for people not to put their heads around discomforting facts or try to figure out which stuff is accurate.”
According to Aldrich, there’s nothing new about this, even if new technologies such as generative AI make disinformation and deepfakes harder to identify.
“People do tend to gravitate toward the sources of information that already support what they’re doing and reinforce their opinions,” Aldrich says. “There are few people willing to expose themselves to information that doesn’t go along with their preconceived notions and beliefs.
“They turn to the information that they feel comfortable with, and that’s always been the case,” he says. “It’s a comfortable thing to have people telling you what you believe anyway, and they’re just adding more fuel to the fire.”
Aldrich has some unconventional thoughts on how to expose people outside of academia to unfamiliar facts and challenging ideas. Instead of speaking in academic jargon, professors and researchers need to find a way to communicate that makes use of what people already know. For example, they can highlight what is most compelling about the research findings and weave a yarn that appeals to people’s emotions or captivates them in some way.
“I would be very happy if, when people got tenure, the next thing they had to do was figure out a way to take what they’ve done in the pages of academic journals and turn it into something they could write for the popular press,” Aldrich says. “We could ask them to take their work and build a bot that uses evidence-based findings from scientific business management research and turns them into the kind of prose that characterizes the books on airport bookstands.
“Tell ChatGPT to write a novel based on your business research,” he says. “Write books that are not just addressed to the people reading the journal articles—widely appealing books without the hype, without the puffery, without the outrageous claims, but rather are full of stories or full of anecdotes, and things that are practical, useful, applicable behaviors.
“Scholars have to figure out how to talk to people who didn’t go to business school.”
