The Committee has based its overall evaluation on the self-evaluation reports it has received and on discussions it has had with research directors and deans and directors of relevant faculties and institutes. The overall impression of the programmes reviewed by the Committee is very good.
Some programmes certainly deserve to be labelled as outstanding. Indeed, a few programmes are certainly among the best in Europe and compare favourably with their academic counterparts in the US. Although it has not been possible to make a detailed comparison with previous evaluation reports, it is the impression of the Committee that academic research in business administration and management in the Netherlands has made good progress. More research is being published in good quality journals, more attention is being paid to PhD programmes and more international contacts have been developed. This progress is very visible in the best performing programmes. The programmes that were good in the past have become even better today.
This assessment of the Committee may at first sight appear contradictory to the fact that the frequency distribution (see table) of the scores by university has now fewer entries in the low scores than in the previous assessment and more in the top scores. The Committee would like to make two comments regarding this shift in the frequency distribution. Firstly, there was no overlap between the current Committee and the previous one which means that the norms and standards may have changed slightly. Secondly, and more importantly, the number, the type and the scale of the programmes have changed such that direct comparisons are very difficult. The main conclusion remains that the Committee in general is very satisfied with the quality of the research if one takes into consideration the size of the research community in the Netherlands and the institutional organization of business economics and management.
The research agenda for the programmes in business administration and management does not appear to be set at the country level. Most of the research topics are derived from themes that have been developed in the US or at the European level. This does not come as a surprise. The biggest countries set the research agenda and the topics that researchers in such countries find relevant for their companies and their economies. Researchers in smaller countries who want to make an international impact have no option but to follow the research agenda set by the leading journals and academic associations abroad. The Committee believes that Dutch academics have been very successful in associating themselves with the international (US and European) research agenda and that they have been able to make good, and occasionally excellent, contributions to the development of the research themes. A negative aspect of this is that the research agenda in the Netherlands is rather narrow and not always related to the problems faced by the local business community. Consequently, the direct relevance of the academic research for the business community has not improved much. This is of course also influenced by the fact that the number of researchers in the Netherlands is naturally smaller than in the larger countries, which inevitably reduces the scope of the research. Comparisons are very often made with US acade Comparisons are very often made with US academic research. The Committee has also discussed such comparisons. It was concluded that some caution is necessary. In general the Dutch faculties, institutes and research programmes in business administration and marketing are much smaller in size, as measured by number of teaching staff and budgets, than their American counterparts which puts a clear limit on the size of the research teams and the scope of the research agenda.
In the Netherlands this leads to a trade-off between specialization in order to achieve economies of scale and competence on the one hand and the scope of the research agenda on the other. The tendency is that more and more faculties choose specialization, which implies that not all research fields will be adequately covered; in turn, this may have a negative impact on educational programmes that run the risk of becoming less research based. The Committee has also noted that the research evaluation includes all universities and that the findings consequently give an accurate view of overall research performance in the Netherlands. Comparisons with the US are typically only made with the top schools. We think that, as a consequence of this, the average performance of the Netherlands is certainly better than the average performance of American schools. The Committee was particularly impressed by the fact that research in the Netherlands in this field has become very well linked to the international research community. Although no overall statistics can be given, it is notable that some groups have made major progress in their international positioning and networking. However, groups differ in the degree to which the international efforts have been fully integrated with all members of the group. In some groups visiting professors and scholars seem to be very well integrated in the research and the functioning of the group. Evidence of this can be found in joint publications and involvement with doctoral dissertations. It also appears that the visiting academics help in creating a bridge between the Dutch research group and its foreign counterparts. In such cases, a truly international exchange is developing. However, the Committee has the impression that, in a few cases, the visiting academics are not well integrated into the research group. In such groups, we find few indications of joint publications and dissertations. Sometimes the Committee even wondered how much time a foreign visitor was actually spending with the research group, because it was clear that some of these visitors had extremely busy schedules at their home universities and at other universities. Overall, the Committee remained very impressed with the international networks that have been developed but recommends that more attention should be given to truly integrating visiting academics into the functioning of the research groups.
