Viewpoint: wisdom-enabled business research: a scholar-activist framework for social impact Open Access

Business schools and business scholars operate in turbulent times. Many are in universities that are experiencing significant financial and political pressures. Beyond financial and political concerns, business schools and scholars face growing calls for change. AACSB International’s 2020 Guiding Principles and Standards for AACSB International (2025, p. 26) includes Guiding Principle #2 on Societal Impact – “Societal impact as an expectation of all accredited schools reflects AACSB’s vision that business education is a force for good in society and makes a positive contribution to society as identified in the school’s mission and strategic plan.” The Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM, 2025) organization suggests, “Imagine a world where business or management research is used widely in practice by business and other non-business organizations to improve the lives of people in our societies.”

Wisdom is not mentioned in these aspirational calls for social impact in business research. However, I argue that achieving social impact in business research requires conducting wisdom-enabled business research. Nicholas Maxwell (Maxwell, 2007a), a philosopher of science, developed a philosophy of wisdom for universities. Maxwell defined wisdom as “[…] the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others […]” (Maxwell, 2007b, p. 109). He explained, “We need to bring about a major intellectual and institutional revolution in the aims and methods of inquiry, from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry. Almost every branch and aspect of academic inquiry needs to change. A basic intellectual task of academic inquiry would be to articulate our problems of living (personal, social, and global) and propose and critically assess possible solutions, possible actions.” (Maxwell, 2007b, pp. 112–113). Maxwell’s logic challenges the nature and role of scholarly research in every university. According to Fazey et al. (2020, p. 13), “A shift towards producing wisdom would require deep and fundamental changes in how knowledge systems are structured and supported and in how they operate within society.” Universities contain groups of scholars working in many different disciplines to discover more disciplinary knowledge, but knowledge of chronic problems is not enough. If business schools and scholars truly seek to be “a force for good in society,” then we should adopt wisdom-inquiry as our North Star or Southern Cross (depending on your hemisphere) to engage in wisdom-enabled business research for solving the “problems of living.”

The world faces a metacrisis in the problems of living – a convergence of interrelated crises spanning social, economic, technological and ecological service systems that can be linked to the disruption in global health service systems caused by COVID-19 (Wong et al., 2024). Service systems are the foundational institutions that sustain human well-being (Vargo and Lusch, 2016). However, service systems worldwide struggle with increasing complexity, incoherence, political polarization and unsustainable practices. This metacrisis is a web of challenges that requires developing the collaborative wisdom necessary to regenerate these service systems. The global climate crisis is a cause for great concern because of the resulting fires, floods, famines and refugee migrations. As Krznaric (2020, pp. 154–155) notes:

Strategically, these disruptive challenges to the functioning of human organizations are opportunities for business schools and their scholars. Consider this quote about solving such problems from Rutger Bregman (2025, p. 141):

The scholar-activist framework for social impact presented here diagnoses these challenges as outstanding opportunities for a new era of innovative business research built on the unifying wisdom of understanding service systems and the human experiences that occur within them. I define a scholar-activist as someone who actively leverages scholarship about people and service systems to advocate for measurable improvements in human experience. In general, scholar-activism for business scholars applies wisdom-enabled business research to study and advocate for social impact through measurable improvements in human experience.

Wisdom-enabled business research should adopt the scholar-activist framework for social impact. The scholar-activist framework comprises three phases. The first phase is designing collaborative wisdom into business research problems. The second phase is redesigning service institutions to better serve humanity. The third phase is co-designing social impact solutions for the human experience. Such wisdom-enabled business research can design and deliver desirable social impacts to all stakeholders.

These strategic opportunities exist because business schools and scholars are well-positioned to become scholar-activists in developing and promoting wisdom-enabled business research. Scholars working in business schools have more in common with one another than those working in other university colleges, such as liberal arts or sciences. All business disciplines are concerned with the human interactions that occur within organizations. Business research has primarily focused on improving business systems and practices. However, we can wisely generalize business research to the study of human organizations, their systems and practices. We can also improve our ability to collaborate on research problems that span the boundaries of business disciplines. As a key example, the service research field emerged from business schools and was championed by marketing and management scholars (Fisk et al., 1993). Many scholars from other disciplines participate in service research today.

Business schools and scholars should adopt a wisdom-inquiry approach and focus on developing solutions to the full spectrum of human-caused problems. Many business scholars are investigating topics beyond the needs of business corporations that align with the wisdom-inquiry logic I propose. However, because I know the service research field best, I focus on how generalizing business research to all human service systems can improve the service systems of planet Earth.

The wisdom of service research can help business research scholars see what most of humanity cannot see. Humanity is born into service systems, lives in service systems and dies in service systems. If business research scholars can see service system problems before the public, then I argue that we have a duty to act on them. If we can see these service system problems and we know how to solve them, then we have a duty to help.

This article describes my standpoint as a business scholar with a long career in scholar-activism. In doing so, I follow the use of standpoint theory by Indigenous scholars (Nakata, 2007; Raciti et al., 2024b). My life and career have been marked by my pursuit of solutions to the chronic unfairness that afflicts many human lives. My personal experiences with unfairness began as a left-handed child in a right-handed world. My first teacher would take the pencil from my left hand and put it in my right hand. I would grab it with my left hand. I am quite obsessed with using my left hand, even though physical products are usually designed for right-handed people. I am also left-eared because of a childhood car crash and concussion that broke the nerves connecting my right ear. My daily experience of hearing impairment makes me very sensitive to noisy service environments, where amplified music causes me to struggle to hear and understand conversations. Learning to advocate for my needs and rights as a child was good practice for learning to advocate for others.

My career obsession with fairness began in 1968 during a wave of civil rights protests, women’s rights protests and anti-war protests in the USA. I was 14 years old, and the appalling TV images from the Vietnam War still haunt me. I decided to become a civil rights lawyer and went to college as a pre-law student. Fortunately, in college, I realized that there are only two ways to influence human behavior: force or persuasion. I was not interested in creating laws that would force people to act fairly, so I chose persuasion, changed my college major to marketing and completed three marketing degrees in rapid succession.

This article on scholar-activism was written after 42 years of teaching, research, service and leadership as a marketing professor in four American business schools. My dissertation (Fisk, 1980) experimentally investigated unfairness in service exchanges, and my obsession with unfair services led me to become one of the pioneering founders of the emerging service research field (Bowen et al., 2023). One of my first journal articles concerned the health-care needs of the hearing-impaired (Grove and Fisk, 1983). The first major service research thread of my career applied the design language of theater to analyze services as comprising actors, audience, setting and performance (Grove and Fisk, 1992) and became known as service theater. In this century, service design (Patrício et al., 2018b) and Transformative Service Research (TSR) (Anderson et al., 2013) were the next major research threads. Service design provides the activist framing of this article because my colleagues and I (Patrício et al., 2018a) adopted the paradigm of management as a design science (like engineering and medicine), which adopts prescriptive approaches to solving problems (Van Aken, 2004). The design science research approach helped us design the electronic health record system for the country of Portugal (Beirão et al., 2017; Patrício et al., 2018a). For a recent ServCollab research project, we collaborated with a UK nonprofit to co-create a toolkit that helped them measure and communicate the social impact of their initiatives for refugee integration (Alkire et al., 2025).

The service research field has an activist history. We began by challenging conventional business thinking regarding the importance of service exchange versus goods exchange and struggled to be taken seriously in business schools. When I co-wrote the early history of the service research field, we characterized the early struggles for identity as “Crawling Out” and “Scurrying About” (Fisk et al., 1993). In this century, service research has evolved to a generalized logic that every organization is a service system and that human interactions occur within these service systems (Moulton-Tetlock et al., 2024). Fortunately, service research has not become a formal academic discipline.

My activist career includes significant service leadership. I served as a department chair for 23 years at two business schools. In addition, I founded the American Marketing Association Services Marketing Interest Group (SERVSIG) in 1993. SERVSIG has worked hard to protect and grow the service research community.

In recent years, I founded ServCollab, a human services nonprofit focused on “Serving Humanity Through Collaboration.” In 2022, I retired to lead ServCollab. ServCollab is based on TSR and the ServCollab mission is “to serve humanity through research collaborations that catalyze reducing suffering, improving well-being, and enabling well-becoming.” (ServCollab, 2025). TSR and ServCollab have actively encouraged the expansion of service research topics beyond the common business research focus on the activities and needs of corporations.

The scholar-activist framework for social impact is based on wisdom-enabled business research. The framework comprises three phases (Figure 1). The first phase of the framework is designing collaborative wisdom into business research problems. The second phase is redesigning service institutions to better serve humanity. The third phase is co-designing social impact solutions for the human experience. Each of these phases is explained in the following sections.

A recent ServCollab article focused on “Cultivating Wiser Service Systems Through Communication” (Moulton-Tetlock et al., 2024). This article began by synthesizing four threads of 21st-century service research. The first thread, Service-Dominant (S-D) logic, views all human interactions as service interactions and all labor as a service (Vargo and Lusch, 2004). Service science, the second thread, views all human organizations as service systems (Spohrer et al., 2007). Service systems are defined in service science as “value co-creation configurations of people, technology, value propositions connecting internal and external service systems, and shared information (e.g., language, laws, measures, and methods)” (Spohrer et al., 2007). The third thread, service design, is built on the service system complexity proposed by S-D logic and service science to develop service designs for omnichannel environments (Patrício et al., 2008) and multilevel service designs (Patrício et al., 2011). TSR is the fourth service research thread (Anderson et al., 2013; Rosenbaum et al., 2011) and is built on the first three threads to embrace scholar-activism in search of solutions to human service system problems. Based on the synthesis of these four service research threads, three premises were proposed (Moulton-Tetlock et al., 2024, p. 550): “1. humanity has always lived in service systems. 2. Many service systems are not serving humanity well. 3. We should design service systems that serve humanity wisely.”

Moulton-Tetlock et al. (2024, p. 562) state that “[…] adopting wise communication throughout global service systems could enable collaborative wisdom in the global service ecosystem and encourage wiser world governance.” Developing collaborative wisdom within business disciplines and subdisciplines is desirable and emerging. For example, humanistic management (Pirson, 2017) has emerged as an alternative to traditional management research, and wisdom is being explored in humanistic organizing (Town et al., 2024). Another example is Raworth’s (2018) rethinking of economics in service to people and the planet.

Members of every service system need to nurture the wisdom of working together (Atkins et al., 2019) to achieve collaborative wisdom. Achieving wisdom is more difficult than achieving knowledge. We cannot just be wiser in small group collaborations; we need to become wiser in large group collaborations. Humanity needs to become experts in practicing collaborative wisdom across systems and system levels, as well as at the global service ecosystem level of world governance.

Business schools and scholars are well-positioned to become leaders in studying and nurturing the essential practices of collaborative wisdom in any service system. This collaborative wisdom will require rising above the confines of disciplinary knowledge silos to seek the wisdom of serving life on planet Earth (Fisk et al., 2020).

Institutions have been a service research topic for many years. In S-D Logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2016, p. 6), institutions are “humanly devised rules, norms, and beliefs that enable and constrain action and make social life predictable and meaningful.” The essential truth about institutions is that they live in our minds because we believe they exist. We act personally and socially on these beliefs to create their physical manifestations. Based on the Vargo and Lusch (2016) definition, institutions include metaphors, languages, stories, ideas, cultures, laws, money, traditions, organizations and service systems. This also means that institutions are critical for understanding the patterns of human history. The languages we use to talk with each other and record human history are institutions of communication and memory. Universities are among the oldest organizations, both as educational and research institutions. Business schools and scholars are particularly interested in the economic institutions of money and corporations. Business education service systems are foundational for enabling people to imagine and create innovative corporations in our modern economies.

Unfortunately, many powerful service systems worldwide are becoming incoherent systems. Incoherent service fragments is a term introduced by Patrício et al. (2008) to describe service systems with poorly connected parts that fail to meet the needs of the people they are supposed to serve. Such incoherent systems can be found among nations, education systems, health-care systems, transportation systems and many large global corporations. In addition, many service systems are riven with corruption and exploitation by powerful humans. These systems are degenerating from knowledgeable systems to ignorant, barely functional systems. Business schools and scholars should devote considerable energy to learning how to help these important service systems regain the wisdom to successfully serve the people they were created to serve. This will require significant work to understand the service system problems and collaboratively redesign these institutions to serve humanity.

To inspire design thinking regarding the role of business institutions, I pose two provocative questions. First, what if business schools redesigned themselves to become organization schools by focusing on all human service systems? Such a broadening to all service systems would enable expanding the teaching and research of business scholars. Humanity lives in service systems. Business scholars could become world experts in solving the problems of human service systems. This broadening could enable the “force for good in society” called for by the AACSB. Second, what if money was managed within human systems as a common pool resource, like the water management systems studied by Elinor Ostrom (2009)? Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning research documented that organizations can manage water resources equitably. Like water, everyone in the modern economy needs money, but not everyone has sufficient money to meet their daily needs. Could the world’s service systems be designed to ensure that everyone has sufficient money to meet their basic human needs?

ServCollab introduced itself with the phrase “Elevating the Human Experience” (Fisk et al., 2020, p. 616). Human Experience was defined as “…the totality of each person’s experience with service systems as they seek to meet their basic human needs across their life journey.” ServCollab’s mission identified three major social impact categories of human experience: “reducing suffering, improving well-being, and enabling well-becoming.” Many specific social impact goals can be identified, but in ServCollab, we think these are the essential social impact categories necessary for elevating human experience.

Human experience can occur at three nested system levels, which means suffering, well-being or well-becoming can occur in any system level. Personal experiences occur in every person’s life. Social experiences occur between and among humans. External experiences occur between humans and the external world, including plants, animals and the Earth. The nested aspect is that personal experiences occur within social and external experiences of the individual. Because humans are a social species, the social experience level of human service systems is the most essential aspect for addressing the social impacts of reducing suffering, improving well-being and enabling well-becoming. ServCollab’s recent research project with a UK nonprofit (Alkire et al., 2025) helped them identify social impact measures at the social experience level of refugees.

Business schools and scholars have typically focused on specific social human experiences in the economy, such as customer and employee experiences. However, these economic experiences as customers and employees are incomplete understandings of the full spectrum of human experiences (Fisk et al., 2020; Gustafsson et al., 2024). A recent book (Frank et al., 2024) by two physicists and a philosopher offers an in-depth argument for the importance of human experience in science. The authors argue that scientific blind spots prevent a full understanding of human experience. They begin by arguing that physicists do not understand the human experience of time. They particularly criticize economics for overly mathematizing human experience. I urge every business scholar to read this book and ponder how to improve the social impact of their research by designing it based on a deeper understanding of human experience.

In my view, business schools and scholars can never become “a force for good in society” unless they embrace and seek to serve the full complexity of human experience. As noted earlier (Moulton-Tetlock et al., 2024), humanity experiences life within service systems, but these systems often fail to serve us well. I am aware of only one business model that comes close to capturing the full complexity of the human experience. B Corporations are designed to be a force for good (B Corporation, 2025a) with a theory of change based on serving all stakeholders (B Corporation, 2025b). Currently, there are over 6,000 Certified B Corporations in more than 80 countries and over 150 industries. Business research is already showing that B Corps are delivering positive social impacts (Kirst et al., 2021). Also, a large and global activist research community, B Academics (2025), has formed around B Corps.

There are many possible directions for wisdom-enabled business research. In 2023, with the editors of the Journal of Services Marketing (Rebekah Russell-Bennett and Mark Rosenbaum), ServCollab developed a set of themes for future service research. We pondered the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and decided to rethink these goals to make them more effective for inspiring future service research. Then we compressed the 17 goals into seven service research goals (Russell-Bennett et al., 2024b). We then recruited seven teams of scholars (from eight nations representing diversity in gender, culture, theoretical perspective and service context expertise) to explore these topics and propose possible research directions. These seven service research themes were developed for service researchers, but they concern significant areas of human need. Hence, these service research themes are relevant topics for business researchers eager to participate in significant social impact research. More details are contained in Table 1, which identifies each of the seven service research themes and lists the UN SDGs that the theme combined. The second column of Table 1 lists two sample research questions from each of the articles. Each of the seven articles contains many more research questions.

There are many practical implications of the three phases in the scholar-activist framework for social impact. Table 2 identifies three practical steps for each phase and elaborates on each step with specific instructions for implementation. (A worksheet version of Table 2 is available as a Web Appendix – Supplementary Material). For Phase 1: Designing Collaborative Wisdom into Business Research Problems, the guidelines are: define problems collaboratively, integrate wisdom principles and use transdisciplinary methods. For Phase 2: Redesigning Service Institutions to Better Serve Humanity, the guidelines are: evaluate institutional purposes, co-create redesigns with stakeholders and embed service standards for serving humanity. For Phase 3: Co-designing Social Impact Solutions for the Human Experience, the guidelines are: prioritize human experience, prototype and iterate solutions and amplify and disseminate knowledge and wisdom.

In addition to these practical guidelines, I strongly recommend a recent book by Don Norman (2023), titled Design for a Better World. His book provides excellent design guidance that will help business scholars avoid many of the human experience blind spots identified by Frank et al. (2024). Similar to ServCollab, Norman (2023, p. 54) argues that “Our designs must serve humanity…”

The most practical advice of all is “Get Started.” Explore scholar-activist business research opportunities among your colleagues inside your business schools and explore the research opportunities that might be possible by collaborating with scholars in other human-facing disciplines. Choose topics that serve humanity, not just shareholders. Identify potential collaborators in your school, university, country or globally. Because the context of personal human experience is always local, research teams that span more diverse disciplines and nations are more representative of the full spectrum of human experience (Fisk et al., 2020). Form a research team and pursue wisdom-enabled business research that serves humanity.

This article introduced a scholar-activist framework for wisdom-enabled business research based on three phases:

1. designing collaborative wisdom into business research problems;

2. redesigning service institutions to better serve humanity; and

3. co-designing social impact solutions for the human experience, which reduce suffering, improve well-being and enable well-becoming.

Business schools and scholars should embrace the wisdom of serving the needs of customers, employees, human society and planet Earth. For decades, business schools and scholars have helped businesses succeed. During the same decades, other human service systems worldwide have become more fragile. Business scholars should become scholar-activists by developing wisdom-enabled business research that improves the functioning of all human service systems.

Business schools and scholars are well-positioned to become leaders in building collaborative wisdom that serves humanity now and serves future generations. Physicists study matter. By broadening business research to studying all service systems, business researchers can study what matters to humans. With wisdom-enabled business research, we can study service systems and make our social impact an essential part of human progress.

Ask yourself how you can help. Choose what you find interesting and have the skills to pursue. Many unmet human needs exist in various service systems. Identify a human experience problem you are passionate about and then take action to design wisdom-enabled business research that seeks to solve the problem.

The supplementary material for this article can be found online.