UC's College of Business Administration Earns
National Praise for Scholarly Efforts

A new study published in this month's Academy of Management Journal ranks the University of Cincinnati's College of Business Administration (CBA) 40th among more than 700 MBA programs nationally. CBA ranked highest in production/operations management (No. 4 nationally). In a combined category of insurance/international business/real estate, CBA ranked 15th nationally, and marketing ranked 28th.

According to Fritz Russ, CBA's dean, "What students learn in the classroom depends very much on how active and current their faculty are. Business research is, ultimately, the search for best practices in business; and this is a significant priority for business education. These high national rankings point strongly to high quality research and high quality teaching by a group of very skilled and dedicated faculty."

In another testament to the college's scholarly excellence, academic publications from two areas in CBA - marketing and the Real Estate program - have recently been recognized as among the best work in recent years nationally in their respective disciplines.

In marketing, an article co-authored by marketing department head Robert Dwyer, has been voted one of the most influential sales articles of the century in a poll of scholars conducted by the Society for Marketing Advances. The article, "Developing Buyer and Seller Relationships," appeared in the Journal of Marketing in 1987. It was the second-highest ranked article in the poll.

The paper was written with Paul Schurr, a professor at SUNY-Albany, and Sejo Oh, a UC graduate student who is now the associate dean of the business school at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. It proposed examining relationships between buyers and sellers on the basis of concepts borrowed from intimate relations theory and modern contract law, a departure from the then-dominant approach of conquest of the buyer. "There was enough conjecture there, enough loose ideas that a lot of people have been able to grab onto the hand-holds in that paper and use it to position their own research," says Dwyer, holder of the Joseph S. Stern professorship.

UC's Real Estate program has also received recognition for its publication efforts. The program ranked third in the nation for the amount of material accepted for publication in the field's three top academic journals --Real Estate Economics, The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics and The Journal of Real Estate Research.

That ranking came in a study, "Real Estate Research: A Ranking of Individuals and Institutions," by Jonathan Dumbrow of the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Geoffrey K. Turnbull of Louisiana State University. It measured the number of published pages in the top three real estate journals from 1989-98.

"I believe this is a reflection on the quality of faculty we have in the program," said Norman Miller, professor of finance and director of UC's Real Estate program. "We've always gone after the best person in the country we could possibly get for our faculty. It is not a surprise these research rankings would be very high, when we have top full-time faculty like Dave Geltner and Jim Clayton, as well as the faculty who have preceded them."