This article is part of a larger project by The Michigan Daily to examine University of Michigan research trends by analyzing academic paper citations. The Michigan Daily spoke with Richard Bagozzi, Dwight F. Benton Professor Emeritus of marketing and one of the top ten most cited researchers connected to the University, to discuss his career and research. Read the other stories here.
With an undergraduate education in electromagnetic field theory and a master’s degree in electrical engineering in applied mathematics, it may come as a surprise that Richard Bagozzi, Ross School of Business professor emeritus, also fell in love with the social sciences. A jack of all trades, Bagozzi’s career transitioned from a background in engineering to becoming a professor of marketing and behavioral sciences in management, drawing from fields such as psychology, business and sociology.
When Bagozzi was 25, he coached 11- and 12-year-old boys at Waterford Township’s elementary school. As a former athlete himself, he disagreed with the typical coaching style of the time, believing it to be brutal and harsh. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Bagozzi said after choosing to play alongside the boys during scrimmages to become more involved with his team, he was inspired to transition out of engineering to become a professor.
“I thought, ‘You know, I enjoy being an engineer, but I really want to help people, so what can I do?’” Bagozzi said. “I thought being a teacher, being a professor, is a helping profession. At the beginning, I thought of it as helping students only. But then, once I became a professor, I realized in addition that we’re helping each other — my colleagues and my staff.”
Bagozzi said while he was a graduate student at Northwestern University, he was inspired to create his own interdisciplinary Ph.D. track after he saw an announcement on a bulletin board at The Graduate School.
“We had the opportunity to kind of design and craft our own program,” Bagozzi said. “I had a dissertation advisor, Sydney Levy … and he also kind of followed a similar philosophy himself. He encouraged me when I brought this possibility up to him.”
While Bagozzi technically graduated from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, his studies included areas within psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and statistics. Bagozzi said compared to most doctoral students who often specialize their studies, his education remained multidisciplinary.
“I had this very eclectic education,” Bagozzi said. “When I graduated, I didn’t have a home in one field, which was a disadvantage because most doctoral students have a core of support colleagues. I had some from the management school because I was in that, but I was sort of an outsider, spanning all these different fields.”
After stints on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, Bagozzi came to the University of Michigan in 1986. As a researcher, his interests and articles remain as broad as his education. Bagozzi said he selects topics based on personal interest and immerses himself in that field.
“I was and still do research in multiple areas, multiple fields,” Bagozzi said. “My research has been more driven by things I’m interested in and not defined by one of the fields that I happen to be in. Most people might … follow the subject matter in their field, and they do what other people are doing. I haven’t done that. So I’ve been much more eclectic, cross-disciplinary as a matter of design and interests.”
The professor’s work, such as his research on emotions, decision-making and neuroscience, still draws on his STEM background. According to Bagozzi, he begins with a theory and attempts to analyze findings with advanced statistics or adapt the theory to different fields.
“The professional schools, like business and public health and public policy nursing, they draw upon research from basic disciplines, often psychology and economics,” Bagozzi said. “Once you start drawing upon research from the basic disciplines, you tend to see that they don’t always fit, and they have to be adapted. When you’re adapting them and learning about them, you see opportunities..”
While many researchers in the hard sciences work with large teams, Bagozzi noted he often works in small groups and self-funds his projects.
“At least half my work is with co-authors, former students and other colleagues,” Bagozzi said. “But I also do work by myself, and I always try to get a balance between both those things.”
With nearly 230,000 citations on Google Scholar as of publication, Bagozzi’s work is widespread and well-known. Despite this, he said he feels measuring his success by citations ignores the impact other students and researchers had on his career.
“I really avoid even trying to look at them or see what they are,” Bagozzi said. “My students and faculty always on and off over time tell me, but I let it go in one ear and out the other because I really think it puts too much emphasis on the individual in an overly-individualistic way.”
Over the course of his career, Bagozzi has sat on many committees that evaluate faculty for tenure, which often require citation counts and numerical comparisons to similar faculty members. Bagozzi criticized the practice of using citations as a benchmark and said it could lead researchers to select only profitable or desirable topics of research.
“They’ve institutionalized (citations as a point of reference), and I think it’s not always a good thing because things that are fashionable or popular put emphasis on the market in a bad way,” Bagozzi said. “I think emphasis should be placed on the content of our research, not on the prestige of the journals that are published.”
As a family-oriented person, Bagozzi made an effort to dedicate his work not to success or income but to his life, his research and his passion for helping others. He said he specifically chose not to go into consulting to ensure he would dedicate himself to the things that mattered most.
“I made a promise, or pledge, to myself and my wife that once I got on a job, I would do no consulting,” Bagozzi said. “Not that because that’s a bad thing by any means. We can learn a lot by consulting, it can even help our teaching and of course, it gives a lot of extra income. But I felt that there were three things I wanted to focus on, and that was family, teaching and research.”
While Bagozzi acknowledged that his research on emotions significantly impacted the fields of psychology and other areas, he said focusing on finding happiness continued to drive both his work and his personal life.
“We are programmed psychologically and socially to want the following five things: prestige, status, reputation, wealth, power,” Bagozzi said. “I really think human happiness and well-being should be the goal of our lives and these other things should contribute to it positively, not interfere with it. So that I think contributed to my research and path in my career, very much.”
Daily News Editor Marissa Corsi can be reached at macorsi@umich.edu.
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