Management Research

European Perspectives

Sabina Siebert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138721463
• eBook ISBN: 9781351760911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Management Research: European Perspectives brings together experts in the field to take stock of European management research and reflect on its distinctiveness. Building on a successful series of papers published in the European Management Journal, this book contains international contributions providing a range of scholarly perspectives on the reality of European management research.

The state of management scholarship has recently been a topic of great interest, focusing on such matters as the role of universities versus businesses in shaping research agendas, the so-called 'rigour–relevance' debate, the use of measurements in quality assessment of research outputs, the role of journal rankings, and the merits of the journal review system. Missing, however, is any discussion of what, if anything, constitutes a European approach to management research, how does it differ from other styles used in the rest of the world and why is there a need for such distinctiveness?

It has been noted that European management scholars have a lower success rate for publishing theoretical papers than their North American counterparts, which is surprising given that Europe has been the cradle of many generative intellectual traditions. European scholars may be the heirs to those traditions, but they are sometimes criticised for failing to channel this legacy into authoritative theoretical contributions in elite US-based management journals. This book provides insightful contributions to the debate and offers critical reflections on what European-based scholars have to offer the study of management.

1
Reflections on the Distinctiveness of European Management Scholarship

Robert Chia

Introduction

In a much publicized announcement reported in the Guardian on 9 December 2013, the 2013 joint Nobel Prize winner for Physiology and Medicine, Randy Schekman, revealed in his acceptance speech that he would no longer send research papers to the top-tier academic journals, Nature, Cell and Science. He claims that although these ‘luxury’ journals are supposed to be the epitome of quality, they have, in fact, inadvertently distorted research priorities and constitute a ‘tyranny’ in the research publication process that must be broken. Schekman maintains that these journals are more preoccupied with aggressively curating their own brands to increase subscriptions than with stimulating important research. Thus, like ‘fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits’ they artificially restrict the number of papers they accept and then market their journals through the notion of ‘impact factor’; a score now widely accepted within the academic world as an accurate measure of a journal’s quality. For Schekman, however, this way of measuring and justifying what are supposed to be better journals is as damaging as the bonus culture is to banking. One major consequence is that pressure to publish in these journals has encouraged younger researchers especially to conform to these norms of expectations in publication terms rather than to do more important and often peripheral pieces of work that actually lead to genuine scientific progress.

Reacting to these comments, the 18 January 2014 editorial of the medical journal Lancet (Kleinert & Horton, 2014) proceeded to reflexively ask how its own journal publication process within the field of medical science research ought to change in response to this criticism from one of its best. Perhaps, in the same light, Schekman’s very public comments ought to give us in management research some food for thought with regard to our own journal publication ranking process and the direction the ‘publications game’, which seems to preoccupy much of management academia these days, is taking us. This, together with the perennial question surrounding the relevance/irrelevance of management theory to practice that continues to rumble on, should provide sufficient grounds for us to seriously rethink and reconsider the future of management scholarship, particularly within the European management academic context. To be sure these concerns about research contribution and relevance are now beginning to be raised even within the ‘top’ management journals themselves.

In his Editorial in the February 2014 issue of the Academy of Management Journal, the incoming editor Gerard George signaled what appears to be an important ‘shift’ in emphasis for the journal’s publishing priorities. George (2014, pp. 1–6) argues, quite rightly, that the traditional emphasis on ‘technical rigor’ and ‘theoretical contribution’ has distracted attention away from the ‘soul of relevance’ and the ‘applied nature of our field’. A major consequence of this persistent insistence on theoretical rigor is that published studies like ‘black cats in a coal cellar’ become ‘increasingly indistinguishable from previous ones’ especially when the specific contexts within which these studies have been conducted are surreptitiously removed. George’s comments are reminiscent of the late Sumantra Ghoshal’s (2005, p. 77) astute observation (following von Hayek, 1974/1989) that the ‘pretense of knowledge’ which accompanies management theories that adopt a scientifically rigorous approach to analyzing and explaining management phenomena is effectively driving out good management practices. Hayek had previously, in his 1974 Nobel Prize lecture, criticized his own economics discipline for adopting a natural science approach to emulate the kind of theoretical rigor and objectivity displayed and admired in the latter. He maintained that, as a consequence, what looks like impressive social science ‘is often the most unscientific’ because it is based on a ‘false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique’ (von Hayek, 1974/1989, p. 6). Despite this warning on the dangers of adopting a scientistic attitude in management scholarship, management research continues to be defined in terms of the kind of rigor associated with the natural sciences.

Thus, instead of adopting a ‘scholarship of common sense’ (Ghoshal, 2005, p. 81) that views the researcher, more like Darwin or Freud, as an adventurer (‘conquistador’) or detective rather than a mathematician or man of science, traditional management research has tended to insist on scientific rigor as the only acceptable basis for theory generation. Instead, of encouraging the pursuit of fresh and bold ideas and the adoption of less conventional research approaches to seek out anomalies that are intriguing and often counterintuitive, and hence potentially useful, there appears to be an increasing standardizing and homogenizing of research preoccupations and findings (Cassell, this volume), as evidenced in much of what ends up being published. George, therefore, proposed that the core of management scholarship ought to be re-conceptualized in terms of a proper balance between rigor and relevance. It is within the terms of this increasing disaffection with the current journal publications processes and emphases and how they are distorting research priorities and preoccupations that I would like to situate this invited chapter contribution.

For management and organization journals firmly based within the British and European philosophical, cultural and social traditions and context, perhaps it is timely to take stock of their own publishing mission and priorities vis-à-vis theory and practice and to show in more refreshingly novel ways how genuine management scholarship (one that is grounded in a ‘scholarship of common sense’) can actually contribute meaningfully to the real world of practice without necessarily compromising their academic raison d’être. In this short reflective piece, therefore, I shall attempt to develop a counterintuitive and possibly contentious argument that emphasizes three interrelated issues that European-based management journals ought to take into consideration in strategically positioning themselves with regard to this rigor/relevance debate in order to genuinely further management scholarship and at the same time make a useful contribution to business practice.

First, I want to make the controversial point that the conventionally accepted schism between academic rigor and relevance to the world of practice is an unhelpful and indeed false distinction, one that obscures the often-times more nuanced ways in which genuine academic rigor and scholarship can contribute to the world of practice. I shall argue instead that the very best of rigor in scholarship mirrors and is, in principle, indistinguishable from that of the very best kind of thinking evident in business and management practices. In this very important sense, therefore, to be truly rigorous, in terms of a ‘scholarship of common sense’ is to be genuinely useful and practically relevant. Secondly, I want to suggest that British and European scholarship with its rich intellectual base and sense of history, culture and tradition is best placed to show the way to this exemplary form of academic openness and scholastic imagination that management research ought to emulate if it is to achieve the kind of relevance it seeks. Being very imaginatively theoretical can be actually very practical, so much so that Lewin’s (1951, p. 169) dictum, ‘There is nothing so practical as a good theory’, remains as true as ever. Finally, I shall argue that European-based management and organization journals have immense potential in reshaping the intellectual landscape, priorities and parameters of management research by encouraging the kind of intellectual entrepreneurship (Chia, 1996) and adventurism that was perhaps more evident in a previous scholastic era but now is increasingly missing in mainstream management research outputs. This entails the scholarly practice of playfully and imaginatively transgressing established boundaries of thought (entre) with a view to grasping (prendre) opportunities for making fresh connections and reconfiguring relationships to produce important novel insights previously unthought or unthinkable. It is about resisting the systematic rationalization that Max Weber (in Gerth & Mills, 1948, p. 51) noted accompanied the inexorable march of modernity and instead reversing this process of ‘disenchantment’ (Chia, 1998, p. 1) through a return to primitivism and the re-enchantment of the world (Suddaby, this volume). Such a primitivism involves relentlessly striving to attain the kind of innocent, pristine and child-like seeing that provides the basis for true entrepreneurial exploits. Displaying this entrepreneurial propensity in academic scholarship renders redundant the rigor/relevance distinction because it encourages the same kind of concrete appreciation and imaginative generalization required for expanding horizons of comprehension both in academia and in the very best of business ventures.

The Rigor/Relevance Debate: A False Distinction

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

(Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1929, p. 5)

Rigor in management scholarship usually refers to an unwavering commitment to an established set of methodological procedures that emphasize: thoroughness and precision in terms of familiarity with the extant conceptual literature surrounding the field of study; care and comprehensiveness in terms of the gathering of extensive empirical evidence to support one’s contention; and logical soundness and justification in terms of the claims being made and the casual relationships imputed. In the typical management journal publication process, one is not in a position to make any kind of credible knowledge claim or to be successful in getting published without having diligently observed these procedural protocols. The current conventional knowledge-creating process, therefore, as such is inherently ‘conservative’; it demands an almost ritualized acknowledgement of previous contributors, continuous evidential (mostly quantitative) justification and logical rigor at every step of the development of an argument. One possible consequence of rigidly adhering to such a formulaic notions of ‘rigor’ is a resultant rigor mortis; an intellectual ‘stiffness’ of the mind that discourages any kind of speculative conjecturing, including especially the initial capacity to gloss over long stretches of incomprehension and to focus on only those aspects that appear immediately appealing or promising. This latter approach is deemed unscientific or not rigorous enough. Yet, it is often this tendency, noticeably widespread among young children, that characterizes the true method of discovery. The art theorist Anton Ehrenzweig (1967, pp. 6–7) describes this ability to take ‘flying leaps’ over areas of incomprehension as a ‘syncretistic approach’, in contrast to the more linear logical method adopted in scientific investigations. It is a feature of inquiry much more understood in the arts than the sciences. This ‘syncretistic approach’ provides us with an alternative understanding of what ‘rigor’ in an artistic sense might mean.

A ‘syncretistic approach’ encourages ‘a diffused, scattered form of attention that contradicts our normal logical habits of thought’ (Ehrenzweig, 1967, p. xii). It elevates ‘unconscious scanning’ over conscious thought so that one gradually learns to ‘handle “open” structures with blurred frontiers which will be drawn with proper precision only in the unknowable future’ (p. 42). In this regard, the urge to prematurely achieve form and proper gestalt is actively resisted. Here scholarly rigor entails not so much the rigid following of procedural protocols, but rather of relentlessly striving to attain an ‘uncompromising democracy’ of vision; one that refuses to accept preexisting conceptual distinctions between the various elements that make up a phenomenal experience. This is the very ‘essence of artistic rigour’ (Ehrenzweig, 1967, p. 29). Artistic rigor as such, in contrast to the kind of scientific rigor that journals often demand as a condition for publication, involves the honing and refinement of an empirical sensitivity and the development of a capacity for imaginative generalization that was much tolerated in a previous scholastic era where the mantra of methodological rigor and obsession with so-called ‘evidence-based’ research had not yet taken a stranglehold over research concerns, priorities and preoccupations. Instead, it was one that was often grounded in everyday (oftentimes singular) empirical observations and then subsequently energized by a fertile and imaginative mind that stretched understanding and comprehension beyond the bounds of logical, linear habits of thought. Like the trajectory of an aeroplane, it often starts from a singular moment of acute observation. It then takes flight in the ‘thin air’ of ‘imagination generalisation’ before landing to produce novel and important discoveries and insights hitherto unthought or unthinkable (Whitehead, 1929, p. 5). This is the kind of ‘scholarship of common sense’ that best describes the inductive and iterative sense-making process undertaken by many influential thinkers in the past as Ghoshal (2005, p. 81) convincingly points out. It is therefore quite unsurprising how many of the established and enduring concepts and theories that continue to provide the foundational basis for management and organizational theorizing have been produced this way rather than through the rigid methodological approaches now widely emphasized in business schools.

Adam Smith’s (1759/1976, pp. 184–185) important notions of the ‘invisible hand’ (sadly often misunderstood) and his arguments for the benefits of the ‘division of labor’ after observing operations in a pin manufacturing plant in Kirkcaldy (Smith, 1776/1991, p. 10), for instance, were formulated, not so much on the basis of massive amounts of empirical data systematically collected, but rather upon deeper sustained reflection of isolated, singular and often casual observations. What was important in arriving at his monumental insights was not so much the quantity of data collected as ‘evidence’, but the acute empirical sensitivity he displayed and his capacity for achieving that sense of sympathetic ‘fellow-feeling’ with those he came into contact with on his visits and in his travels. He possessed that rare quality of pristine seeing which the art critic John Ruskin (1927, Vol. 4, p. 27) called an ‘innocence of the eye’; an almost naïve ability to see clearly and then to take flying leaps of ‘imaginative generalisation’ to arrive at his seminal conceptualizations. Such an artistic ‘rigour’, well recognized amongst art scholars and practitioners alike, is what makes for the kind of ‘radical empiricism’ that William James (1912/1996, p. 42) considered to be the true basis of research as opposed to the kind of ‘false empiricism’ practiced by logical positivists. This revised understanding of ‘rigor’, not as rigidly following established procedural protocols, but as the relentless striving to attain an ‘uncompromising democracy’ of vision, is what is missing from management scholarship today. Curiously, as I have intimated, it is this same kind of ‘artistic rigor’ that underpins the successes of the very best of entrepreneurs and enterprises.

The relentless search for ever-newer products/services that add value to people’s lives remains a central purpose and preoccupation of many business enterprises; it underpins a business’s success. A cultivated and refined empirical sensitivity to people’s needs, a capacity for imaginative generalization and the creative ability to reconfigure assets, resources and expertise to produce novel offerings that add value to people’s lives are what really makes a business sustainably successful. Travelling through the busy streets in Bangalore, Ratan Tata, the founder of Tata Corporation, one of India’s largest multinationals, found himself caught up in the usual traffic congestion that he had had to endure virtually every day of his working life. On this occasion, however, in an unguarded mind-wandering moment of ‘pure seeing’, he noticed for the first time, a single scooter carrying an entire family with father driving, the elder child standing in front and the wife behind holding a baby. Such a sight is not uncommon in In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figure
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Is There a Distinctive Approach to Management Research in Europe?
• 1 Reflections on the Distinctiveness of European Management Scholarship
• 2 In Search of a Soul of Relevance for European Management Research
• 3 Craft, Magic and the Re-Enchantment of the World
• 4 Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhmann as Organization Theorists
• 5 Art, Philosophy and Business: Turns to Speculative Realism in European Management Scholarship
• 6 The Strategy Cycle: Planning, Paradox and Poetry in the Practice of Strategists
• 7 Resurrecting Organization by Going Beyond Organizations
• 8 Corporate Democratic Nation-Building: Reflections on the Constructive Role of Businesses in Fostering Global Democracy
• 9 Studying Vicious Circles to Learn about Reforms
• 10 The Corporation as a Political Actor: European and North American Perspectives
• 11 Professions and Organizations: A European Perspective
• 12 European Qualitative Research: A Celebration of Diversity and a Cautionary Tale
• 13 European Management and European Business Schools: Insights from the History of Business Schools
• 14 Turning a Disadvantage into a Resource: Working at the Periphery
• Index