Essential Skills for Management Research

David Partington

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780761970088, 9780761970071
• eBook ISBN: 9781446227664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Essential Skills for Management Research provides an authoritative overview of research methodology for both students and professional researchers in management. Based on management research methods course needs, and written by expert academics in the field, this book is informed by the requirements of students, professionals and lecturers in management research.

Essential Skills for Management Research places emphasis on the more practical concerns of management researchers, focusing on the detail of developing and applying particular sets of research skills. In addition, the book gives straight-forward advice on how to:

- develop a systematic methodology

- learn to be a successful writer

- acknowledge the individual in the researcher

Essential Skills for Management Research arose from the growing need to address the practical concerns of students in undertaking research that is relevant to management practice. The book develops tangible skills and will be an invaluable guide for management researchers and students at postgraduate and MBA levels.

PART 1

Philosophy and Research

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1

The Production of Management Knowledge: Philosophical Underpinnings of Research Design

Robert Chia

OVERVIEW

Management research deals fundamentally with the production and legitimation of the various forms of knowledge associated with the practices of management. Most traditional approaches to management research and knowledge creation involve a varied combination of the key processes of observation, reflection, theoretical conjecturing and the testing of theories and models developed to capture the essence of management realities. A seemingly wide panoply of theoretical perspectives has been proffered in recent times in the social sciences and in management research in particular, including positivism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, critical theory and realism. Despite this apparent diversity of philosophical approaches, this chapter will show that they basically represent various amalgams of two opposing epistemological impulses driving research and knowledge creation in the Western world. Only the more recent rise of postmodernism poses a radical ontological challenge to the metaphysical premises of modern research.

This chapter traces the philosophical roots of modern Western thought and identifies the key philosophical traditions and assumptions shaping perceptions of knowledge and knowledge creation in general and in management research in particular. I begin by examining the crucial link between philosophy and research in order to show how the former informs the latter in the academic production of management knowledge. This is followed by a systematic tracing of the intellectual origins of Western thought and the identification of the key metaphysical foundations of modern knowledge. This, in turn, leads to a discussion and comparison of the two basic strategies of knowledge creation associated with these foundations. The relationships between each of the various theoretical derivatives commonly used and the two basic forms of philosophic thinking are then carefully examined and explained.

PHILOSOPHY AND MANAGEMENT RESEARCH

What is the nature of reality? Are the patterns and regularities we seemingly find around us products of our own imagination or are they embedded in an external objective reality? What attitude of enquiry should we adopt in order to establish with the greatest possible certainty our knowledge of reality? What forms of reasoning should we deploy to help us gain a better understanding of phenomena around us? What is the status of what we believe we know and how do we ascertain if what we believe we know is actually true or false? How do we justify our beliefs to others? Is there any difference between knowledge acquired from learning a theory and knowledge acquired through observation? How do new knowledge discoveries affect the status of what we believe we know? The substantive field of enquiry that examines these and many other related questions is called philosophy. Philosophy is primarily concerned with rigorously establishing, regulating and improving the methods of knowledge-creation in all fields of intellectual endeavour, including the field of management research. Many people assume that philosophy deals only with very general and seemingly esoteric questions about nature and reality that have very little to do with everyday life and especially with the applied field of management research. However, this is a rather prejudiced view that bears little resemblance to what philosophy throughout the ages has always been about. Philosophy, in fact, is more a rigorous and enquiring attitude of mind than an academic discipline. In philosophical enquiry, the facts, the theory, the alternatives and the ideals are brought together and weighed against each other in the creation of knowledge. Philosophical thinking revolves around the four pillars of metaphysics, logic, epistemology and ethics.

Metaphysics is concerned with questions of being and knowing. Is absolute reality permanent and unchanging or is it continuously in flux and transformation? Should we characterize reality as comprising discrete, atomistic entities or should we think of it in terms of fluid and dynamic ebbs and flows? In metaphysical enquiries, therefore, questions of ontology – the nature of reality – are central. Logic, on the other hand, deals with the methods of reasoning that we employ in apprehending reality in order to extract from it certain useful universal generalizations about how things work. The study of logic enables us to establish how certain knowledge claims are arrived at and legitimated, and hence the validity and reliability of such knowledge claims. Epistemology deals with questions about how and what it is possible to know. In epistemological investigations we attempt to reflect on the methods and standards through which reliable and verifiable knowledge is produced. Epistemological claims are always founded on certain metaphysical assumptions and on the use of particular methods of reasoning. They have to be constantly defended against criticisms levied by others who either do not share the same metaphysical assumptions or who do not find the logic employed coherent and plausible. Ethics, which deals with moral evaluation and judgement, is the subject of Chapter 2. For the purposes of this chapter, I shall concentrate primarily on the first three aspects of philosophy and explore their implications for management research.

Knowledge, interpretation and action

Philosophical attitudes shape and orient us towards particular strategies for knowledge production and action. Such attitudes are often inherited from our cultural settings. As the mathematician-turned-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead noted some time ago, observational discrimination is not dictated by impartial facts. Instead, ‘We inherit an observational order, namely the types of things which we do in fact discriminate; and we inherit a conceptual order, namely a rough system of ideas in terms of which we do in fact interpret’ (Whitehead, 1933/48: 183). These constitute the ‘unconscious metaphysics’ shaping our modes of thought and our methods of sense-making. They influence our focus of attention, what we consider to be significant or insignificant, and ultimately our methods of conceptualization. Research orientations are, therefore, inextricably linked to philosophical preferences which are, in turn, influenced, though not necessarily determined, by the embedded collective histories and cultural traditions within which our own individual identities have emerged. Certain forms of knowledge are, hence, privileged over others in each historical epoch and cultural tradition and this has multiple consequences for what we construe as legitimate and reliable knowledge and how such knowledge informs action. For instance, within certain cultures aural knowledge rather than written knowledge constitutes the primary basis for action and decision-making. In other instances, the tacit and the ‘unspoken’ are privileged over the explicit and expressed. In these cases, what is not said or is merely alluded to is just as meaningful or even more so than what is expressed. This means that the modern researcher whose primary task it is to convert what is said and observed into a documentary written form may actually be very partial and selective, albeit unconsciously, in the process of recording. Selective abstraction and interpretation are, thus, inevitable facts of the process of knowledge-creation.

Moreover, it must not be assumed that the researcher and the practitioner, even within a particular cultural context, hold similar attitudes and definitions of what constitutes knowledge. Whereas the management researcher seeks primarily to understand and explain an observed organizational phenomenon by developing a theory around it, the practitioner is often more concerned with the consequences and instrumental effects of a particular set of management insights, policies and actions. Justification, for the practitioner, does not come by way of empirical verification or conceptual rigour, but by way of desired outcomes – the ends often justify the means. Whereas the researcher is governed by a code of practice established by a community of scholars because of its inevitably truth-seeking orientation, the practitioner is essentially a pragmatist – what works is more important than what is true. It is therefore important to bear in mind that the form of knowledge privileged by the world of academia and research does not necessarily correspond directly with the priorities and preoccupations of the practitioner world, even if it does indirectly inform the latter. In both cases, there is an implicit set of philosophical assumptions that justifies their different individual orientations. These deeply embedded differences in priorities imply that the process of creating and legitimizing knowledge is fraught with epistemological pitfalls and minefields. It is therefore important for any aspiring researcher to become fully aware of the complexities attending the research process.

Understanding the process of knowledge creation

Essentially, the process of knowledge creation may be likened to any other manufacturing process. In the manufacture of aluminium beer cans, for instance, a thin aluminium sheet-coil is fed through a number of stages of stamping presses where cans are successively cut and drawn until they become the familiar cylindrical shape and height. They are then printed externally with the necessary design and coated on the inside with a lacquer to prevent corrosion. In each operation tight specifications are set to ensure the desired outcome of a quality product.

This is likewise the case for the production of management knowledge. In this process, the ‘raw material’ is no longer an aluminium coil but the unfolding ‘coil’ of our human life experiences – our ‘stream of consciousness’, as the American philosopher William James puts it. For James our initial life-world is an undifferentiated flux of fleeting sense-impressions, and it is out of this brute, aboriginal flux of lived experience that attention focuses upon and carves out concepts which conception then names:

. . . in the sky ‘constellations’, on earth ‘beach’, ‘sea’, ‘cliff’, ‘bushes’, ‘grass’. Out of time we cut ‘days’ and ‘nights’, ‘summers’ and ‘winters’. We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. (James, 1911/96: 50; emphasis in original)

Like the stamping presses, we actively cut, draw out and construct social reality from an initially undifferentiated flux of interactions and sense impressions. These isolated parts of social reality are then identified, labelled and causally linked to other parts of our experiences in order to form a coherent system of explanation. It is, thus, through this process of differentiating, cutting out, naming, labelling, classifying and relating that modern knowledge is systematically constructed. Knowledge is therefore produced through this process of selective abstraction, identification and recombination. This implies that researchers must be circumspect about their findings and the limits and limitations of any truth-claims made. The viability of such claims is dependent upon a deeply embedded set of metaphysical assumptions underpinning Western thought.

THE METAPHYSICAL ROOTS OF WESTERN THOUGHT

Western modes of thought remain circumscribed by two opposing and enduring metaphysical traditions. Heraclitus, a native of Ephesus in ancient Greece, emphasized the primacy of a fluxing, changeable and emergent world, whilst Parmenides, his successor, insisted upon the permanent and unchangeable nature of reality. One viewed reality as inclusively processual; the other privileged a homeostatic and entitative conception of reality. This seemingly intractable opposition between a Heraclitean ontology of becoming and a Parmenidean ontology of being provides us with the key for understanding contemporary debates in the philosophy of the social sciences and their implications for management research. Although there is clear evidence of a resurgence of interest in Heraclitean-type thinking in recent years, it is the Parmenidean-inspired mindset which has decisively prevailed in the West. According to this neo-Parmenidean world-view, reality is made up of atomistic and clearly formed entities with identifiable properties and characteristics. Accordingly, form, order, individuality, identity and presence are privileged over formlessness, chaos, relationality, interpenetration and absence. Such a dominant metaphysical mindset presupposes the existence of universal patterns of order underlying the presentation of reality. Thus, clear-cut, definite things are deemed to occupy clear-cut, definite places in space and time. It is this atomistic assumption of matter which allowed Newton to formulate his now famous laws of motion by assuming that the state of ‘rest’ is natural whilst ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Philosophy and Research
• Part 2: Research Processes
• Part 3: Approaches and Techniques
• Index