One common approach scholars use in management studies to develop theory is what I will call ‘borrowing’, i.e. bringing ideas from one theoretical domain to address an issue or explain a phenomenon in another domain. An example of this practice would be Burgelman's (1991) use of evolutionary theory to explain how firms renew organizational competencies. Borrowing ideas from a field like biology for theory development in a social science is not without risks, however, and an interest in these risks is what sparked this Point–Counterpoint. Zahra and Newey (2009) offer an appealing framework for thinking about the opportunities and challenges of borrowing and integrating theories across domains (or ‘intersecting’ as they say). The idea in their paper is that integration of theory may be done in one of three ways (potentially overlapping): (1) application or replication from the parent to the focal domain, where neither is changed very much; (2) theory extension in the focal domain based on ideas in the parent; and (3) transformation of ideas in the parent domain based on what is learned from its extension into the focal domain. They note that the last of these three offers the greatest challenges and risks, but argue passionately that this kind of borrowing creates the greatest impact. Interestingly, these authors conceptualize impact broadly, including influences on field boundaries, researchers' scholarly development and impact on external constituencies, i.e. practitioners. One of the key contributions of this essay is what the authors call ‘the impact wheel’. Markóczy and Deeds (2009) take on the fundamental premise of Zahra and Newey's essay. They challenge the very idea of integrating theories across domains – particularly when such efforts stretch across different disciplines. What is interesting about their challenge is that it doesn't oppose the potential value of theoretical integration that Zahra and Newey describe. Instead, they propose that borrowing theory from disciplines outside of management sacrifices another important goal – developing and maintaining management as a distinctive and legitimate academic field. Accomplishing this goal, they maintain, requires paradigmatic discipline of the kind described in Pfeffer (1993), and this discipline means building theory from ideas within our field rather than reaching outside it. Recognizing that the field may be a long way from this goal, these authors have strong words for those who would advocate for a more pluralistic stance: ‘In our view it is time for the discipline of management to grow up and look to itself first for explanations of phenomena rather than continue to first seek to integrate and synthesize theories and methods from other disciplines’ (p. 1079). For Markóczy and Deeds, borrowing theory amounts to a kind of scholarly infidelity. As with most controversies, both sides have important lessons to teach us. Zahra and Newey do much to help us understand what borrowing theory means and how to do it in a way that maximizes impact. Markóczy and Deeds help us understand the consequences of such borrowing on broader issues in our field's development and therefore suggest why we should constrain it. Enjoy this debate and feel free to post a reaction or comment using the new Correspondence feature of our website at http://www.respond2articles.com/jms.
Zahra and Newey (2009) argue for the importance of creative theory building in management research and suggest that this is best to be done via interdisciplinary research. We argue that the more management research goes down the road of pursuing interdisciplinary research for generating novel theories, the more likely it will compromise another worthwhile goal, which is to establish the discipline of management as a legitimate academic discipline that is distinguishable from other academic disciplines in its subject matter and its theoretical and methodological approach. We also argue against the implicit premise that the focus of management discipline should be on developing new theories.
Drawing on institutional theory, this study examines the factors that pressured Korean firms to appoint outside directors to their boards. While this practice could be considered to be a management innovation in Korea, in the Anglo‐American corporate governance system it has long been used as one of several mechanisms to mitigate agency costs between management and shareholders. As such, this response by Korean firms, following the 1997–98 currency crisis in Asia, could be seen as an example of corporate governance convergence on the Anglo‐American model, where higher levels of outside director representation on the board are the norm. We examine the antecedents of having a higher proportion of outside directors on Korean boards. Our findings indicate that larger firms that are under stricter control by the government have higher representation of outside directors on the board. We also find a positive and significant relationship between the proportion of outside directors and business group affiliation, poor prior firm performance, higher levels of debt and foreign ownership.
The majority of research and practice tends to conceptualize innovation as a vertically coupled, intra‐organizational process. We expand this perspective by conceptualizing innovation as a vertically decoupled, inter‐organizational process and by studying the role of research universities as suppliers of discoveries to this market for innovation . We combined logic from agency and real options theories to explain why the outcomes of technology commercialization are a function of licensing strategies, the autonomy of technology licensing offices (TLOs), and the incentives bestowed on scientists, research departments, and TLO officers. We rely on data from licensing surveys, interviews with 128 TLO directors, and – for convergent validity – from web‐based searches of the TLOs of American universities and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Results suggest that commercialization outcomes (in this case, revenue and start‐up creation) are enhanced when TLOs employ diverse licensing strategies, TLOs enjoy greater autonomy, universities share revenues with scientists' departments, and universities compensate TLOs officers well. Results also show that late entrants – typically underperforming universities – inflate royalty shares to scientists as a means to rectify their commercialization record. We conclude with a discussion of this study's contribution to the literature on innovation and technology commercialization.
This paper explores relational practice in strategic alliances. Focusing on how governance mechanisms and negotiation strategies evolve and form patterns of interaction that are under influence of both recursive and adaptive forces, four modes of relational practice are discussed: recursively integrative, recursively distributive, adaptive toward integrative, and adaptive toward distributive. Three longitudinal cases are examined. I find that different contractual conditions enable (or restrain) interaction patterns. Negotiation behaviour, in turn, affects future contractual conditions and their combination and recombination form the evolution of relational practice. As relationships progress, initial governance mechanisms are complemented and negotiation behaviours change. I explain how perceptions of both process and relational outcomes influence relational practice. In addition, I explicate why relational practices have both recursive and adaptive characteristics, and identify conditions that cause relational practices to move towards more integrative or distributive modes.
This paper develops an argument that leads to a vision of management research as a form of design science. Such an approach to research requires an inversion of the relationship between rigour and relevance. Giving primacy to the pursuit of rigour, as tends to be the current norm, de‐emphasizes the importance of relevance and leads to research that interests very few beyond the community of management scholars. We argue that we should re‐imagine relevance as a necessary condition for rigour and that this will lead to new forms of engagement with theory and practice that have the potential to create a new science of management.
Although acquisitions are a popular way to enter new markets, empirical evidence tends to indicate few benefits accrue to acquiring firms. This might be the case because firms use acquisitions when they should be employing an alternative mode of expansion. Applying real options theory to this issue, we suggest that greenfield start‐up ventures provide a real option alternative to acquisitions for firms establishing new international subsidiary units. To test this notion we examine a sample of Western European firms entering the emerging economies of Eastern Europe. The evidence suggests that acquisitions are a good choice only when firms enter markets containing low demand uncertainty and when these firms possess acquisition‐based strategic flexibility. Overall, our analysis indicates that greenfield ventures appear to provide firms with a real option when making the acquisition decision.
We present organizational logics as a meso‐level construct that lies between institutional theory's field‐level logics and the sense‐making activities of individual agents in organizations. We argue that an institutional logic can be operationalized empirically using the concept of a discourse – that is, a coherent symbolic system articulating what constitutes legitimate, reasonable, and effective conduct in, around, and by organizations. An organization may, moreover, be simultaneously exposed to several institutional logics that make up its broader ideational environment. Taking these three observations together enables us to consider an organizational logic as a spatially and temporally localized configuration of diverse discourses. We go on to show how organizational logics were transformed in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation between 1953 and 1999 by examining the changing discourses that appeared in the Corporation's annual reports. We argue that these discourses were modified through three main forms of discursive agency: (1) undertaking acts of ironic accommodation between competing discourses; (2) building chains of equivalence between the potentially contradictory discourses; and (3) reconciling new and old discourses through pragmatic acts of ‘bricolage’. We found that, using these forms of discursive agency, a powerful coalition of actors was able to transform the dominant organizational logic of the ABC from one where the Corporation's initial mission was to serve national interests through public service to one that was ultimately focused on participating in a globalized media market. Finally, we note that discursive resources could be used as the basis for resistance by less powerful agents, although further research is necessary to determine exactly how more powerful and less powerful agents interact around the establishment of an organizational logic.
Over the years scholars put forward a number of theories to explain the association between slack and innovation. This study extends this body of research by focusing on the effects of reduction in slack level following downsizing on innovation output. We developed two hypotheses to examine the total effects and varied yearly effects. We tested the hypotheses with data from a panel of UK firms that downsized between 1997 and 2003. The results show that the level of downsizing has only temporary effects on innovation output. We discuss the implications of these findings and avenues for future research.
The following series of articles emanate from a session held at the first Journal of Management Studies Conference on the theme of ‘Beyond knowledge management: advancing the organizational knowledge research agenda’. The conference was concerned to advance academic understanding of this broad topic and in addition to reflect on the role of management scholars as creators, commodifiers and disseminators of management and organizational knowledge. The latter theme arose from debates in relation to the apparent marginality of business school academics in the production of management knowledge (Barley et al., 1988; Gibson and Tesone, 2001; Spell, 2001) and their consequent (in)ability to develop and conduct research with practitioners and then communicate the results of this research to a practising audience. Drawing on Shapiro et al. (2007, p. 249), this broad debate can be framed as either a ‘knowledge transfer problem’ (what they term ‘lost in translation’) or a ‘knowledge production problem’ (what they ‘lost before translation’). In the former the solution is to produce publications and outlets that are designed to be attractive to and easily accessed by practitioners. In the latter, the solution involves collaboration between academics and practitioners at different key stages of the research process (Pettigrew, 1997). In the papers that follow the nature of the management research–practice gap is debated as well as the helpfulness and viability of various solutions aimed at narrowing it. Drawing on Luhmann's (1995) systems theory, Kieser and Leiner (2009) argue that the rigour–relevance gap ‘is not only attributable to different languages and styles in the scientific community, but also to different logics – to differences in defining and tackling problems – that prevail in the systems of science and practice’ (Kieser and Leiner, 2009, p. 517). For them ‘science’ and ‘practice’ operate according to completely separate institutional logics, with the consequence that the communication of knowledge from one system can never be absorbed by the other. Given that these two systems are unable to communicate with one another, for Kieser and Leiner attempts to attempts to ‘bridge the gap’ (i.e. through the development of different kinds of collaboration between members of the two systems) are viewed as inevitably futile and as offering a ‘false hope’. In contrast, Hodgkinson and Rousseau (2009) argue that management is a broad discipline and whilst the gaps between research and practice in some areas may be large, in others there are numerous examples of successful collaboration that has underpinned development of high quality research and outputs. They argue that ‘developing deep partnerships between academics and practitioners, supported by appropriate training in theory and research methods, can yield outcomes that meet the twin imperatives of high quality scholarship and social usefulness, to the mutual benefit of both agendas, without compromising the needs of either party in the relationship’ (Hodgkinson and Rousseau, 2009, p. 538). For them bridging the gap is at the heart of the contemporary management academic role since such cross-fertilization can lead to richer and more detailed understandings of organizations. As they conclude, ‘science and practice will not be worse for their collaboration. On the contrary, to some degree they will be different, by virtue of their mutual enrichment’ (Hodgkinson and Rousseau, 2009, p. 543). Starkey et al. (2009) adopt a broader approach to Kieser and Leiner's central concern by examining issues in relation to epistemology and political science to argue that: (1) ‘there is a proliferation of different modes of inquiry’ with the consequence that a range of ‘versions of science are possible’ (Starkey et al., 2009, p. 548), not just the view held by Kieser and Leiner; (2) in aping more traditional and modernist models of science, management as a discipline ‘has sought rigour over relevance, leaving translation to others such as management consultants and management gurus’ (Starkey et al., 2009, p. 552); and (3) a range of contextual pressures may modify the social organization of the discipline with the consequence that relevance may take greater prominence than it does at present. Noting the danger of an overly narrow conception of rigour and relevance, they conclude that by framing management as a ‘design science’ will alter the nature of interactions between researchers and practitioners with the consequence that ‘new things are likely to happen, new forms of practice, new kinds of communication, new codes’ (Starkey et al., 2009, p. 554). In the remainder of this article we identify a number of points that both complement and extend some of the arguments made in response to Kieser and Leiner's initial paper. Kieser and Leiner's account of the rigour–relevance gap represents a particular view on an issue that has been perplexing management academics for some time (see British Journal of Management, Special Issue, 12, 1, 2001; see also Rynes et al., 2001; Shapiro et al., 2007; Van de Ven, 2007). The perception that managers often pay little attention to the theories and findings that as academics we craft so painstakingly – and frequently as fairly explicit offerings to those struggling with the daily problems of decision making – envisages a bleak future for management education and the business schools. For some writers like Starkey and Madan (2001), this is more of a relevance gap, to which the response should be about widening the disciplinary base in order to improve knowledge creation and the dissemination of research. While managers may need to be involved more sympathetically in the process of academic research, aligning the interests of business and academia means the latter has to move the greater distance and better reflect user interests. For Kieser and Leiner, the differences between the two realms are more systemic and the pull of academic rigour is the main issue. At the heart of their account is the notion of a potentially unbridgeable void between academia and practice. For management and organization theory this means that academically rigorous research cannot be pragmatically relevant. Kieser and Leiner arrive at this position by way of an analysis that stresses the impossibility of true collaboration between the separate systems of science and practice. This position in turn arises from the particular interpretation of systems theory that they derive from Luhmann (1995) and his argument that all distinct systems have such pronounced internal logics as to exclude all possibility of communication or collaboration between them. This ‘core assumption of Luhmann's theory’ (Kieser and Leiner, 2009, p. 519) leads to an unbridgeable gap between academic theorizing about organizations and the subject of its study. The academic research code of pursuing truth and critical purity automatically excludes it from the realm of practice. There is certainly an important point here regarding the integrity of belief systems and the autonomy of distinct spheres of knowledge and action. Furthermore, Kieser and Leiner highlight important issues in relation to shifting sources of legitimacy for academic knowledge and how scholars should or should not respond. They are not alone in arguing that the two systems should remain distinct. We see a similar position, for example, in Grey's (2001) insistence that by remaining independent of corporate goals and interests universities are able to ‘freely experiment’ with new ideas, with the consequence that ‘the production of useless knowledge is a public good because it is the price to pay for the possibility of producing useful knowledge’ (Grey, 2001, p. S29). Keeping the systems separate therefore maintains a key historical role of universities. Blurring the two realms will, in Grey's view, limit the type of knowledge universities develop and many potentially useful ideas for practice will be lost. We also see echoes of Kieser and Leiner's argument in Astley and Zummato's (1992) characterization of management research and practice as founded on two ‘distinct linguistic traditions . . . The language games adopted by the two communities have their own internal dynamics and history, and each focuses attention on quite different problems and issues’ (p. 444). The fact that this is such a debated topic suggests that as a community of scholars we recognize that we face an important but difficult challenge that questions a number of values we hold dear. Whilst we sympathize with a number of points made by Kieser and Leiner, nevertheless we believe there are also problems with this interpretation of systems theory and how it impacts on management knowledge. From the Kieser and Leiner perspective the closed nature of social systems which is given the status of totemic fact means a rigid internal cohesion and specificity. Yet one might ask whether systems have such impermeable boundaries and whether the parties on either side of the rigour–relevance gap are actually separate and distinct as characterized. We would argue there is greater cross-fertilization between the systems than Kieser and Leiner imply. This is suggested, for example, by recent accounts of the production of management knowledge. Newmanagement ideas have been seen to emanate from an ‘arena’ (Abrahamson, 1996) or ‘field’ of social actors (Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall, 2002) comprising figures like consulting firms, celebrity managers and gurus, business schools and management academics. In other words, ideas are the produce of a context in which ‘relevance’ is a integral component, and academic and pragmatic systems exist under one umbrella (see also Clark, 2004; Ernst and Kieser, 2002; Heusinkveld and Benders, 2002). The combinations of knowledge and ‘co-evolution’ of new management ideas often come about as academics observe practice and formulate popular ideas in ways that are inherently attractive to and accessible by managers in terms of their preferences for the nature and format of information (Huczynski, 1993). Once produced, management ideas must be legitimized if they are to travel; they have to have relevance and speak to a broad audience. Though they may lag behind influences like consultants and the business media, business-school academics may still be active in developing concepts in use. For example, Suddaby and Greenwood (2001, p. 936) argue that a kind of ‘due diligence’ is performed by the consolidation of management ideas when ‘business schools . . . provide a forum for sober second thought, where managerial knowledge is evaluated and refined’. So while one might conceptualize rigid roles for academics and practitioners, the reality seems more mixed. There are also other crossovers and examples of multiple roles. Some successful management gurus are or were academics, and academics also pursue second careers as consultants. In each case they make their supposed esoteric knowledge portable so that it may be translated and reused in a range of situations. The resulting package often lacks situational precision but such qualities may ensure that knowledge is adaptable to organizational contexts. In this sense, different kinds of ‘knowledge’ are appropriate to different audiences, and what is produced for peer review and journal publication may be too narrow a conception of the academic role. Another limitation may be a too-tight focus on research and a failure to recognize the dialogue in the classroom as communication between proto systems. While the tendency is to bemoan academia's lack of practical influence, the dominant factor over the past 20 years has been the expansion of business education. Groups like consultants and novelties like the corporate university may threaten the business-school monopoly (Starkey, 2001), but a significant proportion of future management is still passing through the university system – and the demand for and status of this knowledge can be influenced by the academic community in its role of training more critically aware consumers of management ideas. Although Kieser and Leiner suggest that only types of conformist knowledge will gain wider acceptance, it may be pessimistic to assume this, or indeed that practical problems should necessarily determine the kinds of knowledge universities generate and pass on. Knowledge that conforms to the conventional requirements of a managerial audience ignores broader social trends and is removed from values that underpin highly-regarded academic writing. As Grey (2001, pp. S28–9) suggests, the critical role of universities and the knowledge produced within them is of most importance as a long-term guarantee of relevance and status, and this may displace short-term striving for managerially appealing ideas. In academia, interaction between the teaching role and research – the transmission of knowledge based on critical independent thinking – may even alter the perceptions of knowledge andenhance the valuation of academic competencies by altering the receptiveness of managerial audiences. A further shortcoming of ‘systems’ thinking is that it can be too generalizing and aggregating – anything in nature and society can be called ‘a system’– and the systemic approach seems to lead to a conflation of terms and categories. Following Luhmann's analysis, Kieser and Leiner use ‘science’ to refer to any theoretical subject, yet surely there are major distinctions between the natural sciences and social sciences. The currency of natural science is law-like motion, while the social sciences deal in meaning and social construction; and using a natural-science model to derive conclusions for social science is likely to lead to confusion. It may be true that the natural sciences are more like conservative closed systems (Kuhn's normal science) but the social sciences have wider affinities with social commentary and permit greater diversity. Kieser and Leiner stress the self-referential nature of the system of science – how it only permits research that refers back to existing theory to enter the body of the subject. They are particularly concerned to highlight a bias against multidisciplinary and non-positivist research (their main interest is action research) and the failure of this to get onto the academic high ground and into the most prestigious journals. An assumption that the strictures of the (natural) sciences are applied in management science means a tendency to keep out practitioner-oriented action research from prestigious journals. But surely the social sciences are not so hegemonic and seem less inclined to deny the possibility of diversity and ongoing critique and management and organization theory that derives from social science has always had critical work going on alongside positive research. For example, currents such as Labour Process Theory and Critical Management Studies have been influential in Europe and the UK (if less so in the USA). We therefore suggest that the systemic view should not be taken to extremes. Kieser and Leiner are concerned about a conservatism that means critical research might be denied a voice, but distinctions between a world whose code is the pursuit of ‘truth’ and another world coded to the practical solution seems to us the wrong place to draw the line. Management studies as a social science has wider external affinities and greater diversity, and is less of a closed system than natural science, and any relative inability to communicate with practice may derive from other sources – perhaps the nature of management itself as an uncertain activity where there are no ultimate answers or design solutions.