Organizations and Markets

| Nicolai Foss |

I am reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science in which Dr. Goldacre explodes the ridiculous claims of medical quacks of all stripes (e.g., homeopathy, the idiocies of the media re the interpretation of research results, hostility towards “mainstream medicine,” etc.). The book is much needed and very, very entertaining.

And it makes me think that management research needs its Goldacre. A few quick ideas:

1. Perhaps we need something akin to the Cochrane Collaboration. We can all agree that “evidence-based management” is a good idea. Indeed, it is such a good idea that there should be no need for writing books or blogs about it. We should all embrace and internalize the idea. However, in practice, there is probably much too little effort devoted to meta-analysis and other synthetic efforts in management research.
2. There are quacks in management. Some of them write books. Some consult. Shrugging the shoulder is the typical reaction on the part of management academics. Should we treat them more harshly? Should management quacks be identified and fought?
3. Perhaps the majority of research articles in management end with a variation over “There is a need for more research.” Articles in medicine used to end similarly. However, as Goldacre notes (p. 57), “… it is a little known fact that this very phrase has been banned from the British Medical Journal for many years, on the grounds that it adds nothing: you may say what research is missing, on whom, how, measuring what, and why you want to do it, but the hand-waving, superficially open-minded call for ‘more research’ is meaningless and unhelpful.” Amen!

| Nicolai Foss |

The new ISI impact factors for 2008 have just been released. There are lots of surprises this time. The biggest one is arguably that Organization Science is now out of the top 10 range, a long drop from its #4 status in 2006 (this sucks when you got two recent papers, one forthcoming and one R&R, at this journal :-( ). The second surprise, at least to me, is that the Journal of Management has made it to #5. One possible explanation is its rather influential yearly review issues. Another surprise is that Organization Studies, which was among the top 10 in 2006, has now moved down a lot to close to #30. The Journal of Management Studies, while not among the top 10 this year, has not been harmed as badly, dropping to #14. ASQ, once the undisputed top-management journal, is now #9. Less surprising is Academy of Management Review’s #1 position (it is usually among the top 3), and that the Strategic Management Journal is #4.

The rank order down to LRP at # 36 is: AMR – AMJ – MIS Q – SMJ – JoM – ORM – JIBS – AMLE – ASQ – OBHD – RP – JPIM – Org. Sci. – JMS – RoB – JoM – JOperationsM – IMA – JMIS – Man Sci -DS – IRS – LQ – Omega – R&D Man – GOM – JIT – Techno. – Org. Stud. – Brit. JoM – Adv. Strat Man. -  HBR – Int Small Bus. J – Int. J. Oper. Prod. M. – Int. J. Man. Rev. – Int. J of Forec. – LRP

A new feature of the list is the inclusion of a five-year impact factor which, given the rather turbulent movements from year to year, makes a lot of sense (and which produces a rather different rank order from the above!).

| Nicolai Foss |

Not long ago after the start of O&M I blogged on the change of editor at the European Management Review, paraphrasing Keynes’s examination of Lloyd George’s pledge on unemployment policy. While EMR is not yet ISI listed and has not surpassed the Journal of Management Studies as the leading Euro management journal, Kogut has most certainly “done it” in terms of boosting the general reputation of the journal. This is another demonstration that an editor with a clear mission, a strong network, and well-defined objectives can rather quickly do wonders for a journal (think Arie Lewin with Organization Science or Joel Baum (et al.) with Strategic Organization).

Kogut has now stepped down as editor, and Professors Maurizio Zollo and Alfonso Gambardella, both of Bocconi University in Milan, carry the mantle. While Zollo is a fullblown management scholar, Gambardella is much more an economist. They share a basic evolutionary outlook. Needless to say, both a very well connected to the US research context in management and economics. The new team’s inaugural issue with a handful of invited paper is available here. Everything is downloadable for free.

| Nicolai Foss |

It seems that O&M may usefully introduce a new category: “Constructs that are central to one or more management fields, but so far have not been measured.” Yesterday, we blogged on opportunity discovery, and could report only one existing scale in the entrepreneurship literature. Today the focus is on routines, a frequently discussed topic here on O&M.

Routines are, of course, absolutely central in much management research, notably strategic management, international business, technology strategy, organizational theory and much else. The construct itself was essentially introduced to management research in Nelson and Winter’s 1982 book, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, although it is often argued that it originates somewhat earlier, namely with the behavioralists (Simon, Cyert, & March; for a critique of this interpretation, see this paper). 

The boundaries of the concept are, even for management research, highly  ill-defined and virtually everything in an organization, save for physícal capital, that has some degree of stability has been called a routine by some author. As if this extreme inclusiveness wasn’t enough, it has even been argued that routines can be “sources of continuous change.”

Such conceptual fuzziness would seem to imply that almost anything goes, empirically speaking. In fact, there is quite  a lot of empirical work on routines, and of a rather diverse nature. However, it all seems to be qualitative in nature (e.g., this recent paper), as least as far as I can see. 

So, do you know of any attempts to grapple empirically with routines in the sense of actual measurement? Are there any scales out there?

| Nicolai Foss |

I just received my copy of the April issue of the Academy of Management Review, stuffed with matrices, probability density functions, NKC models, Boolean algebra, isoquants, Max This and Max That, etc. etc. Yes — that’s right: The Academy of Management Review, the journal that over the last decade has only published one single formal article.

Of course, this is the long-awaited special issue, “Special Topic Forum on Formal Approaches to Management Theory,” edited by Ron Adner, Laszlo Polos, Michael Ryall, and Olav Sorenson. (One of the papers has already been extensively discussed here at O&M). The papers are a mixed bag in terms of the formal approaches that are applied, i.e., analytic methods, simulation, and formal logic. I have only read a couple of the papers (Alvarez & Parker on “Emerging Firms and the Allocation of Control Rights: a Bayesian Approach”) and Postrel’s “Multitasking Teams with Variable Complementarity: Challenges for Capability Management,” which both are excellent, but I look forward to reading the rest.

The editors supply an introduction which reiterates the often claimed benefits — familiar to those with an economics background — of formalization in terms of precision and transparency, logical consistency, and unanticipated implications (for a general treatment, see Suppes’s 1968 classic). They are careful to say that they “would not claim that verbal theorizing . . . has no place in management research”! (p. 206). (more…)

| Nicolai Foss |

The micro-foundations theme is gaining increased attention in management research. As a partial reflection of this, please check the Call for Papers below for a SI of the Journal of Management Studies on the topic in the title of this post.  Submit a paper! (more…)

| Nicolai Foss |

There are reasons to think that changes in organization designs, administrative systems, and managerial technologies are important sources of firm-level value creation. It is also quite conceivable that changes that amount to  innovations in organization design, etc. may give rise to sustained competitive advantages. Business history, popular management writing, and some academic papers offer examples, notably the introduction of the M-form, TQM, the Oticon spaghetti organization, the HRM practices of Lincoln Electric, and so on. And yet, very little systematic, research-based knowledge exists about such “management innovation.” The first conceptual and theoretical treatment of management innovation as a subject deserving of focused inquiry is Julian Birkinshaw and Michael Mol’s paper in the Academy of Management Review — which was published in 2008!

To further research on management innovation, the Center for Strategic Management and Globalization at the Copenhagen Business School is arranging a conference on management innovation later this year (3-4 September 2009). Keynote speeches will be delivered by Julian Birkinshaw, Ed Zajac and Richard Burton. Details on the conference homepage (version 1.0). Submit a paper!