Posts filed under ‘– Foss –’
Pomo Periscope XXI: Trashing Sociology
| Nicolai Foss |
The boys over at orgtheory.net think that our Pomo Periscope series is “lame” and are upset that we ”routinely [trash] these people” (meaning Foucault et al.). Which is what you would expect, as the PP “routinely” pokes fun at sociologists. However, if you want real, heavy-hitting sociology-trashing, rather than the fundamentally kind-hearted approach of the PP, take a close look at Russell Jacoby’s review of Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias.
Scientific Misconduct in Management Research
| Nicolai Foss |
Fraudulent behavior in research is the ultimate academic gossip. It is hardly surprising that our post on Thomas Basbøll’s claim that management theory heavyweight Karl Weick has engaged in plagiarism (here) was one of O&M’s most popular posts in 2010. One of my own papers was once directly copied. All that was changed was the front page. In one of those strange coincidences, the journal editor asked my co-author to review the paper. The plagiarist was a consultant, not an academic, so it is possible that the case had no consequences for him.
How prevalent is scientific misconduct in management research? And how strongly should we care? After all, what gets published in the management journals does not have the same direct impact as what gets published in the medicine journals, or what the UN’s Intergovernmental Climate Panel utters. While management research may not cure cancer, it likely has considerable impact on resource allocation, and therefore on what is available for curing cancer. Moreover, there are strong externalities: A reputation for “bad science” in one field or discipline may easily spill over to other fields and disciplines. Hence, misconduct should be regarded with as severely in management research as in other fields and disciplines.
With respect to the incidence of fraudulent research behavior, rather little is known. While fraud in, particularly, medicine tends to draw major headlines in the press, I cannot recall anything similar in the case of management research. It seems unlikely that management researchers should be significantly more honest than researchers in medicine, so our lack of knowledge in this seems troublesome. In “Management Science on the Credibility Bubble: Cardinal Sins and Various Misdemeanors,” recently published in the Academy of Management Learning and Education, Arthur G. Bedeian, Shannon G. Taylor, and Alan N. Miller present evidence that research misconduct is quite a prevalent phenomenon. Briefly, they collected data from faculty in 104 PhD-granting management departments in the US. Questions identified “eleven different types of questionable research conduct, including data fabrication, data falsification, plagiarism, inappropriately accepting or assigning authorship credit, and publishing the same data or results in two or more publications.”
Some of Bedeian et al.’s examples of “questionable research conduct” seem somewhat open to interpretation and questioning (e.g., “developing ‘ins’ with journal editors” — in fact, the initiative for such “ins” often emerge from the editor side; “published the same data or results in two or more publications” — presumably, there is nothing necessarily wrong with publishing “the same data … in two or more publications”), and the procedure of asking faculty to indicate their “knowledge of faculty engaging in” research misconduct is questionable, as different faculty may relate to the same episode of research misconduct (they acknowledge this problem). Still, the numbers are quite striking. More than 70% reports knowledge of cases of not giving due credit to originators of ideas (i.e., plagiarism). Even more report knowledge of data manipulation, although only (?) 27% report knowledge of outright data fabrication.
Entrepreneurship Nobel to Steven Klepper
| Nicolai Foss |
The Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research may not quite be the real thing, but it is Swedish, highly prestiguous, and 100k Euro is still quite a bit of money. The Prize is administered and financed by the Research Institute of Industrial Economics, the Swedish Foundation for Small Business Research, and the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth. Earlier recipients include Joshn Lerner, David Audretsch, Scott Shane, William Baumol, and Israel Kirzner.
O&M congratulates the Prize Committee for an excellent choice and CMU Professor Steven Klepper for receiving the Prize. Klepper’s work is rigorous, yet highly realistic and relevant. It takes process, heterogeneity, and entrepreneurship seriously, and demonstrates that such research is capable of being published in the very best economics journals. Here is the Committe’s motivation for the choice of Klepper:
Steven Klepper has made significant contributions to our understanding of the role of new firm entry in innovation and economic growth. His work is theoretical and integrative, firmly rooted in empirical observation of historical innovative processes, focusing on explaining “empirical regularities.” Klepper’s work integrates elements of traditional neoclassical models with evolutionary theory, bridging some of the gaps between neoclassical and evolutionary theory and between entrepreneurship research and mainstream economics.
In looking at the evolution of industries, Klepper explores regularities in the time paths of entry of new producers, exit of incumbent firms, industry output and price, and the rate of product and process innovation. To explain these regularities, he develops theories that feature differences in firm capabilities and the advantages of large firms in appropriating the returns from their innovative efforts. The theories are also used to explain differences in firms’ innovative efforts, the composition of their innovative effort and their innovative success.
His work is founded on systematic longitudinal empirical analyses requiring massive, detailed, and painstaking collections and analyses of historical data on firm entry, exit, size, location, distribution networks, and technological choices. The focus is on the function of new firms in industrial growth as well as the background and heritage of new entrants, particularly as reflected in spinoffs from existing firms.
The Confusing “Business Model” Construct
| Nicolai Foss |
The discourse of both practicing managers and management scholars abounds with concepts and jargon that sound fine, and surely refer to something real and important, but are used in a hopelessly imprecise manner and have all sorts of different, often conflicting, meaning attached to them. Examples of yesteryear include “value creation,” “competitive advantage,” and “value proposition” — “yesteryear”, because reasonable clarity has gradually been achieved with respect to their meaning.
Another example, where lack of clarity unfortunately persists, is that of “business models” — which refers to, for example, “bricks and clicks business models” (which is mainly about integrating online and offline presence), “collective business models” (which is mainly about pooling resources across firms), “cutting out the middleman” (which is, well, you guessed it), “franchising” (which is a particular contractual arrangement for handling distribution), “freemium” (offering free basic services and expensive premium services” etc., etc. (examples are from the wiki on the subject). So, business models are about internet distribution, the contractual form of distribution, resource sharing, cutting out middlemen, differentiation policies, etc. It is not clear what unites all this, except, perhaps, a basic concern with the consumer/customer side of value creation and appropriation (and even that doesn’t hold for all conceptions). Moreover, some argue that building a business model is subordinate to formulating a strategy, while others (e.g., Teece) argue that strategies are on a lower level than business models.
Obviously, attempts to reduce all this confusion are highly laudauble. Two recent such attempts deserve mention here. One is an excellent paper, “The Business Model: Theoretical Roots, Recent Developments, and Future Research,” by Christoph Zott, Raphael Amit, and Lorenzo Massa. Among other things they argue that the business model is a meaningful unit of analysis, and should be understood as a firm-centric, yet boundary-spanning activity system supported by a logic of value creation and appropriation. The second attempt is a special issue of Long Range Planning on the subject, with contributions from such luminaries as David Teece, Raphael Amit, Rita McGrath, Muhammad Yunus, Yves Doz, Michael Tushman and many others. I have only read the Teece paper, but look forward to reading the rest. Teece (in “Business Models, Business Strategy, and Innovation”) begins by arguing the “concept of a business model lacks theoretical grounding in economics or in business studies,” goes on to offer his own definition, supplies several examples, discusses the conceptual differences between business models and business strategies and ends by linking the business model constructs to his earlier work on how the organization of the innovation process influences the appropriation of value from innovation. Like so many articles in LRP, this paper will be excellent for the classroom.
Coordination Problems in the Theory of the Firm
| Nicolai Foss |
Many textbooks (e.g., this one or this one) begin by noting that there are two fundamental problems of economic organization, namely the coordination problem and the motivation problem — and then devote 95% of the space to the latter problem. (In a paper published in 1993 (but written in 1989), I proposed that extant theories of the firm could be understood as taking either a PD (-like) game or a coordination game as the fundamental underlying structure of interaction. In my reading, capabilities theories were about coordination problems, while mainstream organization economics fundamentally started from PD-like situations; this paper develops the argument a little bit).
Important work has been done on coordination problems in the context of the theory of the firm by Colin Camerer and Mark Knez (e.g., here), Phanish Puranam and Ranjay Gulati (here), Luis Garicano (e.g., here), Birger Wernerfelt (e.g., here), and, of course, co-blogger Dick Langlois (check his CV here on O&M — most of his stuff on economic organization is about coordination). One could also make the point that large parts of traditional organizational design theory (of the information processing/contingency variety, including Marschak & Radner’s team theory) are really about coordination problems rather than motivation problems. Dick Langlois has long argued that Coase (1937) is fundamentally about coordination rather than motivation.
This is definetely something; however, compared to the enormous outpouring of work on motivation problems, it is fair to say that coordination problems are neglected, although there are reasons to suppose that they are quite important: There are plenty of examples of highly motivated people utterly failing with respect to organizing and coordinating.
I just came across an excellent paper, “Coordination Neglect: How Lay Theories of Organizing Complicate Coordination in Organization,” that deals with a number of obstacles to coordination rooted in heuristics (“lay theories”) that individuals apply, for example, when setting up a division of labour in an organization. Notably, individuals systematically neglect task interdependencies. They also fail to communicate sufficiently because of knowledge bias and they are poor at translating problems for others. There are plenty of useful illustrations and anecdotes in the paper, making it excellent as a companion to a traditional motivation/incentive-focused textbook in a theory of the firm class. Highly recommended!
Democracy and Credible Commitment in Universities
| Nicolai Foss |
In 2003, Denmark enacted what is the easily the least democratic university legislation in the world (the North Korean one may be less democratic). Essentially, faculty voting rights are now limited to selecting members of an “academic council” which mainly serves as a quality check on candidates for evaluation committees and as a body that offers advice to the university president and the deans. A board of directors (with a majority of external members) appoints the president, the president appoints the dean, and the dean appoints department heads.
This truly major change was partly motivated by the various inefficiencies of the earlier, much more democratic conditions. However, as autocratic systems also have well-known inefficiencies, the question is whether Denmark let the governance pendulum swing too much toward the opposite end. My colleague Henrik Lando directed my attention to a truly excellent paper by O&M guest blogger Scott Masten that is directly relevant to the understanding of this issue. (more…)
WEIRD Science
| Nicolai Foss |
It seems to be rather generally accepted that the Gold Standard of empirically-based science is the randomized experiment. Mosts economists and management scholars subscribe to this view, although its critics include notables like James Heckman (here). Arguably, the greatest badge of honor that one can aspire to nowadays as an economist (let’s forget about management scholars here ;-)) is to publish an experimentally-based paper in Nature or Science. However, one thing is the method of randomized experiments per se; quite another thing is the actual design of such experiments in social science and psychology.
In a recent paper, “The Weirdest People in the World,” Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan point out that most designs involve samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, in practice often first-year students.
Of course, any serious experimental paper should be forthcoming about potential problems of external and ecological validity. The problem is certainly not neglected; in fact, some journals ban papers based on experiments involving students. However, the point of the Henrich et al. paper is to document how massive the problem really is in terms of the extremely widespread use of samples drawn from a total outlier population, namely WEIRD people and the sweeping conclusions drawn from experiments using WEIRD subjects. To establish this they compare to non-WEIRD samples. They end their paper by discussing what may be done in terms of practical research heuristics and research policy with respect to dealing with generalizability.
Here is the journal version of the paper (as well as various interesting comments). And here is the working paper. Warning: The Intro may not be for the faint of heart.
Professors Respond to Incentives
| Nicolai Foss |
That’s the overall conclusion of a nice recent study, “Career Incentives and ‘Publish and Perish’ in German and US Universities,” by Uschi Backes-Gellner and Axel Schlinghof. Their theoretical basis is fairly standard personnel economics, but empirically they do something attractive, namely they compae intra-individual productivity differences and monetary incentives over a single researcher’s career. This means that they can avoid the biases introduced by inter-individual ability differences that plague cross-sectional comparisons of research productivity and incentives.
Briefly, Backes-Gellner and Schlinghof hypothesize that increases in research output will obtain prior to tenure in the US system as well as prior to lifetime employment in Germany (and a decline after tenure/lifetime employment). They expect productivity to rise more prior to promotion to full professor in the US than prior to equivalent career changes in Germany (because the wage structure is more compressed in German academia). Finally, for the US (but not for Germany), they expect research productivity to increase in the period before promotion to full professor, but decline afterwards. To test the hypotheses, the authors build a dataset from online CVs of US and German researchers. All hypotheses are borne out in the data.
The Emerging Strategic Entrepreneurship Field
| Nicolai Foss |
“Strategic entrepreneurship” has emerged as a field in the intersection of strategic management and entrepreneurship. It has its own specialized journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, now in its fifth year of existence. Some of the pioneers of strategic entrepreneurship characterize the field in the following manner:
Strategic entrepreneurship is the integration of entrepreneurial (i.e., opportunity-seeking actions) and strategic (i.e., advantage-seeking actions) perspectives to design and implement entrepreneurial strategies that create wealth. Thus, strategic entrepreneurship is entrepreneurial action that is taken with a strategic perspective” ( Hitt, Ireland, Camp & Sexton, 2002:2).
I am excited by this research stream and think that its attempt to identify the antecedents of new value creation in the context of established firms is entirely warranted (at least in management research, entrepreneurship has too often been associated solely with new firm formation). And yet, strategic entrepreneurship is clearly a field in search of a core and an identity.
It is not yet entirely clear whether the field amounts to more than relabelling existing “dynamic” strategic management ideas (e.g., dynamic capabilities, real options), ideas that have been around in entrepreneurship research for some time (e.g., entrepreneurial orientation), and ideas from innovation theory. It is also not clear what fundamental view of the firm is underlying this research. Given that extant entrepreneurship has had a strong emphasis on individuals, it is striking that individuals do not really seem to be present in strategic entrepreneurship research. It is not made clear, or even discussed, what role organization design (the design of organizational structure and control) plays for the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities.
The Center (soon Department) of Strategic Management and Globalization at the Copenhagen Business School has arranged a conference that is dedicated to furthering strategic entrepreneurship by “bringing organization design and micro-foundations into the field.” The conference begins tomorrow and features such luminaries as Shaker Zahra, Jeff Hornsby, Bill Schulze and Mike Wright — and O&M’s Peter Klein. More to come …
Do Economic Freedom and Entrepreneurship Impact Total Factor Productivity?
| Nicolai Foss |
Cross-country studies of the antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurship have become something of a cottage industry. My contribution to the industry is an earlier paper with Christian Bjørnskov, as well as rather recent one, also written with Christian, “Do Economic Freedom and Entrepreneurship Impact Total Factor Productivity?” (and we have a third paper in the works with a certain Klein).
In the former paper we analyzed institutions and economic policies as determinants of entrepreneurship, paying particular attention to “freedom variables,” like sound money and a stable legal framework. In the latter paper, we focus on where the action is in the growth process, namely Total Factor Productivity, and proffer Austro-institutional arguments why entrepreneurship and the institutions associated with a free society may be expected to positively impact TFP.
While we find that entrepreneurship strongly and significantly impacts TFP, our results only partially support the intuition that institutions of liberty as well as liberal economic policies promote growth in productivity. In fact, we find no significant effects of sound money and legal quality on TFP in the medium run. When some of the freedom variables are interacted with the entrepreneurship variable, we in fact find that entrepreneurial activity is more effective in raising levels of TFP in environments dominated or strongly influenced by government activity, either through production in government-owned enterprises and investments or in its financing activities. Thus, increasing the active involvement of the government in the economy as well as the tax burden actually increases the impact of entrepreneurship on TFP. Our explanation of this somewhat surprising finding is that a reduced supply of entrepreneurship increases the marginal productivity of entrepreneurship; thus, the best ideas do survive even in the relatively hostile welfare state environment. (more…)
The Vromen/Abell-Felin-Foss Debate
| Nicolai Foss |
As readers of this blog will know (probably ad nauseam), Teppo Felin and I have been engaged over the last five years or so in a minor crusade in favor of building micro-foundations for, particularly, strategic management research (e.g., this paper with Peter Abell). I think it is fair to say that we have had some success with this project, as talk of micro-foundations has now become a part of contemporary strategic management discourse.
One of our critical targets have been the extant literature on capabilities and routines which we argue work with collective-level constructs that have no clear micro-foundations. We make use of the famous Coleman “bathtub” diagram to explicate these ideas.
In a paper, “Micro-foundations in strategic management: Squaring Coleman’s diagram,” that just been published online in Erkenntnis, Jack Vromen, criticizes our reading of the routines and capabilities literature and, in particular, our use of the Coleman diagram to explicate our criticism. Basically, he argues that we are confused about the key distinction between constitutive and causal relations. Here is our Reply. The abstracts are copied in below. (more…)
Austrian Economics in Transition
| Nicolai Foss |
The Austrian School of Economics continues to provide grist for the doctrinal historian’s mill. New interpretations are developed. Forgotten manuscripts by prominent Austrians are still being discovered. The discovery of the Mises archive about a decade ago by Jörg Guido Hülsmann comes to mind. I recently had the pleasure of reading four hitherto unpublished Hayek papers (including his talk at Cambridge in 1931, immediately before the lectures at LSE that became Prices and Production, that Joan Robinson later described/dissed in this manner, referring to a question by Richard Kahn: “Is it your view that if I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat that would increase unemployment?” “Yes,” said Hayek, “but,” pointing to his triangles on the board, “it would take a very long mathematical argument to explain why”).
Many of those who have done important work on the history of the school includes committed contemporary Austrians (e.g., Joe Salerno, Roger Garrison, Richard Ebeling, etc.), but very substantial research has also been contributed by economists who may may not consider themselves Austrians (this includes many European scholars, such as Hansjoerg Klausinger, Meghnad Desai, Rudy van Zijp, Jacb Birner and many others). This evening I had the opportunity to browse Austrian Economics in Transition, which is an example of this kind of doctrinal history scholarship. The book is edited by Harald Hagemann, Tamotsu Nishizawa, and Yukihiro Ikeda, and was published a couple of months ago by Palgrave MacMillan. It is a collection of essays, 16 in total, by European and Japanese scholar, originating from a conference on Menger in Japan in 2004, and addressing the history of the Austrian School until approximately the end of World War II. (more…)
RBV Primer
| Nicolai Foss |
With Nils Stieglitz I have written “Modern Resource-Based Theory(ies)” (creative title, eh?) for the Handbook on the Economics and Theory of the Firm (apparently, “economics” and “theory” are different things), edited by Michael Dietrich and Jackie Krafft (Edward Elgar, 2011). The paper is mainly an overview. However, we also argue that there are many indications that the different strands of the RBV are increasingly converging.
In Defence of L’Ancien Regime
| Nicolai Foss |
It is sometimes instructive to reflect on the massive changes that the University has undergone since the Second World War. On the negative side, the advent of the mass university has very likely led to a dumbing down of the curriculum in many disciplines and a fall in the requirements for entry. It has paved the way for a powerful bureaucratic caste, and the “bureaucrat-professor” who is in the academic industry because of his specialized management skill, and not because of his wish to engage in scholarly pursuits and the training of the most intelligent persons in a given society. On the benefit side, many more people can now share in science and general learning, very likely contributing to economic growth.
As the universities are broadly speaking financed by the taxpayer, politicians and their henchmen in the ministeries of education, science, technology, etc. happily undertake to steer the universities. Thus, inspired by as-yet-largely-unvalidated claims of a general shift in the “mode of knowledge production,” university bureaucrats, managers, and politicians are calling for increased “inter-disciplinarity” and “relevance,” notably in the form of mobilizing multiple disciplines in the context of concrete problem-solving in “business” (the so-called “Mode II”). In the context of business schools, it seems almost de rigeur in certain quarters to deem business schools largely “irrelevant” (meanwhile, business happily employs the products of business schools, paying MBA and other graduates hefty salaries, presumably motivated by the high usefulness, indeed, “relevance,” of these graduates).
Contrast all this with universities not so many decades back. There are not many who stand up on behalf of l’ancien regime of universities. But here are two who do, one implicitly and the other one (much) more explicitly. (more…)
ScienceCodex
| Nicolai Foss |
ScienceCodex is the name of a great resource for serious procrastination, amusement, and — sometimes — useful inputs to research and teaching. Signing up for the feed will result in about 20 daily pieces of science news, and, at least for me, a couple of them are usually great fun and potentially useful for teaching. For example, those who teach OB or HRM may find this piece, “Over 50? You probably prefer negative stories about young people,” useful for classroom discussion. There are also potentially offensive stories (e.g., “You Kick Like a Girl“), so be forewarned ;-)
The Economics of Freedom of Speech
| Nicolai Foss |
Recent, uhhmm, debate here on O&M has made me wonder why we don’t have an economics of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech has been hailed as the fundamental hallmark of free, open societies and a fundamental human right. It is also clear that freedom of speech is under attack, not just by its traditional enemies within various fundamentalist factions of established religions and authoritarian, populist, and socialist/communist regimes, but also by the tendency to turn political disagreements into moral disagreements (in Europe, most prevalent among lefties who just don’t disagree with you but think you are downright evil in case you defend free markets, nuclear power, etc.).
Related to the latter point, increasingly individuals, groups, and nations define certain opinions, political positions, moral judgments, etc. as “hatecrimes.” This position seems increasingly influential in the EU. Proponents of the right to freedom of speech has countered that part of living in a free and open society is that there is simply no right to avoid insults, hurt feelings, and the like. For example, such arguments have been invoked here in Denmark in the aftermath of the Mohammed cartoon crisis, and are currently being leveled against DK legislation regulating blasphemous utterances. However, even the most ardent defenders of freedom of speech draw the line at the explicit verbal promotion of violence against others. And most defenders of freedom of speech would also argue that organizations and associations have the rights to regulate their members’ freedom of speech.
These are clearly externality and property rights issues, and would therefore seem to fall directly within the orbit of economic arguments. And yet, economists have had very little to say about freedom of speech. Specifically, negative or positive externalities are not conventionally seen as including the untraded effects of utterances. One of the few papers that have dealt with these issues, Coase’s “The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas,” basically argues that if there is a case for regulating the market for goods, there is also a case for regulating the market for ideas (specifically, politicians — which admittedly adds to the attraction of the idea). (more…)
Chris Freeman, 1921-2010
| Nicolai Foss |
Chris Freeman, author of The Economics of Industrial Innovation, co-founder of Research Policy, and founder and first director of the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, died yesterday. Freeman was not only an academic entrepreneur, but also an important mentor for innovation scholars like Giovanni Dosi, Keith Pavitt, and Jan Fagerberg.
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“De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum”?
| Nicolai Foss |
History of econ nerds (wonks?) will know that John Stuart Mill was trained by his father (James Mill) from the age of three in the Greek and Latin languages. Since Mill, economists’ Latin capabilities have deteriorated rather badly (a result of the dominance of Greek notation? ;-)). In fact, most economists only know two Latin sentences (or rather, dicta) that, however, they love to blurt out, often with a smug smile. One is a sound analytical principle, namely the ceteris paribus principle. The other is a much more problematic (if applied outside of economics) claim, made famous to economists by George Stigler and Gary Becker, namely “de gustibus non est disputandum.”
I have always been surprised by the readiness of many economists to endorse this claim as a general claim that goes beyond the simple implication that in economics we take preferences as given and applies on the aesthetic domain (perhaps this simply reflects the fact that many people nowadays subscribe to total or near-total relativism in aesthetics). However, understood as an aesthetic claim, “de gustibus non est disputandum” lies entirely outside of the orbit of economics (and economists-as-economists should shut up), and is emphatically not implied by subjective value theory, or any related branch of subjectivism in economics. (more…)
Pomo Periscope XX: Thomas Basbøll vs. Karl Weick
| Nicolai Foss |
Karl Weick may not really qualify as a bona fide pomo. He writes well and clearly and much of his work is quite in the mainstream of management research. Still, he has written about the favorite pomo notion of reflexivity (e.g., here), his authority is often invoked in prominent pomo tracts in management (e.g., here), and his notion of sensemaking has a distinct pomo connotation.
Weick’s work has recently been subject to close examination by my CBS colleague, Thomas Basbøll. In a recently published paper, “Softly Constrained Imagination: Plagiarism and Misprision in the Theory of Organizational Sensemaking,” Basbøll argues that Weick’s work suffers from “significant instances of plagiarism and misreading” (p. 164). Wow! Here is the abstract:
While Karl Weick’s writings have been very influential in contemporary work on organizations, his scholarship is rarely subjected to critical scrutiny. Indeed, despite its open ‘breaching’ of the conventions of much academic writing, Weick’s work has been widely celebrated as ‘first-rate scholarship.’ As it turns out, however, his ‘softly constrained’ textual practices are rendered doubtful by both misreading and plagiarism, which makes his work resemble ‘poetry’ in a much stronger sense than perhaps originally intended. This paper draws inspiration from literary theory to analyze three cases of questionable scholarship in Weick’s 1995 book Sensemaking in organizations, framing them in the context of standard formulations of the methodology of sensemaking drawn from the literature. It concludes that we need to rethink our tolerance of the sensemaking style and re-affirm a commitment to more traditional academic constraints.
Here is Weick’s reply. And here is Thomas’s reply to the reply.
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Management Journal Impact Factors 2009
| Nicolai Foss |
Eugene Garfield may not exactly be defunct, but it is entirely tr
ue that practical men, such as university presidents, deans, and department heads, are slaves of the Science Citation Index he created. In fact, so are the rest of us who have eagerly been waiting for the publication of the impact factors for 2009. They have just arrived and it is fascinating stuff. Here are a few immediate observations on the management IFs:
- Abstracting from MIS Quarterly, the Strategic Management Journal is #3.
- Journal of Management is, at #5 (and #4 if MIS Q is left out) cementing its position as a top journal.
- Strategic Organization is up on #8! Way to go, Joel and colleagues! But can you sustain that position?
- Journal of International Business Studies has dropped a few positions but is still in the top-10.
- Journal of Management Studies (#14) has emerged as a close competitior in terms of ranking to Organization Science (#12). It is the undisputed #1 Euro management journal (it has also just entered the Financial Times ranking).
- Resarch Policy, which was among the top 10 only two years back, is now #22.
- Management Science is now down to #24. There are management departmetns where this journal is considered A+.
Of course, we all know the many reasons why all this should be taken with more than the proverbial grain of salt. For example, as Ram Mudambi points out (personal conversation), more and more journals play the impact factor game and force authors to cite recent papers in the journals, and reference lists grow longer and longer. Perhaps Article Influence Scores represent the superior alternative.
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