Improving the Quality of Business Research by Asking Significant Questions: A Review and Suggested Technique for Increasing Relevance (original) (raw)
2010, Advances in Business Research
We suggest that organizational and managerial research tends to suffer from incremental approaches that marginalize the results. We review the history and nature of organizational research as a means of pointing out WKH OLPLWDWLRQV RI YDULRXV DSSURDFKHV WR WKH LVVXH RI GHYHORSLQJ KLJK TXDOLW\ UHVHDUFK WKDW FDQ VLJQL¿FDQWO\ LPSDFW research and practice. We note that research that tends to affect practice comes from qualitative studies that lack rigor, but frequently provide meaningful insights. We then examine one technique, called Spectrum analysis, as a means of improving the assessment of organizational information and as a basis for improving the quality of future qualitative research efforts. This is demonstrated by applying the Spectrum analysis to the information from the book Built to Last as a way of providing an example of the utility of such approaches to furthering knowledge of organizational and managerial experience.
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This is a paper where what is unsaid is as much important to me as what is said. Ultimately, I would say it made me think with a hammer, but still left me frustrated. The theory-practice debate has always engaged me as a practicing administrator, but I could hold on fondly to my prejudices until I began to write this piece. 2. I have tried to answer two questions: 1. Are multiple paradigms good for organizational theory? 2. Is theory valid for its own sake or for its relevance and usefulness to the practitioner? I have begun by trying to see the reasons for the theory-practice divide: Theory does not capture complexity, the heterogeneous nature of the practitioner audience, theory’s emphasis on what ‘ought to be’ than process and politics, distance from local reality, and theory creating theoreticians, not actors. 3. In Part II, I have tried to see if a bridge can be built. History, Globalization and the emergence of Professional disciplines (management, public policy) seem to be closing the gap. Part III is a discussion of Professional/Practitioner Rationality vis-à-vis Technical Rationality and the nature of Professional theory. In Part IV I have concluded that given the complex nature of reality, and given that theory and practice validate each other; a multi-paradigmatic discipline like organizational studies is more equipped to provide answers than other mono-paradigmatic sciences. 4. Early on, I began to have doubts (a) Is it not better to leave theory free to find validation in itself than in practice? (b) Is it the practitioner’s responsibility to sift and find answers or the theorist’s to cater to practicality? (c) Is it good for a discipline to be self engaged or engage with the world outside itself? As I read more and more to find clarity, what I found were heartening echoes in literature rather than answers. My questions remain, but I hope I am a bit wiser now in not having all the answers.
Crossing Boundaries to Increase Relevance in Organizational Research
Journal of Management Inquiry, 2009
... in Organizational Research Jeffrey T. Polzer Ranjay Gulati Rakesh Khurana Michael L. Tushman Harvard Business School ... It has been our intent to bring this diversity of perspec-tives to bear on the problem of relevance. Commentary on Palmer, Dick, and Freiburger ...
Organization Theory, as taught in Business Schools and even in departments of Sociology, unquestioningly assume a conventionally bounded social entity called 'the organization' to be its legitimate object of analysis. This theoretical orientation is of much more recent origin than most organization theorists would care to admit. Max Weber, for instance, was really more interested in the increasing ordering and bureaucratization of modern society rather than in discrete operational (business) units called 'organizations'. The idea that Organization Theory's legitimate scope of study is circumscribed by the practical problems of how to efficiently and effectively organize work effort seriously overlooks the significance and relevance of the wider societal context and the shifting intellectual mood within which such areas of concern have been constructed. It is possible and perhaps even necessary to effect a certain distancing from these preoccupations and to ask how else might Organization Theory proceed which can be radically different and yet pragmatically useful to the practitioner manager. This requires a kind of speculative conjecturing which does away with the 'sacred cows' of the managerialist dogma. Just like Darwin's deep reflections gradually weaned him away from the ideology of creationism, speculative theorizing in the generic area of organizational analysis may yet help reconstruct a fruitful and edifying role for the future of Organization Theory. The idea of Organization Theory as a kind of Speculative Science is intended as a conceptual handle for stimulating debate on the future of the discipline. It calls for a reorientation of our current interest in the analysis of the organization of effort to an analysis of the intellectual effort involved in formulating new concepts and categories that would help effect a radical rethinking of the locus/focus of Organizational Analysis.
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