94. "The Importance of Management Research"

SUMMARY

In this volume of Current Topics in Management, we continue the tradition of devoting the final chapter to a discussion of the health and practice of management research and offering suggestions for improvement. While some may think that these annual assessments are slightly grumpy, they are never offered in a curmudgeonly spirit. We are optimistic about the importance of management research. If we appear overly critical, it is because we perceive a wide gap between performance and goal, which also applies to our work. Each year we struggle to understand why this gap appears so highly resistant to being narrowed. We hope and trust that these articles will encourage others to improve the quality and relevance of management research. We continue because we believe that management research is important.

We keep searching for root causes of the gap between what management research could contribute and its actual contributions to both the organization sciences and society. We are reminded that this gap is real. For example, Mitroff (1998) states that management is a tenth-rate discipline of first-rate importance. While Mitroff overstates the problem, he provides a colorful way of describing this gap. We see the world differently than does Mitroff. We see enormous vitality in the sheer volume of effort, in the variety of problems being researched, and in the originality and creativity of much of the research. This vast outpouring of effort certainly offers many opportunities for improvements. We believe that the basis for criticisms such as Mitroff's is not so much an epistemological set of issues for how we conduct the research but rather, more of an ontological question of the nature of management.

We argue that management is not a natural science such as the physical or biological sciences. We think that management is best seen as a class of technologies. We can study aspects of management using methods of science but the phenomena is inherently man-made and continually changing. We think that management is society's prime technology.

Management research is important because improving management is seen as the best means of attaining, sustaining, and enhancing our civilization. It is the poorly performing companies, economies, and nations that spawn conditions leading to a lack of hope, to ruin, to intolerance, and to counterproductive movements such as the terrorists of the al-Qaeda network and the oppression and darkness of regimes such as the late Taliban in Afghanistan.

The subject matter of management research is virtually infinite. There is an immense variety of organizations. The scope of subjects involving management is unbounded. There is diversity in research methods, theoretical stances, and choice of problems. Furthermore, organizations change for a wide range of reasons and are subject to variation in their environments. This richness and diversity poses challenges to anyone brave enough to try to make sense of it all. Furthermore, management is not a static target. It is continually shifting as organizations adapt to new augmenting information technologies, new competitive and social forces, irregular application of regulations, and stakeholder demands. Management research addresses a moving target with the unusual feature that in most cases, a management solution begets more problems than it solves. It is like being on an accelerating treadmill in which the more one does, the faster it goes.

This evolving nature makes management research different from research in fields such as physics and chemistry. In those sciences, one can confidently speak of scientific discoveries which Polanyi (1962, p. 179) defines as "an addition to our knowledge of nature." In management, on the other hand, there are inventions "which establish a new operational principle serving some acknowledged advantage" (Polanyi, 1962, p. 179). A radical change in economic values of the means used up and in the ends produced by an invention can render an invention worthless. A brilliant invention can be rendered nonsensical by a better invention. Management solutions, like inventions and discoveries, involve originality. However, management solutions can be made obsolete by changes in context, market conditions, and improvements in technology. Circumstances change and this fact makes involvement in management research an infinite game.

The evolving nature of management and, hence, of management research, has notable consequences. First, our theories tend toward abstraction, with constructs in the place of variables and elaborate statistical procedures substituting for actual measurement. Second, it may be that as a field we suffer a mild case of "physics envy": We have adopted the epistemology of the physical sciences and try to produce knowledge that is objective, context free (general), encapsulated in formulae or rules, and not reliant on talent or intuition for implementation. Previous articles in this series [cf. Pate, Golembiewski, and Rahim (1997), Lundberg, Golembiewski, and Rahim (1998), Mackenzie, Golembiewski, and Rahim (1999, 2000), and Mackenzie, Rahim, and Golembiewski (2001)] have offered suggestions for reducing these shortcomings. Another consequence is that management research tends to lag behind actual, cutting edge, management practices. The research community tends to react to changes taking place in organizations.