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British Journal of Management, Vol. 12, Special Issue, S33–S39 (2001) The Two Pillars of New Management Research Armand Hatchuel Ecole des mines de Paris/CGS 60, Bd St Michel, Paris 75006 email: [email protected] Ken Starkey and Paula Madan’s report, Bridging the Relevance Gap (2001), advocates the development of collaborative networks between academics and organizations. Drawing on similar experiences, this article discusses two essential conditions of such programmes: a clarification of the scientific object of management research, and the design of research-oriented partnerships. The scientific identity of management research should be distinguished from other social sciences: management sciences do not study economic or social facts, but ‘models of collective action’ which are then perceived and judged conventionally and historically as ‘economic or social phenomena’. Therefore, the essence and universality of management research is in understanding, criticizing and inventing ‘models of collective action’. In management research, as in other design sciences, the classical laboratory and field models of research are important. However, a third model of research based on partnerships is required, where knowledge does not transcend action but is integral to it. Yet research is not simply ‘doing better’ and requires theoretical and empirical control. Hence, the design of ‘research oriented partnerships’ is a crucial key of new management research. Inspired by existing experiences, the research community could lay down the rules and commitments expected from academics and companies in research-oriented partnerships. Resting on these two pillars, research could contribute to the invention of new models of collective action adapted to contemporary issues and values and reduce misleading mimetic behaviour, blind compliance to gurus or fashion in management practice. Introduction: experiences in innovative management research The report, Bridging the Relevance Gap, by Ken Starkey and Paula Madan is one of the most comprehensive overviews of contemporary issues in management research. Using ‘relevance’ as a questioning entry, the authors critically revisit some of the classical views of the field: the socalled ‘word-class’ level, the limits of academic self-governance, the problems of transdisciplinary research, and the challenges and difficulties of partnerships. The report also offers a creative synthesis, identifying the need for new orientations in management research and training. Among other propositions, the authors advocate a shift towards a model based on collaborative networks between academics and organizations corresponding to Gibbons et al.’s Mode 2 type of knowledge © 2001 British Academy of Management production (Gibbons et al., 1994). However, the report avoids a naive view on the feasibility and effectiveness of such a shift. Instead, the authors recommend an experimental, pragmatic and collective endeavour towards three objectives: (i) maintaining the scientific logic and identity of the management sciences; (ii) adopting a critical view on ‘relevance’; (iii) learning from existing innovative research practice which has combined rigour and partnerships. As most of my own research work has been inspired by similar orientations (Hatchuel and Molet, 1986), I deeply agree with the diagnosis, spirit and recommendations of the report. Therefore, drawing on my research experiences in new forms of management research my comments S34 mainly offer complementary views on the central propositions of the report. My research experience took place in two academic institutions, mostly in France (as a Professor and Deputy Director of the Center for Management Science of the Ecole des Mines de Paris) and more recently in Sweden (as Guest Professor for the FENIX programme). In both cases, we tried to rethink and redesign the definition and practice of management research, anticipating some of the current criticisms addressed to ‘mainstream’ management research. The youngest of these institutions, the Swedish FENIX programme, is significantly mentioned in Starkey and Madan’s report (pp. 23–24). The older one is the Center for Management Science at the Ecole des Mines de Paris, a well-established research team in France where I had the opportunity with colleagues to elaborate and develop in several organizations a concept of InterventionResearch (David, 2001; Hatchuel, 2001). It would be interesting to compare the history of the two groups, their different cultural or institutional contexts and the strong links they have with engineering schools and technical universities. However, such comparison would be beyond the scope of this note and I will focus instead on two key issues which are accurately discussed in the report, and which also appeared to us as interrelated basic conditions for a renewed model of management research: • • the need for a clear scientific identity of management research differentiating it from social or economic studies; the necessity for a set of principles and rules (a collective chart?) for the design of researchoriented partnerships. A simultaneous treatment of these two issues could provide the main pillars for the ‘bridging’ efforts advocated by the report. The identity of management research: neither applied economics, nor applied sociology Management sciences are among the youngest of all human and social sciences. They still suffer A. Hatchuel from being bogged down in recurrent controversies1 on the effectiveness and meaning of management techniques or their borrowings from a number of other sciences.2 Too often they are perceived as a ‘crossroads’ of other more fundamental disciplines. The management sciences are thus condemned to find a better definition of the true nature of their object and scientific identity. This difficulty is also experienced by most of the social sciences. Nonetheless, the crisis takes a different form for them. It results in the fragmentation and questioning of a conceptual ‘heart’, the discipline’s scientific core. Although it has been severely criticized and even sometimes abandoned, this ‘core’ nonetheless remains as the field’s unifying symbol or a ground for dispute between the Ancients and the Moderns. This type of model, common to both sociology (with Durkheim’s definition of social facts) and economics (with Walras’s theory of markets), is the reverse of the one faced by the management sciences. The latter did not develop from a theoretical reference project, but from an educational project, with its foundations in the constantly renewed needs of firms. Lacking core theory The key issue for management sciences can therefore be expressed the other way round from those of the other social sciences: theoretical unification is needed to put an end to permanent scepticism and controversies. The social sciences (we will mainly refer here to sociology and economics) were initially created around academic traditions. Economics was structured mainly by intellectuals like Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham. Economics sees itself primarily as a science for trade or markets. And although economics has also taken an interest in production and firms, it normally only interprets 1 There have been countless worried editorials and special issues of journals devoted to questioning the status of the management sciences. 2 Even these borrowings can spark off difficulties. By recently adopting culture-based perspectives (Hofstede, 1986), the management sciences merely imported additional difficulties: should culture be seen in the structures, in the tools or in knowledge? Or in all of these elements at the same time? These notions come from an interpretative epistemology that does not provide a theory of collective action. The Two Pillars of New Management Research these within its hypothetical framework: that of distinct individual interests exchanging riches, which may or may not cooperate in their creation. Likewise, most of the founding fathers of sociology belonged to the academic community. But, sociological research had more difficulties in specifying its identity (Jonas, 1991). Auguste Comte thought that sociology would be the ‘science of sciences’ and would absorb economics as one of its branches. But this all-encompassing position did not prevail. Rather, sociology resolved (after Durkheim) to define itself in a more restrictive manner, as a science of ‘social facts’. This notion still remains difficult to delimit, but it refers quite clearly to the study of things that forge and consolidate human groups. Both of these disciplines therefore specify their objects by separating and distinguishing the class of collective action they study.3 Management sciences sprang from rather different origins. Taylor and Fayol, recognized founders, were both company directors and engineers who, moreover, engaged very little with the philosophical debates of their time. Why were they obliged to carry out such an in-depth reflection on their practices? One reason was that they were confronting a world where organizational action was more difficult to comprehend. Business history confirms that management research arises when it is no longer possible to act by reflex or according to tradition, as if the situation and phenomena to be dealt with were perceived as ‘natural’, and the adequate response had been previously ‘naturalized’.4 This remark explains why management sciences found their nest in a specific form of collective action, ‘the enterprise’; and why this was their only possible place of birth. Firms could not be naturalized as could ‘families’, ‘nations’ or ‘ethnic 3 A sociologist can, of course, decide that he is interested in all the collective phenomena, as he will be examining them with the eyes of a sociologist. This position means that the specificities of such a point of view must be clarified, if only to differentiate it from that of an economist. Stating these specificities inevitably reintroduces a form of restriction on the phenomena studied. 4 Let us define ‘naturalization’ as the attitude which consists of treating as ‘naturally observable’ a phenomenon whose context and history have been isolated artificially through the material and conceptual conditions of observation. S35 groups’. Thus a general theory of collective action, the foundation stone of what an enterprise really is, should be the major issue and result of management sciences, and not of sociology or economics which deal with restricted interpretations of collective action. Moreover, it is mainly around the development of the enterprise that the process of ‘denaturalization/artifactualization’ of collective action became important in our societies.5 The object of management science: models of collective action The enterprise as a collective action process is forced to live with objects whose identities are both transformed and transformable. This is not an economic fact, but rather a constitutional element underlying economic facts. Consequently, the study of this singular object has given rise to unexpected epistemological problems. What, after all, is a ‘firm’? What is the exact nature of these collectives, so varied in terms of size and activity, which determine such a large part of modern history? The ‘firm’ constitutes a type of collective action in which economic and social phenomena are inevitably intermingled. As soon as they appeared, firms tended to challenge the idea that it was possible to isolate classes of collective phenomena just as the animal world had, until recently, been separated from the vegetable world thereby neglecting the symbiosis vital to their mutual survival. Thus the ‘firm’ is constituted as an ‘artefactual’ collective action and not as a natural social phenomenon or an anthropological fact. It is precisely because it is not in the least bit natural or traditional that the firm takes part in the transformation and the production of societies, for better or for worse. It therefore links things that were thought to be separate, and reveals by its action that it is not possible to isolate collective phenomena in principle and definitely. Hence, the firm is not a collective that can be isolated naturally, and the permanent revising of its boundaries (physical, legal, human, commercial, etc) is a condition of its existence. In studying ‘firms’, the management sciences could not 5 I consider that the well-known Weberian concept of ‘disenchantment of the world’ or ‘rationalization’ can be extended and more precisely described as a denaturalization /artefactualization process (see Hatchuel, 2001). S36 therefore define themselves by isolating a limited series of collective phenomena in advance, but had to examine the actions that create and destroy collective phenomena. As soon as they are formed, ‘firms’ are confronted with unusual freedom: they are responsible for defining what they are to do and the way in which this definition is to be operationalized! No other ‘institution’ has such freedom to define itself! Consequently, firms can experience radical changes after which neither a name nor a brand survives (for instance, after acquisitions). The ‘artefactual’ nature of firms explains the invention of management doctrines: they are both the consequence and the condition of this artefactuality. Management doctrines do not determine actions or success, but they are necessary for the controlled production of knowledge and discourse. With these doctrines research becomes possible and also the discovery of a specific class of collective learning about action models. The management sciences are therefore inseparable from a conception of reflexive freedom. However, they should not accept a metaphysical view of liberalism. They must contest the illusions of pure self-foundation or the entrepreneur seen as a ‘deus ex machina’. Similarly, it is within the management sciences that the most common concepts of voluntary and planned action (decision, command, coordination, design) have been critically investigated. The action of a planner can stimulate collective action but can never replace it. The management sciences should reject either totalizing principles of action such as ‘optimization’ and ‘invisible hands’, or totalizing subjects (the entrepreneur, the boss) capable of ‘planning’ collective action. With these elements in hand, a new definition of their object appears which is of crucial importance for their methodology and relevance. The management sciences do not study economic or social facts, but ‘models of collective actions’ which are then perceived and judged conventionally and historically as ‘economic or social phenomena’. They should therefore occupy a special position in the world of the social sciences. The social sciences can be thought of as interpretative or critical anatomies of collective living, but the management sciences only reach their true object by referring anatomy back to embryology, i.e. embedding social and economic phenomena in a more universal theory of collective action. What would collective life be without A. Hatchuel such foundational notions like ‘promise’ or ‘contract’ which are precisely models of action? The essence of management research is in understanding, inventing, and criticizing ‘models of collective action’. Thus, it is not surprising that the main contributions of management research to societies, those of historic importance, are small in number: accounting, company definition, risk management and Taylorism. The development and social diffusion of new models of collective action does not happen every day. Therefore ‘lack of relevance’ in management research is a scientific problem and not the mere consequence of academic isolation. If ‘there is nothing more practical than a good theory’, then applying this proposition to management scientists means that their best methodological support is also a good theory of what management science is. Principles and rules for researchoriented partnerships One often confuses knowledge production methods and scientific disciplines. There are infinitely more disciplines than there are methods for producing knowledge. Such methods are very few in number. It could hardly be otherwise since research methods define our conditions of representing the world and the action we can carry out upon it. Models of knowledge production are transdisciplinary by nature. The famous ‘experimental method’ does not belong to medicine, to biology, to statistics or to physics. It is indisputably a transdisciplinary concept. To understand the scarcity of knowledge production models and their transdisciplinarity, one should consider that they are universal models of action and that each field of research adopts all or part of the same list. Yet only two universal models of research are usually mentioned, the ‘laboratory’ and the ‘field’ model, forgetting that the design of artefacts and models of action is a third model; a model which is as necessary in the management sciences as the other two. Let us briefly remind ourselves of their main differences. The laboratory model or the confinement of action The laboratory (including the observatory) represents the ideal model of knowledge production which developed triumphantly during the great The Two Pillars of New Management Research seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the laboratory, the researcher attempts to be master, circumscribing all questions, confining all objects and tests, constraining all entities manipulated in a certain manner; even defining their conditions of existence by, for example, putting them between microscope slides, chopping them up or putting them into homogenous groups. Hence, pure mathematical and conceptual research can be considered as an extreme form of laboratory research. Moreover, the researcher can increase his or her knowledge only insofar as he or she can limit collective action inside the laboratory. They must prohibit intervention by any other parties in the process of knowledge production: the method demands independence, and independence in turn is the guarantor of legitimacy. The ‘field’ model or the ‘naturalizing’ of phenomena and artefacts The ‘field’ model consists of ‘naturalizing’ an object that cannot be ‘manipulated’ so as to study it. Collective action is quite often naturalized and transformed into a phenomenon. By saying: ‘I observe landscapes’, we immediately naturalize the notion of landscape and we forget, at least momentarily, that we are dealing with only an artefact. The notion of ‘research field’ begins, thus, with the masking of the artefact that defines the field. It should also be underlined that this posture is common to both the natural and the social sciences. One can, thus, consider as research fields ‘the day-to-day life of a CEO’, ‘animal life’, or ‘the evolution of geography’. In each case, one must also suppose a separation between the research process and the phenomenon under study. Nevertheless, this separation is never complete; the researcher cannot manipulate and control his ‘field’ as in a laboratory. He must take advantage of a certain amount of ‘interaction’ with the ‘field’ which authorizes his presence. The intervention-research model: when research becomes constitutional of the action process In the preceding models, outcoming knowledge was a potential help for action. However, knowledge production and action processes were set apart as two different historical processes. This distinction no longer holds for the sciences which create artefacts or collective action processes, like S37 management sciences. In these cases, theories are constitutional of their objects and fields – they are not simply ‘denotive’ or ‘descriptive’. The distinction between description and prescription becomes almost impossible. If we say that ‘management should allow autonomy to employees’, the proposition is of poor value if we do not explicate how we can define autonomy, recognize it or discuss it; yet this ‘operationalization’ is not a ‘description’, it is a ‘prescriptive’ view of autonomy, which has to be submitted to the judgement of concerned people. Hence ‘autonomy’ is both an input (or an intent) and an output of the management process (what emerges as ‘autonomy’). Therefore, autonomy is not a ‘control factor’ but a concept opened to innovation, discovery and dependent on organizational learning. A theory of ‘autonomy at work’ has to capture the concept, its contingencies and its possible transformations through research. Sciences accepting the idea that research is constitutional of action processes could be called ‘Sciences of Design’ (Simon, 1969; Tranfield and Starkey, 1998). Management sciences, together with architecture, engineering and medicine belong to this genealogy of knowledge. This does not mean that the laboratory model and the field model of research are not important ways of creating knowledge. For sure, they are. And this is obvious, for example, in surgery. Yet, due to their specific purpose, these sciences require a third model of research, a model in which knowledge does not transcend action but is integral to it. Management research, as much as surgery, needs more than laboratory work or observation. It needs models of action helping to design and redesign what is good management. Starkey and Madan clearly remind us that such a model requires companies’ participation and understanding. I would add that this participation requires also adequate principles and rules for the design of what can be labelled ‘research-oriented partnerships’. Not all forms of collaboration between academia and companies are research oriented. At the Ecoles des Mines, we have defined the methological principles of what we call ‘interventionresearch’ (David, 2001; Hatchuel, 2000; Hatchuel and Molet, 1986). The principles of interventionresearch are built on more universal principles than classical action-research in social psychology (David, 2001) as they can be adopted by any science that defines itself as a science of design. S38 Similarly, researchers at the FENIX programme insist on ‘table-tennis research’, a metaphor designating the type of rules and relations which are settled with companies (Adler and Shani, 2001). Let us describe briefly the common features of these intervention approaches and how they attempt to build research-oriented methodologies. Research as a model of action. They offer to companies a research project where the scientific objectives are clearly defined and where there is a potential interest for the companies themselves to adopt a research perspective. This partnership does not aim only to create reflexivity or improvement: these are not sufficient criteria for scientific achievement. Its core programme is to discover hidden properties of existing models of action, to detect unknown models and whenever possible contribute to inventing new ones. The role of the research team is to ground this programme in solid theoretical advances. Our experience also confirms that consulting and expertise are not good models for interventionresearch. Moreover, companies experimenting with intervention-research are more aware of a universal truth: research is not simply ‘doing better’; research requires embedding ‘progress’ in a theoretical framework that allows conceptual and empirical control. Methodological commitments concern all partners. In both experiences, principles for research-oriented partnerships have been progressively established. They clarify the methodological conditions under which Gibbons et al.’s Mode 2 is really a research process. It would take too long to discuss here all these principles but we can briefly sketch the main ones: • • Intervention-research is possible only in companies (or organizational contexts) where some management issues are ‘opened up’ to internal debate. The results are thus embedded in historical and institutional contexts. The research team has to clearly ascertain that in spite of such contingencies the ‘opened’ questions can be linked to a more universal agenda of research: a favourable case occurs when the company context offers room for innovative investigations or innovative management. One can imagine the potential value of a research programme on new production systems that would have taken place during the 1960s at Toyota or at Volvo. A. Hatchuel • • The research team has to make explicit the commitments required from companies in order to fulfill the research goals: project duration, scope of the investigation, and authorization to publish the findings. The research programme has to be monitored by special committees that will look for creative compromises between the research goals and the company’s interests. Management research as a permanent functional process. The main impact of research-oriented partnerships is the progressive assessment of management research not only as an academic activity located in universities, but also as a functional process that could be permanent in some companies (this is actually the case in some French and Swedish companies), a function similar to research departments in chemistry, materials or electronics. The value of this cultural change should not be underestimated. It means that managerial choices, endeavours and evaluations can be progressively designed with increased scientific awareness. There is no better method to reduce misleading mimetic behaviour, blind compliance to gurus or fashion in management practice. Finally, rigour in management research should tend to become as natural as it is in any other company process. Let us give an example of this evolution in a company with which we have developed several research programmes. A new CEO decided to introduce major structural changes; obviously, the goals of those changes were ambitious, uncertain and highly dependent of the implementation process. Recognizing these contingencies, the CEO offered our team the chance to study the change process, to analyse its features, to compare it to already-known models and to provide management with scientific feedback at planned milestones. The CEO accepted also the idea that this longitudinal research should be published. The research project lasted three years and the research report was published in its entirety – containing probably the first attempt to conceptualize a strategic change inspired both by a ‘republican’ logic, seeking strong assent from the company’s personnel, and by a ‘biological’ perspective, recognizing spontaneous forces for change (David, 1993). It is important to mention that consultant teams had been involved in the change process, but their role was always and naturally perceived The Two Pillars of New Management Research as different from the researchers’ one. From an academic point of view it was one of the rare situations where we could get close access and experimental opportunity to explore new action models for strategic change. Conclusion To conclude, let us come back to the main message of Starkey and Madan’s report. For sure, management research has to win the ‘relevance’ battle. However, I share with the authors of the report the idea that this endeavor cannot be achieved by classic ‘institutional science policy’, i.e. measures aimed at the better diffusion of existing academic knowledge or better communication between universities and companies. These means are perhaps appropriate in the context of basic chemistry or physics, but not the management sciences. My experience has convinced me that in our field, contemporary issues require deeper changes. Two of them have been discussed in this commentary: i) the identity of management research must be clarified and distinguished from other social studies; ii) the cooperation with companies should not be perceived as a useful consequence of research but as a prerequisite for the production of actionable knowledge. I have tried to offer some insights on how these changes could be conducted in research teams. Yet scientific evolutions have to be assessed by research communities and there is an urgent need to collectively discuss these issues with a new pragmatic perspective. The design of ‘research-oriented partnerships’, a major challenge, requires collective rules, as it concerns also organizations and companies. All stakeholders would find great value if management researchers could establish a kind of chart describing the rules and commitments expected from academics and companies in the design of research-oriented partnerships. These rules should not be a mere rephrasing of classic qualitative methodology. The problem is not to assess data collection and treatment, but to define the rules of an innovative and cooperative game between heterogeneous partners. Actually, these rules will not create the talent needed by any true research work. Similarly, they are not a panacea to become S39 innovative companies. However, they will offer the methodological and institutional setting for the invention of new models of management that have a greater chance to reach universality. Finally, I have no doubt that the debates introduced by the report will convince the readers that ‘bridging the relevance gap’ is a vital and ambitious project; I also hope that my comments will convey the idea that, fortunately, we do not have to build such a project from scratch. References Adler, N. and A. B. R. Shani (2001). ‘In Search of an Alternative Framework for the Creation of Actionable Knowledge: Table-Tennis Research at Ericsson’, paper presented at the 17th Colloquium of the European Group for Organization Studies, 5–7 July, Lyon, France. David, A. (1993). RATP, la métamorphose. Intereditions, Paris. David, A. (2001). ‘Intervention Research as a General Framework for Management Research’. In: A. David, A. Hatchuel and R. Laufer (eds), The New Foundations of Management Science, (English translation). 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