Guest editorial

Guest editorial

About the Guest EditorsAll of the guest editors of this special edition teach and research in the School of Management at the University of Surrey.

Andy Adcroft teaches corporate strategy and has written and published on issues as diverse as public sector management, the global cars business and the use of poetry as an analytical device in management research. Andy Adcroft is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: a.adcroft@surrey.ac.uk

Spinder Dhaliwal’s research is in the area of small businesses and focuses specifically on minority ethnic businesses and female entrepreneurs. She teaches mainly in the area of entrepreneurship.

Graham Miller is a Senior Lecturer in the Tourism Management group in the school where he teaches in areas related to ethics and sustainability, issues on which he has published widely.

Phil Walsh is the programme director for the school’s MBA and teaches corporate strategy and project management across many of the school’s programmes.

Theory and practice, strategy and sustainability

This special issue of Management Decision is concerned with the nature of relationships. Philip Larkin in his famous poem about parents suggested that the relationships within a family are the source of both joy and despair and that the tension between these two feelings is what gives individual families their unique quality. This perspective on tensions, paradoxes and opposing positions underpins the philosophy of this special edition; rather than seeing these characteristics as things, which require reconciliation and rationalisation, we accept them as fundamentally positive characteristics of inquisitive life. The modern political response to this kind of conflict is triangulation where opposing views are defined in terms of their extreme nature and a subsequent position is justified between the two on the basis of sensibility and consensus. We do not aim to either reconcile or compromise on the debates and discussions in the articles in this special edition but, with a degree of good temper and moderation, we hope to describe, engage and further some of the arguments.

The co-creator of Seinfeld, Larry David, suggested that a good situation comedy requires two key ingredients. The first ingredient is the characters and, especially with ensemble comedies, a diversity of characters. The second ingredient is less tangible and it is the relationships between those characters. The comedy will work, according to David, only if these two elements are present and working. In this context, we have four characters and three relationships in this special issue. Our characters are theory, practice, strategy and sustainability. These issues are important because they both inform and reflect a great deal of management research. The first pair, theory and practice, provide the foundation for much academic and scholarly work from both prescriptive and descriptive perspectives. The second pair, strategy and sustainability, are much less foundational and architectural concepts but we would suggest that they do reflect two major preoccupations of the modern world for, amongst others, academics and policy makers, public and private sectors, economists and ecologists. The character list is varied, therefore, and offers insights into both the process and outcome of management research but it is the three relationships, which, perhaps, matter more in terms of scholarship. The relationships are those within and between each pair and between the two pairs. Before examining these relationships, let us start by thinking of the characters and our perspective on the issues.

Hegel suggested that success of any kind requires a good theory which offers as good a starting point as any to discuss the nature of theory. The problem with theory as a word and concept is that to different people it will mean different things. For some, being theoretical will be a badge of honour, the sign of a true academic concerned only with scholarly pursuits and the generation of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. For others, being accused of being theoretical is an insult and a term of intellectual abuse where the person is too academic, too distanced and divorced from the real world and whose work has no real practical value. There is little that can be done to settle the squabble as the conceptual basis of theory accommodates both perspectives; theory can either be a set of ideas formulated, often by way of reasoning, from known facts or theory can simply be an opinion or a supposition. If we cannot settle the debate, let us stoke the discussion and offer two suggestions about theory in relation to management research: First, theory is rarely clear cut and absolute but is more likely to be a combination of fact and opinion; second, management research, in attempting to renew itself, increasingly draws on non-management theories for inspiration.

In a speech to the 7th International Conference on the Dynamics of Strategy, the Foreign Minister of the Seychelles, Patrick Pillay, suggested that theory is never blind and so theory can never be absolutely academic. Like speech act theorists, Minister Pillay suggested that theory is always for someone and for some purpose; whilst they may be developed out of established facts, theories often have agendas. One explanation for this is that “all theories have a perspective and perspectives derive from a position in social and political time and space” which raises the idea that theory is important not just because it may explain the world in which we live but also because it is a reflection of the world in which we live. Roger Mason’s paper raises some interesting issues along this theme and discusses the issue of the organisation-environment relationship which is central to pretty much all theories of strategy. To understand a company’s strategy, Mason argues, it is impossible to detach that strategy from the position in time and space occupied by the company and he makes some interesting use of complexity and chaos theories to make the point.

One of the problems for management research is that whilst management as an activity has probably been around forever, management research, which attempts to explain it, is much younger. For example, strategy as a subject has only been around since the 1960s and it is not unreasonable to suggest that a great deal of modern thinking on strategy can be traced back to the work of Michael Porter in the early 1980s. Despite its youth, and possibly because of the exuberance of such youth, management research has developed at breakneck speed and in a number of interesting directions. As traditional theories are developed and (over) exploited, management researchers often look elsewhere for new ideas and inspirations to explain how the world of management works. For example, one of the growing trends in strategy research has been the use of political concepts, especially revolution, and, more generally, management researchers have looked to psychology, sociology, economics, geography, post-modernism, modernism, anthropology and a whole series of other areas to inform their research. Whilst much of this may reflect desperation and not inspiration, when the depth and meaning of a non-management discipline is not lost but added to in the translation, value can often result. For example, Colin Jones paper considers success and failure in the Hobart pizza industry and, through the innovative use of models and theories of evolution, he draws interesting and valuable conclusions for both the theorist and the practitioner. It is to practice that we now turn.

In considering management practice we are necessarily raising the first of our relationship issues in this special issue and that is the relationship between theory and practice. In the context of this special issue, this relationship is absolutely crucial for two reasons: first, the perspective on the relationship will directly influence the nature of management research and why it is carried out; second, the relationship will determine how that research is carried out. If we think first about the purpose of management research then there are a whole series of different perspectives, which have gained prominence in the past few years. Central to all of this is the extent to which management research is a prescriptive or a descriptive activity and how this is reconciled will, for example, have a major impact on the role of the management researcher. If we consider management research from the perspective of universities, then two questions are raised about the work of such institutions. Over 200 years ago, Friedrich Von Schiller suggested that the work of universities should be divorced from considerations other than the searching for knowledge; knowledge is valuable in and of itself and it is the work of academics to create this knowledge. In this sense management research is primarily a disinterested and descriptive activity. More recently, Gabriel Hawawini (2005) has questioned the extent to which this philosophy still holds true in the ultra competitive world of management training and education. His conclusion is that business and management schools will probably have to become less like traditional universities and adopt a “production based model” where academics become “knowledge professionals”. If nothing else this may reinforce Minister Pillay’s point about the influence of time and space. The idea of business and management schools as having a purpose is explored and developed by Sherry Kothari and Bob Handscombe who consider the extent to which universities are fit for the modern purpose of promoting entrepreneurship and enterprise and the authors use a conceptual approach to discuss how universities could be made more fit for purpose.

Just as the relationship between theory and practice impacts on why management research is carried out, so too will the relationship influence how that research is carried out. Our argument would be that the methodological preferences of the management researcher will be a reflection of his or her perceptions of the world and how it operates. The dominant approach in management research over the past few years has been quantitative in nature and driven by numbers. From this perspective, complexity is best understood by deconstruction and measurement: phenomena can be understood scientifically if they are broken down into their respective components and then analysed through the application of quantitative techniques. Another recent special edition of Management Decision offered an interesting set of counterpoints to this possible tyranny of the sum and suggested that poetry offers a whole series of different opportunities for management researchers. Clearly there is merit in both perspectives and there is probably no clear choice for the management researcher between being a poet or a census taker. We offer illustrations of each perspective. For example, the paper by Frank Lasch, Frederic Le Roy and Yami Said considers why some firms grow and others do not through the use of sophisticated statistical techniques whereas the paper by Anne Marie Fray considers issues of long-term ethical behaviour through a more qualitative process. Whilst both papers are fundamentally different in approach they are similar in terms of the rigour of methodology and value of results.

Chaharbaghi and Willis (1998), in reviewing the popular literature on strategic management, found 52 definitions that were in regular and everyday use. Almost a decade later, it is more likely that this number will have risen rather than fallen, after all the Library of Congress in the USA adds more than 7,000 new articles, journals and books on strategy to its stock every year. As a character, therefore, strategy is complex bordering on schizophrenic, ever changing like the moods of the Style Council and as diverse as an intellectual eco-system. Strategy is about thinking, innovating, art, science, learning, stretch, leverage, survival, winning, capabilities, adding value, alliances, collaborations, competitions, networks and many more things besides. Despite the diversity and seeming lack of structure and consistency, there are a number of themes in the literature on strategy, which remain reasonably constant over time. For example, our recurring issue of time and space; strategy is about how the firm manages the relationship it has with its external environment. Another example, which may differentiate strategy from other forms of management activity, is the notion that strategy is not about an individual activity which resides in one particular part of the organisation but rather strategy is about how activities are integrated together into a consistent whole, how the departmental or functional base of an organisation is bought together in a coherent manner. Another recurring theme of this special edition is that strategy is about relationships as much as anything else. In all of these things, strategy must embody the zeitgeist, strategy is, maybe, about deliberately being in the right place at the right time and in the early twenty-first century this means strategy is about technology and the opportunities presented by technological advance, strategy is about globalisation and the opportunities of international markets and strategy is about revolution and changing to meet the needs of an ever more dramatic, dynamic and accelerated business environment. Saskia De Klerk and Jaipe Kroon’s paper covers a number of these issues, especially the relational possibilities bought about by technological advance and how this advance has forced changes on organisations. On a similar theme, the paper written by Francois Fulconis, Laurence Saglietto and Gilles Pache examines the issue of strategic change from the perspective of supply chains where closer relationships become ever more important.

The final character in this ensemble is sustainability, again a concept open to a myriad different definitions and interpretations. At the most simple level, sustainability could be defined as the ability of actors in the present to meet their needs without compromising the ability of future actors to meet theirs and this is normally set in a context of tension between the economic imperative of a sustainable competitive advantage and the ecological imperative of sustainable development through reductions in pollution, carbon emissions and a range of other issues. In considering the nature of economic sustainability, the discussion usually focuses at two levels. At the macro-level discussions will tend to focus on how, for example, developing economies can secure a place for themselves in the global economic game through issues like government policy, inward investment and new firm development. At the micro level discussion tends to focus on the organisational forms and business models, which will come to dominate the economies of the future and raises issues such as entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship. The paper by Bitange Ndemo and Fides Maina covers a number of these issues and offers some original and fresh insights into gender based entrepreneurship in developing economies.

In discussing the four characters of the special issue and the relationship between them, there is of course, always the chance that we have got it wrong that we have searched for meaning and truth where none exists and that all we have created is an interpretation of phenomena and events that fit our own preconceived expectations and pretensions. If every generation believes that their time is more dynamic, revolutionary and significant than any which preceded it, is there a danger that all we are doing is putting a modern and meaningful spin on issues which have been around much longer than the arrogant and pretentious academics who believe they are stumbling on something new and novel? Poet and critic, Tom Paulin, famously sees most things as operating at a number of different levels and with a variety of meanings. In reviewing the reviewer, the criticism is often made that meaning is artificially created by the critic and that it is always possible to impose an interpreted meaning where none was intended. The truth, therefore, is not necessarily built on solid foundations but rather is derived from little more than “mud and wrath” (Paulin, 1977). Perhaps the world is more like Seinfeld, the comedy where nothing happens except people just do things that every one else does. In his paper, Steven Henderson considers related issues and questions the extent to which modern theories of strategy really reflect what happens when strategy is being carried out. Henderson suggests that too much time is spent analysing decisions that have been taken and not enough time is spent considering whether those decisions actually matter.

At the end of the day, management research is about the search for some kind of truth. That search for truth can come from rigorous statistical analysis of complex data sets or in depth analysis of one or two case studies but we must accept that the outcome will always be informed by the process. In the broad and eclectic collection of papers in this special issue we have come, through many processes, to many truths about theory and practice, strategy and sustainability. Whilst many of the positions are complimentary, many are paradoxical but such is the nature of academic life and we should never abjure this kind of variety. Whether it is our or someone else’s truth, whether that truth is real or imagined, if it raises debate it will always have some value.

Andy Adcroft, Spinder Dhaliwal, Graham Miller, Phil WalshUniversity of Surrey, Guildford, UK