Why is Academia Sometimes Detached from Firms' Problems? The Unattractiveness of Research on Organizational Decline.
| Autor | Serra, Fernando Antonio Ribeiro |
| Cargo | Research Article |
INTRODUCTION
If Sir Isaac Newton had to publish a number of articles in top ranked journals to ensure tenure, would he have chosen dynamics (or Newtonian physics), optics, and mathematics for his groundbreaking contributions, or would he have pursued a more mainstream topic of the day? Would he have chosen a single topic on which to build his reputation? Although his genius might have led to groundbreaking discoveries, his choices of what to research had a profound impact on human development. In this paper, we address the overarching question of what drives researchers' decisions on what to consider to research in business and management, using the specific theme of organizational decline.
As researchers, we are driven by different motivations to conduct research and publish. One motivation is the pressure to publish, often for tenure or to guarantee the performance metrics imposed by the department or university (Davis, 2015). Other motivations may entail a sense of satisfaction or personal accomplishment (Elson & Broudard, 2012; Miller, 2006), including the dissemination of knowledge validated by the peer review process (Acedo, Barroso, Casanueva, & Galan, 2006; Miller, 2006). Perhaps primarily, publishing in well-ranked journals increases our reputation as scholars and aids career advancement (Bedeian, 2004; Davis, 2014). It is likely that these motivations and barriers to publish drive, albeit partially, how researchers select their research problems or what to study. In the literature on the sociology of science, this is known as 'problem choice' (Neff, 2014).
A researcher's problem choice will influence his/her career (Rzhetsky, Foster, Foster, & Evans, 2015). Research on problem choice usually focuses on explaining internal and external factors that influence the researcher's choice of what to research. The personal interests of researchers are classified as internal factors. Internal factors may include interpersonal relationships, including the personal enjoyment of collaborating with specific individuals and broader communities of scholarship (Pfirman & Martin, 2010; Roy et al., 2013).
Pressures from the environment are classified as external pressures (Fisher, 2005). In selecting what to research, scholars are influenced by external factors such as academic productivism (Kolesnikov, Fukumoto, & Bozeman, 2018), the influence of reviewers (Singh, 2003; Swanson, 2004) and editors (Radford, Smillie, Wilson, & Grace., 1999), and low acceptance rates in top tier journals (Sugimoto, Lariviere, Ni, & Cronin, 2013). Other external factors are related to institutional factors from the university and the environment (Rhoten, 2003), and the availability of funding (Nicholson, 2007). All these and other external factors may be barriers to more risky and innovative research (Rzhetsky et al., 2015). They may inhibit personal interest in investigating important business and management phenomena that would challenge existing knowledge (Doh, 2015; Hambrick, 2007; Helfat, 2007; Miller, 2007).
Business schools are criticized regarding knowledge creation and knowledge distribution (Gibbons et al., 1994; Kieser, Nicolai, & Seidl, 2015; Tranfield & Starkey, 1998). 'Problem choice' affects knowledge creation (Evans & Foster, 2011; Foote, 2007), as well as the need to address important phenomena that should link theory and practice (Makadok, Burton, & Barney, 2018; Schwarz & Stensaker, 2014; Van de Ven, 2016) and the way we teach managers (Mintzberg, 2004). If important phenomena are not studied due to the difficulties involved in doing so (Tihanyi, 2020), we will continue to fail to address them inside the classroom (Bower, 2008; Butler, Delaney, & Spoelstra, 2015; Mintzberg, 2004).
In this paper, to contribute to the ground level of problem choice, we scrutinize researchers' problem choice motivation with regard to their research agendas. We specifically analyze the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to adopt, maintain, or abandon a particular research agenda, theory, theme, or topic. Most studies assume a general acceptance of the complexity of internal and external motivations (Zuckerman, 1978), since the days of the work of Merton (1938), and do not usually consider classical approaches to human motivation (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 2012; Ryan & Deci, 2000a, 2000b).
To understand and analyze problem choice, we selected the literature on 'organizational decline' as a relevant research topic (see, for instance, Collins, 2009; Damodaran, 2011; Hamel, 2012; McMillan & Overall, 2017; Whetten, 1980). This goes somewhat against the grain of mainstream research on growth that is prevalent in business and management journals (Serra, Pinto, Guerrazzi, & Ferreira, 2017). Despite the pervasiveness of organizational decline in countries, the extant research has not succeeded in explaining firms' failures (Garicano & Rayo, 2016). Organizational decline is not adequately explained by mainstream theories (McMillan & Overall, 2017). Organizational decline is a topic for phenomenon-driven empirical research that theories of management and organizations neither adequately predict nor explain. It is an important managerial problem that should be researched (Tihanyi, 2020).
In other words, the context of this study is a theme that has seemingly not attracted a great deal of interest from scholars, despite Whetten's (1980) call for additional research over 30 years ago. Therefore, organizational decline is a good research object when it comes to understanding problem choice, since it has the rather rare condition of being an important and yet under-researched topic (Serra, Ferreira, & Almeida, 2013). Methodologically, we used a qualitative approach. We first conducted a search of the literature to identify the most relevant scholars in the field of organizational decline. We then emailed a brief five-question survey to forty scholars that have published major contributions in the field in question. The analyses of their responses were based on interpreting and classifying the scholars' opinions concerning their motivation to study the topic, the reasons for abandoning it, and its pertinence.
This study makes a core contribution to academia by seeking to understand what scholars do and especially how they decide on their research agendas in management and business. This paper also makes a broader contribution, as it allows a better understanding of why some topics or themes are not studied as much as others are. Previous studies usually surveyed a number of authors, identifying the factors that influence their problem choice when it came to adopting or persevering with a topic. We delve deeper to gain a better understanding of why researchers make their decisions, and why they opt to study a certain topic. We may thus gain greater insight concerning why some topics or theories rise to the top of research agendas, while others appear to be forsaken. The choice of a research agenda may be a complex decision, as scholars struggle with pressures to publish that may (Carayol & Dalle, 2007), for instance, lead to choosing research topics that are quicker and easier to publish, pushing important (but harder to research, controversial, or simply not mainstream) research topics to the periphery or abandonment (Rzhetsky et al., 2015). In many instances, these pressures also drive researchers away from topics that are of practical relevance to firms and to teaching. We therefore strive to call for a broader debate on how to encourage research on important topics, and to incorporate these topics into our teaching.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Taking a step back to the foundations of the contemporaneity of a field of research leads to questions regarding how and why scholars choose to pursue a given research topic, and their motivations and interests (Ziman, 1987; Zuckerman, 1978). This is problem choice. According to Ziman (1987), problem choice is related to "all the actions and considerations to enter into intentional pursuit of scientific research" (Ziman, 1987, p. 95). How researchers select their research problems and agenda is discussed, albeit insufficiently, in the literature on the sociology of change (Neff, 2014). Problem choice is important, as it influences the impact of relevant research, such as content for teaching in the classroom (Tihanyi, 2020).
The traditional view of problem choice is rationalist (Gieryn, 1978; Zuckerman, 1978). The rationalist view assumes that researchers know the challenges and significance of the problems chosen before they begin their research. The problems are previously identifiable (Zuckerman, 1978) and shared by the community (Gieryn, 1978). Despite the predominance of this view, another less researched view is the cultural view of problem choice. In this view, problem choice will depend on the situation, including demands, problems, resources, and constraints (Fisher, 2005).
Another possibility is to understand problem choice from a psychological viewpoint. The psychology of science "fully appreciates and understands scientific thought and behavior... we must apply the best theoretical and empirical tools available to psychologists" (Feist, 2011, p. 330). Motivational scientific interest is one of the possible avenues of research (Newcombe et al., 2009). In this work, we strive to understand what drives problem choice, considering researchers' motivation in their specific contexts.
What drives problem choice?
A number of factors influence problem choice. Polanyi (1962) noted that researchers are guided by their curiosity and an 'invisible hand.' Polanyi (1962), Merton (1938), and Zuckerman (1978, 1989) noted that problem choice is rooted in internal and external factors. Hence, the decision to adopt or abandon a topic (Avital & Collopy, 2001) depends on aspects such as the characteristics of individual researchers (DeBackere & Rappa, 1994). Nonetheless, most studies have looked into the internal factors...
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