The research reputation of a business school is the central driver in the institution's long-term success. A school whose faculty publish often in prestigious international (=American) journals creates an aura for itself, which then attracts prestigious recruiters (consulting firms like McKinsey and Bain, investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) - whose top-drawer salary offers then make the school rank at the top of business school rankings in newspapers and magazines. In other words, a reputation for research is a starting point for an ever-widening virtuous circle of events, each of which feeds and strengthens the other.
I have often wondered what makes some management research valued and instantly accepted for publication, while others get rejection slips or, worse, go into endless loops of rewriting suggestions. I got some sense of this from a recent paper by Anirvan Pant and J Ramachandran, professors at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. They examined 165 papers in the area of international management (studies that dealt with cross-national management issues) that were published in the top 20 international management journals between 1994 and 2011 to see whether any patterns existed. And, sure enough, they did: most of these papers could be classified as belonging to a mere five "frames". By "frames" they meant overarching themes.
One frame they detected is what they call "institutional distance". Scholars who adopt this frame emphasise the cultural difference between developed economies and emerging markets. They then look for and find differences such as the preponderance of family-managed businesses in emerging markets, the use of relationship-based versus rule-based methods for enforcing what is agreed upon, labour-intensive practices and so on. "Consequently, the emerging economy context is framed as an unfamiliar terrain for developed economy firms," they write. It is this frame that drives research papers that focus on topics like on bottom-of-the-pyramid business models, or offer tips on how managers of multinational corporations (MNCs) can successfully implement strategies that overcome the lack of legal boundaries, or difficulties in property rights protection. I can now see how abiding by a frame such as this makes a research paper readily acceptable for top international journals.
The four other frames they detect are transactional vulnerability, institutional voids, environmental change, and capability development.
Scholars who use the transactional vulnerability frame, for instance, emphasise MNCs' vulnerability to opportunism in the course of transactions with local firms in the host country. Thus, for example, while opportunism as a threat to foreign firms has preoccupied researchers in framing research on emerging economies, the real reasons for the cause of transactional vulnerability to opportunism may lie in MNCs' lack of local market experience, or the extent of economic integration between local and foreign partners.
They also point out that the large body of research on international management that has accumulated in the last two decades itself follows a pattern - the increasing interest for western MNCs in "third world" countries as a market. Western business schools and management consulting firms followed that interest and started focusing on this perspective - and framed research questions matching this perspective. Phrases like "third world", "less developed" and "industrialising", which seemed to emphasise the role of these countries as a source of cheap raw material and labour, were changed to the phrase "emerging markets", a term that emphasised these countries' new role as markets.
As you can see, practically all these frames are from the point of view of foreign firms entering or already operating in emerging economies. How about research that adopts the point of view of emerging market governments, firms, managers, expatriates, and intergovernmental agencies engaging with constituents in their own countries, as well as their perspective in dealing with entities across their borders? This kind of research approach, they say, may help identify novel questions in new contexts.
Other research questions that are worth pursuing and which may identify more novel questions are, for example: how do emerging economy firms develop high-quality managerial talent pools, given the high growth context that encourages employee mobility? How do managers from emerging economy firms confront their cognitive biases in international markets?
It used to be said that the correct answer to the question, "who is a great king?", was that a great king is one who has a great poet in his court. And then if you followed it up with the question, "who is a great poet?", the correct answer would be that a great poet is one who is in the court of a great king. Similarly, the question, "what is a great management research article?", may get the answer, "one that is accepted for publication in a great journal". And the question, "what is a great journal?", may get the answer that it is one that publishes great research articles.
Except that both poets and management researchers need to operate within The Acceptable Frame to be crowned Great.
Ajit Balakrishnan is the author of The Wave Rider: A Chronicle of the Information Age.
ajitb@rediffmail.com
ajitb@rediffmail.com
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
