When I was a doctoral student at Oxford University, I lived in a college together with graduate students in many other fields, including the natural sciences.
After dinner one night, a chemistry student remarked that he would head over to the lab – across the road – to test a hypothesis he had come up with.
Those of us who studied management had no similar facility at our disposal. There was no lab at the business school, only offices, lecture halls, and a library.
If we wanted to “get access” as we called it, i.e., do a study to test a hypothesis in a real organization, we would have to go through a cumbersome and long-drawn process of identifying possible companies, setting up a meeting (or multiple meetings), negotiating the terms of the research, finding a time suitable for both parties (often at some point into the future), and then carry out the research.
Even if initial access was secured (which was not certain), one would never be guaranteed that one would be able to collect data in the way that was planned. The manager with whom the agreement was made might have moved on, or the people that one planned to involve in a study might be preoccupied with other, more pressing issues and no longer have time to participate in an academic study.
Needless to say, many doctoral students (and professors) found this approach to be too time-consuming – and the outcome too uncertain – to pursue, given publication pressures, deadlines, and limited research budgets. As a consequence, a lot of research was done in the library, reading, analyzing and slightly modifying the theories already developed by others.
Although one can understand these individual choices given the constraints that researchers work under, the lack of exposure to the real world has a profoundly negative effect on the scholarly study of business organizations. A look at the type of work published in leading academic management journals will demonstrate this.
The key issue, as I see it, is not so much that the research that is published is “theoretical”, but that theory development occurs in a vacuum. I am of the opinion that theories are tools (see this article that I wrote a few years ago) – and that researchers should use theory to develop solutions to important problems facing organizations or society at large.
But only a minority of researchers carry out this type of “problem focused” research. There is even less “intervention research” – that is, research where management scholars posit a hypothesis about a likely outcome resulting from an intervention, and then carry out the intervention in a real organization to see whether the hypothesis is confirmed or not. It’s a bit like having a chemistry department without organic chemistry, only theoretical chemistry.
I believe that this is one reason why many doctoral students in management and the organizational sciences do not continue in academia but go into consulting after they graduate. By working as a consultant, one is provided with the laboratory that is missing in academia.
This is at least what I have found. In writing my textbook on organization design, I have certainly spent a lot of time reviewing – and attempting to synthesize and extend – a number of theoretical frameworks.
But I have also been helped immensely by the opportunity to test different approaches during client engagements and observe how they work, as well as reflecting upon the daily dialogue with managers that I work with in my engagements. To the extent that I succeed with my book, I believe it will be because of this mix of theory and practice.
If we are serious about creating relevant knowledge, this opportunity should be open to all of those who carry out academic research in the organizational sciences.
Leaders of business schools should consider how faculty members can be provided with the opportunity to observe real world organizations and even intervene in (simulated or real) systems. As Chris Argyris, a renowned organizational psychologist, once stated:
“The most powerful empirical tests for theories are provided when predictions are made about changing the universe, not simply describing it”
Every business school should have a laboratory.
Nicolay,
Very well stated.
Jay Galbraith once told me that specializing in org design may not be a wise academic career choice as few business schools seek tenure-track professors in the org design field.
I believe you are correct in stating that an organizational laboratory is required to test predictive rather than descriptive hypotheses.
Elliott Jaques worked as a consulting partner with a CEO-owner of Glacier Metals Company supporting action research by elected work councils at every level of the organization for about 14 years. His research responded to real questions at each level and in aligning the levels correctly. The Glacier Project claims to be the longest more comprehensive organizational research project on record. Wilfred Brown the sponsoring CEO and Jaques wrote a number of books and articles and traveled the world speaking at major conferences about this work.
The work is predictive, normative and systems based.
I know of no other comparable organization wide – all level, longitudinal research in the management literature. I’d appreciate suggestions of other extensive research across org levels others may be aware of.
Jay Galbraith, while an academic who studied org design theory extensively, wrote his many books based on his consulting experience describing trends he saw in organizing to implement various types of strategies — descriptive rather than predictive. It’s difficult to find consideration of levels of work anywhere in his extensive writings.
Deming, Juran, and Goldratt developed their approaches to re-designing operations (levels I, II & IIi) outside of academia developing principles and templates related to craft rather than tested theories.
James G. Hunt, long time-editor of Leadership Quarterly and an admirer and advocate for Jaques’s approach, bemoaned his perception that most academic research on management has been done on MBA students or at most workers at level I and their first line managers at level II.
As you say Nicolay, it seems to be largely a matter of access.
Drucker, supposedly the greatest management guru of the 20th century, wrote from a sociological perspective, a keen observer of emerging trends, but certainly not a design theoretician with tested predictive hypotheses.
While the Harvard School of Business under Paul Lawrence in the 1960’s had better access than most, only a descriptive contingency theory emerged.
As our current management journals tell us, evidence-based management theory, is sorely lacking…and extremely difficult to develop.
My own view is that Elliott Jaques’s Requisite Organization that evolved in the late 1980s and 90s is the most radically modern, powerful, and lightest theory supporting general managers in designing and managing organizations. He often identified himself as a clinician rather than a consultant. He persisted in his focus through 40 years of action research with full access to major organizations to develop the most elegant, predictive, and useful theory he could for practicing general managers.
I’ve been trying to imagine a simpler, lighter, more elegant systems-based design theory, but so far have not been able to do so. What I see in most books on design are the authors own subjective picking and choosing of theory fragments into a pastiche that fits his/her own values and preferences.
I eagerly look forward to any and all practical suggestions that can improve the academic-clinician-consultant access to all organization levels and functions for various kinds of research including action research.
Until then we are craftsmen working with a few principles and templates on a heuristic with little hope of moving to tested predictive algorithyms.
Hello Ken and Nicolay,
As an entrepreneur who came from a design background, I have become keenly interested in organizational design over the years. I cannot claim to any formal expertise in this area, although I have tried some experiments in my own company, in part because traditional forms often did not “feel right” given the pace of change in our business environment.
As a designer I have been thinking a lot lately about the concepts behind service-oriented architectures (SOA) from the software world and how these concepts and principles might be applied in organizations.
SOA evolved because traditional programming methods were breaking down due to the increasing scale, and complexity of increasingly interconnected software and IT systems.
You both seem very well-educated and I wonder if you could point me to any scholarship or research that might have been done in this area?
Certainly it seems that people like Herbert Simon were thinking in this direction. Do you have any thoughts about whether this is a thread worth pursuing?
I’ve been blogging some of my ideas at http://connectedco.com if you care to take a look.
Hello Dave,
thanks for your comment and for the link to your blog (I did take a look at it). I have also for some time been interested in how one can transfer ideas from product and software architecture to organizations (my 1993 dissertation was partly about this). The starting point for my research was the work on modular systems by Ron Sanchez and by Baldwin & Clark. The systems approach advocated by Russell Ackoff is also very important, I believe.
Yet both Ken and I agree that organizations will always be hierarchical (as I write about on this blog). You need hierarchy to ensure accountability and control, as well as coordination. But one can experiment with better team/unit grouping and with ways of improving the horizontal interfaces between teams/units.
Ken, thanks for your thoughtful comments. I agree that the “clinical” approach used by Jaques is a good example of how it can be done. I would also add some other names. Russell Ackoff developed prescriptive theory and in some cases also attempted to implement it (or have others implement it). People at the Tavistock institute (where Jaques was) like Trist also combined theory development with action research. Outside the field of org. design I would mention the research by Chris Argyris. However, these remain exceptions to the general “closed loop” that I describe in my post.