Joergen Sandberg

Bio: Joergen Sandberg is an academic researcher from University of Queensland. The author has contributed to research in topics: Epistemology & Empirical research. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 3 publications receiving 558 citations.

Has Management Studies Lost Its Way? Ideas for More Imaginative and Innovative Research

Abstract: Despite the huge increase in the number of management articles published during the three last decades, there is a serious shortage of high-impact research in management studies. We contend that a primary reason behind this paradoxical shortage is the near total dominance of incremental gap-spotting research in management. This domination is even more paradoxical as it is well known that gap-spotting rarely leads to influential theories. We identify three broad and interacting key drivers behind this double paradox: institutional conditions, professional norms, and researchers' identity constructions. We discuss how specific changes in these drivers can reduce the shortage of influential management theories. We also point to two methodologies that may encourage and facilitate more innovative and imaginative research and revisions of academic norms and identities.

Habitat and Habitus: Boxed-in versus Box-Breaking Research

Abstract: This paper argues that scholarly work is increasingly situated in narrowly circumscribed areas of study, which are encouraging specialization, incremental adding-to-the-literature contributions and a blinkered mindset. Researchers invest considerable time and energy in these specialized areas in order to maximize their productivity and career prospects. We refer to this way of doing research and structuring careers as boxed-in research. While such research is normally portrayed as a template for good scholarship, it gives rise to significant problems in management and organization studies, as it tends to generate a shortage of novel and influential ideas. We propose box-breaking research as a strategy for how researchers and institutions can move away from the prevalence of boxed-in research and, thus, be able to generate more imaginative and influential research results. We suggest three versions: box changing, box jumping and, more ambitiously, box transcendence.

How Employee Selection Decisions are Made in Practice

Abstract: Existing literature on employee selection contains an abundance of knowledge of how selection should take place but almost nothing about how it occurs in practice. This paper presents an ethnomethodological-discourse analytical real-time study of how selection decisions are made in situ. The main findings suggest that selection decision making is characterized by ongoing practical deliberation involving four interrelated discursive processes: assembling versions of the candidates; establishing the versions of the candidates as factual; reaching selection decisions; and using selection tools as sensemaking devices. In addition, this paper identifies two basic forms of selection decision making: one characterized by initial agreement and one characterized by initial disagreement. In each basic form of decision making, selectors reason through the four discursive processes in a methodical, situated and practical manner in order to construct local versions of the candidates and make ‘reasonable’ selection dec...

The Art of Phenomena Construction: A Framework for Coming Up with Research Phenomena beyond ‘the Usual Suspects’

Abstract: Despite the centrality of research phenomena, the process of their definition is often neglected and reduced to a simple choosing of pre-established subjects of interest. However, good research not only includes empirical work aimed at more or less ‘given as fact’ phenomena. It also involves phenomena construction: that is, the process of generating and establishing phenomena to investigate and theorize. We contend that phenomena construction is not separate from, but integral to, both the empirical and theorizing phases in research. As few phenomena are truly ‘given’ or straightforward to observe, good research calls for careful and creative construction of the phenomenon under investigation. We propose and elaborate a framework that enables researchers to generate and establish research phenomena beyond those currently available in their specific area of interest and, based on this, to produce more imaginative and impactful research.

Doing Critical Management Research

Abstract: The editors of this collection declare its mission to be to ‘stimulate thinking on quality-related issues and to facilitate bringing quality into the mainstream of organisational effectiveness’ (p. ix). I understand the first of these goals, but the precise meaning of the second defeats me; in a way, this is emblematic of the volume as a whole. There is some very interesting material here, and some useful guides to prior work—but there is also much to mystify and some disappointments. The book opens with an erudite and lengthy piece by Lengnick-Hall which plays with the idea that existing Total Quality (TQ) thinking and practice is premised on stable and repetitive environments and organisations, and, in these oso-turbulent times, some new thinking is required. After a brief introduction to TQ, there is a lot of discussion on the wild and intriguing world of complex adaptive systems, with allusions to many relevant literatures. This is an important issue, and has much in common with the debates which gently rage in this journal about the prospects for rational intervention in human systems—although the article ignores Beer, Checkland and Mingers and others whose perspectives would be informative. Indeed, Lengnick-Hall’s analysis focuses on the dynamic instability of human systems rather than the subtler philosophical problems about system ontology and epistemology. Nevertheless, it would be churlish to complain about such omissions when there is such a fecund supply of citations from strategy, operations and organisational analysis, and even (curiously) the poppsychology of Michael Scott Peck. The key weakness of the article is that its abstract prognostications are under-illustrated, and careful use of real examples would make the argument more convincing. Strangely, interesting examples are only a few pages away, and the article by Easton and Jarrell on the Japanese concept of Hoshin Kanri (loosely, ‘policy deployment’, a neglected element of Japanese TQ thinking which relates to the generation and cascading of plans for operational improvement) would be an excellent starting point for a discussion of Lengnick-Hall’s themes. Easton and Jarrell compare the experiences of three US organisations who each work with some variant of the technique, and then contrast these implementations with the ‘ideal’ Japanese system—a highly formal process of planning and control which seems to lie in diametric opposition to LengnickHall’s ruminations on managing complexity. Unfortunately, comparisons are drawn against how Hoshin Kanri is supposed to work in Japan rather than against empirical data from Japanese companies: a matched pair comparison would be more interesting. Nevertheless, the chapter contains some useful commentary and some illuminating insights. Elsewhere in the book, several papers give rather cursory coverage of important ideas without offering new data or sufficient depth to really push the debates forward: Greller presents an outline of feedback in TQ systems, and Knouse examines reward and recognition schemes. Both will be useful for teaching, but had the two authors collaborated one would have expected a richer set of ideas to emerge. Harvey, Buckley and Novicevic examine the important question of how TQ ‘culture’ translates across national boundaries in multi-national corporations, but also settle for ruminations and pointers to further work rather than the presentation or discussion of data. Vaughan and Renn present a systematic and informative account of what they term ‘Customer Service Citizenship Behaviour’, and reflect on how employees and customers interact with the notions of ‘organizational justice’ and the degree of support perceived to be available in the organisation in regard to customer service. The article is well-argued and thoughtful, and is worth closer reading by anyone interested in the management of services in which direct customer–employee contact is central. The final chapter, by Handfield, Calantone and Ghosh, is the most disappointing. At last, the reader is offered a chapter with data, but the methods used are suspect and the resulting conclusions are unsupported by the research. Some rather over-ambitious claims do not seem to integrate with the more thoughtful theorisations offered earlier in the book. Incidentally, the authors ignore the controversy regarding the Baldrige award, and the view of WE Deming (whom they cite approvingly) who once wrote that the award ‘transgresses all that I try to teach’. Overall, the volume is a useful addition to the literature, although it does not live up to its potential. One might hope that for subsequent volumes there might be a greater degree of integration between the contributions, and a more obvious contribution from the academic editors. It is also plagued by more typographic errors, misspelled names, and missing references than one would expect in such an expensively produced book from a respectable publisher.