Abstract
We live in an age of breadth rather than depth. Social media dictates how many characters we can use in a post, how long our chats can be seen by others, and some people measure success by the number of likes or views they get on a picture or post. In this age of online dating – tinder, match, eHarmony, and okCupid – sites actively seek to sell the first date: How can they get you to swipe or click to make a match? However, what happens next, what gets people to come back for the second date, to find out more, to keep reading? Paper titles and abstracts are a bit like dating sites: they aim to peek your interest hoping you will see something of interest and keep reading. Conceptual papers take this to the next step. Reading a conceptual paper is no longer a first date, but rather the start of a relationship. Conceptual papers integrate what we know with where we might go to better understand the topic of interest (Gilson & Goldberg, 2015). In other words, a good conceptual paper not only inspires the reader to keep the relationship alive, but also provides the foundation for a healthy and satisfying relationship.
In reading the 2017 Conceptual Special Issue, we hope you will agree that we are taking a depth over breadth approach. The four papers we feature in this issue examine very different topics from very different perspectives, and yet each takes a deep dive into it’s domain. The papers in this special issue not only enlighten us on topics of interest to today’s management scholars and practitioners (management theory, bootstrapping, competitive HR, and agent bias), but also provide guidance about, or good examples of, how to integrate diverse theoretical perspectives to enhance our understanding of a topic. In so doing, we believe they provide a depth to our discussion which was previously lacking.
The shifting landscape of management practice adds additional pressure on management scholars to accommodate the conflicting needs for both breadth and depth. As organizational environments change, scholarly attention shifts as well. But, how do we direct our attention in such a way as to add depth to our analysis? How do we draw upon the already vast array of management theory to answer new questions that arise as new issues and phenomena become salient? The complexity and diversity of management theories makes this a daunting task. In “Why do management theories say what they do?” Kessler provides a way of mapping management theory that will be useful for scholars who have identified an important issue or phenomenon, but need to find a theoretical perspective for understanding the topic. This mapping also provides a framework that can be used to understand where any one theory fits within the big picture of management research.
In “Tell me who, and I’ll tell you how fair: A model of agent bias in justice reasoning,” by Cojuharenco, Marques, and Patient, we see a nice interplay between depth and breadth in the existing justice literature. The authors argue that our understanding of justice perceptions is incomplete if we don’t acknowledge the role of agent characteristics in justice reasoning. Further, they posit that existing research on justice focuses too narrowly on the event being evaluated, and that future research needs to also examine agent characteristics such as warmth, competence, and entity justice. Traditional research on justice delves deeply into the distributive, procedural, and interactional characteristics of a justice event, but fails to adequately incorporate agent characteristics into the analysis. Here we see that a deeper understanding of justice phenomena may require expanding the breadth of constructs in the nomological network of justice theory and research.
Changing topics to the realm of entrepreneurship, Rutherford, Pollack, Mazzei, and Sanchez examine bootstrapping in their manuscript “Bootstrapping: A Theoretical Fusion, Review of the Empirical Landscape, And New Way Forward.” This paper reminds us of the importance of clearly articulating the current state of the literature about a topic, and how this current state may be insufficient (Lange & Pfarrer, 2017). For this topic, distinguishing between theory and the constructs comprising theory is a particularly important issue for scholars to address. For example, the authors state that, “bootstrapping is a construct – not a theory” and that bootstrapping is “… a construct in search of a theory”. They further propose that “entrepreneurship research tends to be phenomenological in nature, this condition occurs periodically”. In doing so, they describe the current state of understanding of the phenomenon of bootstrapping, and the challenges associated with further development of this understanding. In many ways, their work builds on that of Bacharach (1989) which states the importance of understanding the building blocks of theory.
Finally, another important characteristic of a good conceptual paper involves indicating how the current discussion of a topic is incomplete (Lange & Pfarrer, 2017). In “The good, the not so bad, and the ugly of competitive human resource practices: A multidisciplinary conceptual framework”, Sapegina and Weibel provide a good example of applying diverse theories to understand a phenomenon that has gained a lot of recent attention in the popular press, but is perhaps underrepresented in current management research. They outline a process by which competitive HR practices trigger comparison processes that evoke emotional reactions leading to behavioral and attitudinal outcomes.
Taken together, these conceptual papers cover a breadth of topics, but each employs a great deal of depth to help us better understand the state of what we know, and more importantly to uncover avenues for future research. We hope that you will all swipe right, and continue reading.