Contents
Lecture 1. ..................................................................................................................................... 2
Bridging Practice and Theory: A Design Science Approach – Holmstrom et al. (2009) ....... 2
“I’ve Got a Theory Paper – Do You?”: Conceptual, Empirical, and Theoretical
Contributions to Knowledge in the Organizational Sciences – Shapira (2011)...................... 8
What Constitutes a Theoretical Contribution? – Whetten (1989) ......................................... 12
Lecture 2. ................................................................................................................................... 15
Why would corporations behave in socially responsible ways? An institutional theory of
corporate social responsibility – Campbell (2007) ............................................................... 15
The stakeholder theory of the corporation: Concepts, evidence, and implications............... 20
Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: Defining the principle of who
and what really counts – Mitchell et al. (1997) ..................................................................... 27
Lecture 3 .................................................................................................................................... 34
The cross-national diversity of corporate governance: dimensions & determinants ............ 34
Corporate governance: Decades of dialogue and data .......................................................... 39
Lecture 4 .................................................................................................................................... 43
Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Journal of Management ................... 43
Barney (2001). Is the resource-based view a useful perspective for strategic management
research? Yes......................................................................................................................... 48
Integrating insights from the resource-based view of the firm into the new stakeholder
theory..................................................................................................................................... 53
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Lecture 1.
Bridging Practice and Theory: A Design Science Approach – Holmstrom et al. (2009)
The goal of making academic research relevant to the practitioner remains elusive: theoretical
and academic research interests do not seem to coincide with the interests of managerial
practice.
- In OM is the practitioner and not the academic scientist who engages in basic research.
In OM recognizing and building on the complementarity of problem-solving research and
theory academic research on one another is important.
- Why? Because problem solving oriented research produces the artifacts that OM research
subsequently evaluates in an attempt to build explanatory theory.
• Design Science is fundamentally different from both theory-building and theory
testing approaches
• Exploratory research - Design Science: Solution Incubation and Solution Refinement
• Explanatory research – Theoretical science: Substantive Theory and Formal Theory
Introduction
Operations management research is driven by a desire to create knowledge and to expand our
understanding by explaining various empirical phenomena.
- OM methodology is based on the premise that empirical research should be used to
develop and test theoretical hypotheses.
Goal of the article? To examine the methodological basis where scientist assume an active
role in shaping phenomena and to establish its link to the more conventional theoretically-
oriented explanatory research used in OM.
- Should an OM scientist extend beyond theoretical explanation to actual problem solving?
Design science as the basis of problem-solving research
Questions at both managerial and theoretical level can be relatively ill-structured.
Ill structured means decision situations where the decision maker may not know or agree on
the goals of the decision, and even if the goals are known, the means by which these goals are
achieved are not known and requisite solution designs (e.g., technologies) to solve the
problem may not even exist.
Design science focuses on tackling ill-defined problems in a systematic manner.
- It is different from theory building and testing approaches as they seek explanation based
on observation and design science emphasizes the process of exploration through design.
Design science is research that seeks;
(1) to explore new solution alternatives to solve problems
(2) to explain this explorative process
(3) to improve the problem-solving process
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The goal of a researcher using this method is to develop “a means to an end”: an artifact to
solve a problem.
- Action research on the other hand focuses on problem-solving processes or group
dynamics in a specific problem situation.
- Action research must focus on the design and implementation of a means to an end to be
considered design science.
- The idea that scientists should be as much active problem-solvers and designers as
observer and theorists is well established.
The most familiar example of design science to the OM audience is activity-based costing.
- Labeled as action innovation research by Kaplan. Design science is however rarely used
in OM.
Contrasting exploration and explanation research
The fundamental philosophical difference between exploratory and explanatory research is
ontological.
• Explanatory research
(theoretical cognitive
research): phenomenon to be
studied already exists and the
goal is to understand it.
• Exploratory research (design
science): the phenomenon must be created before it can be evaluated.
The design scientist must first create the artificial phenomenon so that data to be analyzed can
be obtained.
- Those doing interviews do not have to do this as they start with the premise that the data is
already out there to be collected.
- The goals and end product are different in both researches and indicate different interests.
The majority of OM research is more cognitive than pragmatic.
- Primary goal of research articles is to advance theory and publish, not to improve practice.
Corbett and Van Wassenhove (1993) argued that managerial interest in operations research
has declined, because of a lack of connection between management consulting and
management engineering.
Exploration and explanation research as complements
Exploration and explanation are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are both essential and
highly complementary.
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Exploration research Complements explanation research by producing artifacts that can be
used as raw material for evaluation research.
- Artifacts developed here are tested in evaluative research
Evaluative research: complements exploration by evaluating the merits of various artifacts in
different contexts. What are the limitations of applicability of Sigma, JIT etc.
From exploration to explanation: four phases of research
Four phases describe the process of moving from new ideas to tested ideas to mid-range
theory to formal theory. The first two phases provide a practical solution, the last two are
labelled theoretical science (The last 2 dominate contemporary OM research).
Means-end analysis is the central method through which goal-directed scientific research can
be conducted. Means-ends analysis is based on representations of present states, desired
states, the differences between the two states, as well as the actions that change the present
situation.
- The goal of the means-end analysis is ultimately to move toward the desired state. Design
science provides the details on how this can happen.
Phase 1: Solution Incubation
Attempts to solve problems start with constructing an understanding of the problem, but it is
important to acknowledge that we do not discover problems as much as we construct them:
we may discover a symptom, but symptom does not equal problem.
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