Table of Content
,W1 Introduction
Lecture Notes
What is Art?
Art will always mean different things to different people. Art is everything you want it to be and that is, to me a very beautiful
thought
Art is inspiration. Inspiration, in a virtuous circle, whereby feeling inspired generates thought, thoughts breeds into action and
action means being creative of some sort. Inspiration holds anew and the circle continues.
Art is a powerful tools to push agendas and promote ideologies, it has been the fabric and bridge between society and people, but art
can also be nothing at all. Art is able to take us to time long past and to places we can only imagine. Art is everything and nothing
In art there is always this dichotomy between realism and style. Being an artist nowadays may not hold the same way it used to be,
such as accelerating society, its development and ideologies, but it is still the main source of inspiration of some sort
Paper 1 Suddaby 2010
Stresses the importance of taking a step back and spending time on defining concepts and theorising as it has strong implications in
real life. Management concerns can often be rooted back to individuals holding different definitions about the same concepts,
thereby causing disagreements and misunderstandings.
=> Matrix helps individual firms where to allocate their resources capabilities
Good definitions:
- Not descriptions
- Not too narrow, not missing important characteristics
- Not too broad, not including unrelated matters let alone counterexample
- Making use of unambiguous terminology or terminology that you can define well
- Scope conditions
- Relationships between concepts
Good definition help to say:What it is, where it begins and where it ends- boundaries as well as what kinds of it there are, if these
kinds leads to different causal relationships
Good operationalizations help to say how much of it there is, how strong/weak something is, whether it affects something else so
one needs a good operationalization to properly test a hypothesis/theory
,Forward thinking vs. Backward thinking
Looking ahead, thinking ahead can be useful in terms of stimulating innovation. In terms of management, it is best to take a step
back and look back at definitions and conceptualizations.
Something to keep in mind:
Performativity of economics- applying theory makes reality corresponding more to reality
- Ex. a formula can work well if everyone one is convinced that it works well but this is also very scope/context specific
- Often happens in markets where competition is dominated by a peer selection system
Counter-performativity of economics - applying theory makes reality corresponding less to theory
Inertia: blocked, not easily changed
Organisational inertia examples:
Age, size, density dependence, legitimacy, specialists vs generalists
,Suddaby, R. 2010 Construct Clarity in Theories of Management and Organization Academy of Management Review Vol. 35, No.
3, 346–357. Link
Short summary
This article is about construct clarity; what makes a good theory and provides practical guidelines to do so such as the need to fulfill 4-
criteria: 1) a definition of the construct, indicating the essential characteristics and properties, 2) a scope definition in terms of time,
space (e.g. micro/macro-viewpoint) and value (i.e. from which perspective the construct is understood by: organisations, individual,
society as a whole) 3) semantic relationship that entails the meaning of the definition and the coherence of reasoning.
Purpose
The purpose of this essay is not to discuss the issues of construct validity, which has received a considerable amount of attention
already. Rather, the issues of construct clarity and its importance for science will be explored. The intent of the author is to discuss
the broader question of what constitutes a good theory; construct clarity, but also and perhaps more importantly, open the
discussion on that manner, which is largely lacking in management science.
What are constructs
Conceptual abstraction of phenomena that cannot be directly observed, a concept that has been deliberately and consciously
invented or adopted for a specific scientific purpose. Construct are not reducible to specific observations but rather are abstract
statement of categories of observations, which are robust, comprehensible to a community of research
- Examples: animals, minerals, vegetables, liquids.
- Constructs are at the core of developing a theory, they are not the theories per se but rather the building blocks that
construct a strong one.
Constructs clarity comprises 4 basic elements
1- definitions
- Skillful use of language, unusual skill in translating abstract concepts into crispy defined theoretical constructs, using
terms that a reader can understand. Difficult to do because words/terms can have contradictory interpretaitons- are
subject of interpretations
- Good definition should
- Effectively capture the essential properties and characteristics of the concepts under considerations
- Avoid circularity or redundancy
- Parsimonious; being concise
- Using names used in common speech
- Offering a contextually specific and clear description of the term
- Have illustrative examples
- Definition life-cycle Approach: acknowledge complexity(1), catalog current definitions(2), offer new definition of the
term, purposely broad (3) rallibrate by trimming away what was accounted by previous theories (4) and introducing the
salient attributes, reflecting relevance, urgency, power, legitimacy (5)
- Risks: too general or too narrow
2- Scope conditions
- Explain the contingent nature of the definitions
- Careful in borrowing definition from other disciplines as it assumes universality, which can easily be contracted; science is
about producing theories which are hard to falsify; assuming universality, means ignoring the unique features of a
definition which contribute to its scope definition
- Specifying the boundary limits is important
- Categorize the scope conditions
- Time: temporality, ephemeral nature, antecedents, correlations, causality
- Space; level of analysis dependence (e.g. micro, macro, mid-economics)
- Value; point of view that the definition is taken; organisational or individual perspective, long terms or short
term projection, collectivistic or individualistic, be straightforward with respect to the hidden assumption that
one is making!
3- Semantic relationships
- Constructs exist only in referential relationship, either explicit or implicit, with other constructs and with the phenomena
they are designed to represent.
- There should be a semantic network of conceptual connection to other prior construct that should be made
, - Examples; historical lineages, derivation from other constructs, from other field of studies
4- Coherence
- The definition, scope and relationship should all make sense, must all cohere or hang together in a logically consistent
manner, also called latent model at an aggregate level of analysis.
- Coherence is a somewhat intuitive assessment of whether the various attributes of a phenomenon are adequately
contained within a construct
Why do we need construct clarity
1. Facilitate communication between scholars; i.e. avoid the proliferation of different terms and labels for similar
phenomena leading to confusion. Naivating a narrow path bw definitional accuracy and communicable generality, is the
goal
2. Enhance researcher’s ability to empirically explore phenomena; helping them to text the theory and identify
anomalies or phenomena that defy categories and force researcher to re-evaluate their theories
3. Allow greater creativity and innovation in research; allowing manager to redefine problems in ways that are more
amenable to resolution, stimulating insights into additional possible relationships, related constructs and often related
theories
Variation of construct clarify
Umbrella advocates refers to those researcher who argue that constructs should be viewed as large buckets or broad concepts loosely
defined because this better captures the inherent complexity and messiness of the empirical world we study
Validity police refers to those researchers who argue that constructs should be small buckets narrowly defined in order to bring
more scientific rigor and validity to the study of organizations.
= while different research traditions may have different interpretations on how constructs are constituted and how they should be
used in research, the need for clarity and precision in the description of concepts remains intact. The challenge is the use of
language, finding the balance between purposeful ambiguity/style and realism. While interpretation vary across sub-disciplines of
organizational research, requirement for clarity of a description as well as the 4 key elements of construct clarify matters.
Discussion
Construct clarify aids in the communication and accumulation of knowledge. Clear conceptual categories help overcome
fragmentation in the field, which is relevant for all science. Coverage of construct clarity compared to construct validity is relatively
scarce which raises question as to how graduate should or should not be trained.
