Mintzberg - strategy for direct research

I wasn't going to be doing much posting on this blog as I got busy in my PhD but it happens to be quite a good way to review bits and pieces in the strategic management field and also share them with anyone who is interested.

For those interested in business strategy and strategic planning should have come across Henry Mintzberg in your travels.  Not only is he incredibly insightful and has been for decades, he has a very good ability to juggle academic rigour and practitioner applicability and his writing style is understandable, interesting and very engaging.

Way back in 1979 he wrote a paper about direct research which is has applicable today as it was then when it comes to thinking about how to effectively research strategic management.  There is a big spilt in this area between;
  • those who believe management research should try and emulate the methods of scientific research;
    • Trying to investigate actors’ subjective processes, because they are considered unobservable in an objective fashion, might introduce the very guess work and dogma that science has been trying to eradicate since the enlightenment.
  • and those who believe that anything involving human beings and human cognition can't be effectively researched that way and the results are "the pretence of knowledge"
    • The social world cannot be understood in terms of causal relationships that do not take account of the situation that human actions are based upon the actors’ interpretation of events, social meanings, intentions, motives, attitudes and beliefs.
Henry's article (and my own view) is very much aligned with the second view point.  He writes;
I see two essential steps in inductive research. The first is detective work, the tracking  own of patterns, consistencies.  One searches through a phenomenon looking for  order, following one lead to another. But the process itself is not neat. 
The second step in induction is the creative leap.  Every theory requires that creative leap, however small, that breaking away from the expected to describe something new. There is no one-to-one correspondence between data and theory. The data do not generate the theory - only researchers do that - any more than the theory can be proved true in terms of the data. All theories are false, because all abstract from data and simplify the world they purport to describe.
Management research is still battling to break free of scientific shackles which seem to result in research into the insignificant at expense of the interesting (not my words but I can't be bothered trying to find out who's they are!!!!).

The paper Henry wrote (Mintzberg, H. (1979). An Emerging Strategy of "Direct" Research. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24(4), 582-589) hasn't dated and I have used it to help my arguments and it is well worth a read if you have access to research databases.

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