Special issue of the Baltic Journal of Management on management research in East and West

Citation

Rolv Petter Amdam, D. and Rainhart Lang, D. (2007), "Special issue of the Baltic Journal of Management on management research in East and West", Baltic Journal of Management, Vol. 2 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/bjm.2007.29502baa.001

Special issue of the Baltic Journal of Management on management research in East and West

About the Guest Editors

Dr Rolv Petter AmdamDuring the last years he has primarily done research and taught within international and cross-cultural management. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading, UK, University of Toulouse, France, ESSEC, Paris, ISM University of Management and Economics, Lithuania, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Arab Academy for Science and Technology and Maritime Transport, Alexandria. He has published several books and articles appearing in international refereed journals like Academy of Management Executives, Human Resource Development International, European Journal of Industrial Training, Nordic Organizational Studies, and Business History. E-mail: rolv.p.amdam@bi.no

Dr Rainhart Lang Main research interests are closely connected with the process cultural change and organisational transformation, entrepreneurship and leadership in emerging economies as well as the transfer of management knowledge and practices. Moreover, he is interested in professional changes in HR and OD departments of enterprises, and cross cultural leadership studies. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Linköping, Sweden, and the University of West of England in Bristol, UK. He has published books and refereed journal articles in German and English, among them articles in International Studies of Management and Organisation, Journal of World Business and Human Resource Development International. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for East European Management Studies (JEEMS). E-mail:r.lang@wirtschaft.tu-chemnitz.de

Special issue of the Baltic Journal of Management on management research in East and West

Management research has a long tradition rooted in the early twentieth century of the Western hemisphere, namely in Northern America and Western Europe. Taylor's Scientific Management Fayol's Principles of Management as well as Max Weber with his “Theory of Bureaucracy may be seen as cornerstones of these early tradition, pointing also on different angles and approaches to problems of “modern” organizations at that time. Departed from the early contributions, management research have been heavily influenced and dominated by American management models in practice and research: a result of the economic, political and social developments and the US dominance after World War II and the Cold War.

The transfer of the respective American management practices across the world has been supported by the ongoing process of globalization of markets and worldviews. Rationality instead ascetics, religion and superstition, individual instead of group orientation, a focus on followers responsibilities instead follower rights, a hedonistic instead of altruistic motivation and the centrality of work and (Western) democratic values (House et al., 2004, p. 56) may be seen as the basis of American management models, and moreover research attempts. In the field of scientific thinking, the spread of the MBA system and the dominance of US journals over publications on management have contributed to this situation.

Management research in the Western hemisphere is therefore mainly based on the functionalist paradigm, dealing with management problems as facts not as constructions, or meanings, often normative, aimed at the enhancement of the management performance, with a clear dominance of quantitative, questionnaire using, hypotheses testing approaches (“hypothetico-deductive fashion”). The understanding of a “theory” is, especially in the US-American management research and partly contrary to Western Europe, often limited to claims of relationships between important factors. In line with the functionalist or elitist paradigm, the researcher is often seen a superior observer. Moreover, management research in the West is influenced by management fashions as institutionalized myths of good practice. TQM, six sigma, lean management, balanced scorecard, empowerment, 360 degree assessment, etc. are not only parts of a management practice, but have subsequently influenced the focus of management research. But also the applied theories and methods have followed to a certain extent research fashions. Some theories are especially seen as “good and proper” as fashionable, by a scientific discipline, or in a certain period of time; driven by what can be called “Zeitgeist”. All in all, management research, have to be aware of the danger to become a legitimizing management ideology.

But as Hofstede has put it, “in a global perspective, US management theories contain several idiosyncrasies not necessarily shared elsewhere” (Hofstede, 1993, p. 81).

Taking into account the different economic, social developments within the leading countries of Europe, the development of culturally based practices or differences in the institutional settings of business and management systems (“varieties of capitalisms” or “national business systems”), as well as national traditions of science and academic thinking in Europe, the applicability of US based theories and approaches to management problems have to be challenged. Especially the European philosophical tradition of structuralist, poststructuralist, postmodern or critical social theories, and its application to organization and management studies, as well as a broader, more qualitative research attempt for empirical studies can be seen as an alternative approach to the dominating paradigm of US management research.

Moreover, the raise of Japanese management and “postmodern” organizations in China and Korea has led to more diversity in management practice and research. The new research interest is expressed for instance in journals like Management and Organization Review focusing on China, which encourages a contextual approach within management research (Tsui, 2006). With the fall of the iron curtain, new developments in the management of the “East European capitalism” may also contribute to other and alternative approaches in management research.

The contextualisation in management research seems to be the best way to cope with the different cultural and institutional settings for management research instead of following leading paradigms and theoretical and methodological approaches developed in the context of a Western capitalism, especially the USA, from the last century. This may be of special value for post-socialist countries that have undergone a radical societal transformation and respective organizational and management changes.

This special issue of the Baltic Journal of Management is a good test to confront research approaches and results from mainly young management researchers from East and West.

It is based on selected papers presented at the Management Conference on Management Research in East and West in Kaunas, Lithuania in 2006.

The papers of the special issue are dealing with three main fields of organizational and management research, relevant in East and West: the link between performance and ownership, organizational development, learning and knowledge creation and preservation, and motivation and commitment. They also address a broad variety of branches and types of organizations, banking sector, health care services, various industries; multinationals and their subsidiaries, but also family business.

In the first field, Zsolt BedoÍ and Barnabás Ács are analysing the impact of ownership concentration, and identity on firm performance in Hungary compared with results from the US, while Nerijus Maciulis, Vaiva Lazauskaite and Elias Bengtsson have developed a model to evaluate the performance of Nordic and Baltic stock exchanges. Both uses quantitative models and have carried out respective statistical analyses.

The first article on development, learning and knowledge sharing is dedicated to small and medium sized family business in France. Sami Basly analyses the internationalization such firms from an organizational learning and knowledge development perspective. While Basly have treated the topic through a quantitative questionnaire-based empirical analysis, Trude Johansen is discussing the conditions of subsidiaries learning from a theoretical point of view, applying the concept of localised learning and local network embeddedness.

Organizational commitment and motivation seems to be seen as decisive factors in a postmodern world, taking into account the importance of human capital for the organizational success, and the disintegrating impact of a more and calculative organizational imperative in new forms of organizing. Lina Labatmediene, Aukse Endriulaitiene and Loreta Gustainiene try to analyse therefore the individual correlates of organizational commitment with the intention to leave the organization. The final article of Vilma Zydziunaite and Egle Katiliute is than dedicated to the improvement of the motivation among health care workers in private health care organizations, focussing on nursing personnel, an employment group which is especially suffering from stress and, at the same time underpayment. Again the article is applying a quantitative statistical analysis of questionnaire data, pointing on important factor for commitment and motivation a Lithuanian context.

Despite of differences in the research approaches, depending on the subjects under inspection, the papers of the special issue from researchers of countries in East and West shows a number of similarities: all papers depart from a functionalist understanding of science, trying to describe an objective reality, and to find measures, driving forces, factors of influence in order to improve the described reality. Only papers on learning include, more implicitly, some notions of constructionist scientific reasoning, mainly as a result of the theoretical concepts applied by the authors. Moreover, all the papers, with the exception of the conceptual article of Johansen, have applied state of the art quantitative analysis based on questionnaire data or statistics. The focus on functionalist quantitative studies and the lack of sound qualitative, interpretative or critical approaches may be seen as a characteristic overall feature of present CEE management research, following the leading paradigm of US based management studies. But we have also seen some developments, departing from this kind of analysis. In a few papers, the authors engaged themselves in developing frames for the influence of local factors taking into account the specific context of the countries in question. This belongs especially for papers on CEE organizations. In order to develop management research further on, we would like to encourage especially the researchers from these emerging economies to discover the richness of other theoretical concepts and research approaches.

Rolv Petter Amdam and Rainhart LangGuest Editors