Search results

To describe the implicit epistemic flaw of “confirmation bias” and to illustrate and evaluate the threats to qualitative research trustworthiness from that bias.

The article overviews evidence and analysis from a wide range of disciplines. The adverse effect of three varieties of confirmation bias is described in some detail in illustrative examples.

It is argued that the threats from the bias go to the heart of the research. A subsequent article summarizes and critiques counter-arguments.

Discussions and illustrations of varieties of confirmation bias can increase awareness of the unwitting bias and reduce its influence.

The bias not only threatens the trustworthiness of academic and other professional research but also underpins much ideological extremism, the effectiveness of post-truth politics and inter- and intra-group conflict. These are directly discussed in the article.

The article extends and enriches descriptions of threats to the trustworthiness of qualitative from confirmation bias. Such threats are inadequately recognized in many qualitative research arenas. It identifies a previously unrecognized variety of confirmation bias: hollow citations.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and critique ways in which the threats from confirmation bias have been rejected.

Dismissals of the existence of, or threats from, confirmation bias are identified from a review of literature across a very wide range of disciplines. The dismissals are robustly examined.

The dismissals are categorised as: (1) radical scepticism (2) consequentialism: and (3) denial. Each type of dismissal, it is argued, is flawed.

The three-fold structuring of confirmation bias dismissal is novel. In addition to drawing from organisation, management and wider social science literature, the article also uses arguments and examples from the creative arts.

Considers why different explanations of the same event can be produced and discusses the characteristics of a good explanation. It identifies and analyses a wide range of different published explanations of a seminal public administration policy‐change. It separates those accounts of that event into families of explanations and describes their common underlying presuppositions. These shared presuppositions are used to construct four models of public policy‐making: sovereign policy‐makers; policy‐makers as relays; policy‐making as the personal; and the discursive construction of policy. Each explanation (and its conceptual model) is challenged by historically grounded counter‐evidence. Based on this analysis the paper suggest ways in which analysis of public management changes might be more fruitfully orientated.

According to an extensive and growing literature, we are in the twilight of bureaucracy. The labels applied to the supposed new organizational form include: post‐bureaucratic; post‐modern; post‐hierarchical; and the virtual organisation. The purpose of this paper is to consider the various claims for “epochal” change by evaluating the supporting and contrary evidence.

The paper draws on evidence on the reform of the UK Civil Service over the last few decades to show the intensification of bureaucracy.

The paper takes issue with the “epochalist” visions of sudden transformation which have underpinned much of the comment on post‐bureaucracy, arguing that the concept of post‐bureaucracy is analytically blind to the diversity and complexity of contemporary organizational change.

Locating the debate on post‐bureaucracy in the broader political economy of Neo‐Conservatism reveals an authoritarian dimension which has been absent from most commentaries.

To comment on Brewer and Venaik's review of the misapplication of the national culture dimensions of Hofstede and GLOBE at the individual and other sub‐national levels. This paper supports and extends their critique.

The implausibility of deterministic claims about the multi‐level power of national culture is described and discussed by drawing on a wide range of disciplines (including anthropology, geography, sociology, and historiography).

Descriptions of the characteristics and origins of sub‐national level behaviour based on a priori depictions of national culture values are invalid and misleading.

There are important implications for practitioners. The paper highlights the unsoundness of descriptions of the sub‐national (individuals, consumer segments, organizations, and so forth) which are derived from national‐level depictions of culture and the dangers of ignoring the independent causal influence of non‐national culture and non‐cultural factors.

The ecological fallacy in the national culture literature is located within a wider and long‐standing critique of that fallacy. The paper is the first to show that the fallacy in the national culture literature is often an extreme causal version. It not merely supposes cross‐level equivalence, as in the standard version, but more aggressively, it attributes deterministic power to national culture thus excluding other independent influences and agency.

Although vanquished in anthropology, the notion “national culture” as a set of unique, shared, closed, enduring, coherent, determinate subjective values has been repopularized in management by Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE), Hofstede, and Trompenaars (the Trio). The purpose of this paper is to critique the Trio’s representation of culture and its purported consequences.

Identifies the essential similarity of the Trio’s work by describing seven propositions they share. Drawing on research from multiple disciplines it critiques a number of these propositions.

The Trio’s representation of culture functions as a conceptual cage which confines analysis to misleading and impoverished explanations of organizational and other social action.

By describing and critiquing some of the metaphorical “bars” of the Trio’s emasculating “cage” it opens further the possibility of richer and relevant cultural research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the claim that the pursuit of maximum value (wealth) for shareholders optimises economic and social benefits for society as a whole.

Evidence cited in support of the claim and the methodology employed by its supporters are examined. Counter‐evidence from a wide range of disciplines, including accounting, economics, finance, and medical sociology, is considered.

The evidence does not support the claim. Bias and severe methodological flaws in its supporters' research is revealed. Considerable evidence of adverse consequences is identified.

This paper draws from an unusually wide range of disciplines to expose the fallacy and a number of powerful myths about the economic and social benefits of making maximizing shareholder value the primary aim of corporate governance.

The link between social interaction and entrepreneurial activity has attracted considerable attention in the entrepreneurship literature. In this study, we focus on individual cultural values, shaped by interactions in the social space, as they relate to opportunity evaluation, a cornerstone of the entrepreneurial process. We test our predictions in India, a non-Western society that has sustained one of the highest rates of entrepreneurial activity in the world. Our findings suggest that value orientation of high power distance is negatively associated with opportunity evaluation whereas uncertainty avoidance, collectivism, and femininity are positively associated with opportunity evaluation.