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The purpose of this paper is to address the imbalance between inductive and deductive research in management and organizational studies and to suggest changes in the journal review and publishing process that would help correct the imbalance by encouraging more inductive research.

The authors briefly review the ongoing debate about the “developmental” vs “as-is/light-touch” journal review modes, trace the roots of the prevailing developmental review to the hypothetico-deductive research approach, and contrast publishing deductive and inductive research from the perspectives of authors, editors, and reviewers.

Application of the same developmental evaluation and review mode to both deductive and inductive research, despite their fundamental differences, discourages inductive research. The authors argue that a light-touch review is more appropriate for inductive research, given its different logic.

Specific criteria for the light-touch evaluation and review of and some concrete suggestions for facilitating inductive research.

Advancing knowledge requires a better balance of inductive and deductive research, which can be facilitated by light-touch evaluation and review of inductive research.

Building on the debate on journal publishing, the authors differentiate the evaluation and review of inductive and deductive research based on their philosophical underpinnings and draw implications of pursuing inductive research for authors, editors, and reviewers.

The discipline's most common uses for literature reviews—identifying gaps, developing research agendas, and categorizing the literature—too often fail to challenge, change or advance theoretical perspectives. The authors offer guidance to theorization through literature reviews. The key to theory advancement is consistency between the state of theory and the chosen review type.

A conceptual approach is taken. The authors identify shortcomings in literature reviews of logistics and supply chain management (L&SCM) research and develop a framework to aid theorization from literature.

Literature review types are categorized as inductive theory building, contextualized explanations, theory testing and interpretive sensemaking. The authors argue that the effectiveness of a review type depends on the prior state of theory, which ranges from nascent, to intermediate, to mature. The authors propose the interpretive sensemaking review as a novel review type rooted in the interpretive paradigm.

This study should be of immediate interest and value to logistics and supply chain management scholars—as well as scholars in other fields—because it offers a pathway to theory development through literature reviews. Appropriate applications of the proposed review types will result in more comprehensive theories.

This article lays down arguments for the need to change the way L&SCM scholars use literature reviews. It extends earlier work from the authors (Durach et al., 2017; A New Paradigm for Systematic Literature Reviews in Supply Chain Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management) by outlining four review types, and offering further insights to theorization, as is typically the goal in the synthesis step of literature reviews.

Literature review articles have become a frequently applied research approach in operations and supply chain management (SCM). The purpose of this paper aims to elaborate on four approaches for developing or employing theory in systematic literature reviews (SLRs).

The paper uses conceptual arguments and illustrates them by pointing to recent examples. In SLRs, the material collection is usually based on keywords and searching databases, which is comparatively well documented. Data analysis, however, often falls short in documentation and, consequently, is neither well explained nor replicable. Therefore, the focus of this paper is the elaboration of the data analysis and sense-making stage in the research process of SLRs.

The paper presents four different approaches, which are characterized as theory (1) building, (2) modification, (3) refinement and (4) extension, based on whether new concepts are formed or extant concepts within SCM or other fields of management theory are adopted.

The limitation of this research is that literature reviews could be conducted and presented in many ways. Since the focus of this research is on systematic literature reviews, only a limited number of approaches can be discussed and presented here.

The paper contributes to explaining the process and expected outcomes of a literature review and, therefore, aids in further developing the related methodological approaches. This is relevant as literature review publications now often replace conceptual or theoretical pieces but still have to deliver concerning demands of theory building.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a reconceptualization of the critical incident technique (CIT) and affirm its utility in management and organization studies.

Utilizing a case study from a leadership context, the paper applies the CIT to explore various leadership behaviours in the context of nonprofit boards in Canada. Semi-structured critical incident interviews were used to collect behavioural data from 53 participants – board chairs, board directors, and executive directors – from 18 diverse nonprofit organizations in Alberta, Canada.

While exploiting the benefits of a typicality of events, in some instances the authors were able to validate aspects of transformational leadership theory, in other instances the authors found that theory falls short in explaining the relationships between organizational actors. The authors argue that the CIT potentially offers the kind of “thick description” that is particularly useful in theory building in the field.

Drawing on interview material, the authors suggest that incidents can be classified based on frequency of occurrence and their salience to organizational actors, and explore the utility of this distinction for broader theory building purposes.

Principally, the paper proposes that this method of investigation is under-utilized by organization and management researchers. Given the need for thick description in the field, the authors suggest that the approach outlined generates exceptionally rich data that can illuminate multiple organizational phenomena.

The role of nonprofit boards is of major importance for those organizations and the clients that they serve. This paper shed new light on the leadership dynamics at the top of these organizations and therefore can help to guide improved practice by those in board and senior management positions.

The CIT is a well-established technique. However, it is timely to revisit it as a core technique in qualitative research and promote its greater use by researchers. In addition, the authors offer a novel view of incidents as typical, atypical, prototypical or archetypal of organizational phenomena that extends the analytical value of the approach in new directions.

This article has an explicit purpose of making a theoretical contribution to the issue of senior management cognitions of the corporate identity/corporate strategy interface. The aim of this research is to particularise the nature and saliency of this interface to corporate marketing scholars and practitioners alike.

This article adopts a grounded theory methodology and is informed by three in depth case studies undertaken among three building societies (mutuals) operating within the British Financial Services Industry.

The results confirm the saliency of the corporate identity/corporate strategy dyad vis‐a‐vis the comprehension and management of contemporary organisation. Theoretically, the study finds that senior management's cognitions of the corporate identity/strategy interface are interdependent, symbiotic and dynamic in nature: the nature of the dyad differed among the three institutions examined. In terms of the nascent domain of corporate marketing, this study confirms the extant literature, which suggests that, in addition to comprehending the psychology of customers and other stakeholders, the psychology of senior managers is also highly germane.

Within corporate marketing contexts, organisations should be mindful of the critical importance of the corporate identity/strategy interface; a concern for the above should be an important part of their corporate marketing as well as regulatory and strategic deliberations. However, senior managers should note the inherent dangers to identity maintenance where material alignment between corporate identity and strategy is ignored and where cognitive alignment is adopted as a surrogate: the former entails a synchronisation of facts whereas the latter entails the calibration of beliefs vis‐à‐vis corporate identity and strategy.

This is a major theory‐building study, which examines managerial cognitions of the corporate identity/strategy interface and a major study of its type within the British Building Society sector.

The purpose of this paper is to map corporate disclosure theories as a step towards filling a gap in the theoretical background for corporate disclosure research. The purpose of the map is to encompass a range of particular theories relating to corporate disclosure and to demonstrate the complex relationships between different notions of the financial disclosure phenomenon. This will help new researchers to understand how particular corporate disclosure theories are related, as well as help with teaching accounting theories at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

A deductive and inductive approach to theory building was applied. The deductive approach suggests identifying the gap in the literature, the inductive approach then prescribes theory building in three stages: phenomenon observation, categorisation and relationship building. This approach serves to develop a theoretical map integrating the corporate disclosure theories.

The paper discusses theories that recognise actual features of financial markets – market failure, information asymmetry and adverse selection – to provide an explanation for the existence of corporate reporting regulations and managerial incentives, which control and determine the maximum level of corporate information under these conditions. It then integrates these theories in a map seeking to explain corporate disclosure levels, mandatory and voluntary, financial and narrative. A combination of theoretical supplements – codification theory, Dye's theory of mandatory and voluntary disclosure, and disclosure transformation theory – are proposed in this framework as theories to explain processes of change in mandatory and voluntary corporate disclosure in practice.

Another benefit mapping these theories is to provide useful insights into existing disclosure theories, which may help to explain why some empirical results have been inconsistent with the predictions of these theories. No similar attempts have been published in the accounting literature.

Independent travelers are those vacationers who have booked only a minimum of their transportation and accommodation arrangements prior to departure on the vacation. Independent travel is an important and growing sector of worldwide tourism. Choice of vacation itinerary for the independent vacation represents a complex series of decisions regarding purchase of multiple leisure and tourism services. This chapter builds and tests a model of independent traveler decision-making for choice of vacation itinerary. The research undertaken employs a two-phase, inductive–deductive case study design. In the deductive phase, the researcher interviewed 20 travel parties vacationing in New Zealand for the first time. The researcher interviewed respondents at both the beginning and the end of their New Zealand vacations. The study compares pre-vacation research and plans, and actual vacation behaviors, on a case-by-case basis. The study examines case study narratives and quantitative measures of crucial variables. The study tests two competing models of independent traveler decision-making, using a pattern-matching procedure. This embedded research design results in high multi-source, multi-method validity for the supported model. The model of the Independent Vacation as Evolving Itinerary suggests that much of the vacation itinerary experienced in independent travel is indeed unplanned, and that a desire to experience the unplanned is a key hedonic motive for independent travel. Rather than following a fixed itinerary, the itinerary of an independent vacation evolves as the vacation proceeds. The independent traveler takes advantage of serendipitous opportunities to experience a number of locations, attractions and activities that they had neither actively researched nor planned.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the level of theory building in public procurement by reviewing and classifying manuscripts published in the Journal of Public Procurement (JoPP) from 2001 to 2016.

The articles are divided into four important periods: discovery, agenda setting, embracing and expansion and consolidation. The articles are classified according to a hierarchical level of theory building composed of six levels: rapporteurs, reporters, testers, qualifiers, builders and expanders.

Key findings indicate that public procurement, in light of JoPP publications from 2001 to 2016, is at the tester level. There is also increase in the classification of articles with high level of theoretical contribution over time.

Qualitative theory building approaches, such as grounded theory method (GTM), are still not very widespread and rigorously applied in operations management (OM) research. Yet it is agreed that more systematic observation of current industrial phenomena is necessary to help managers deal with their problems. The purpose of this paper is to provide an example to help guide other researchers on using GTM for theory building in OM research.

A GTM study in the German automotive industry consisting of 31 interviews is followed by a validation stage comprising a survey (110 responses) and a focus group.

The result is an example of conducting GTM research in OM, illustrated by the development of the novel collaborative enterprise governance framework for inter‐firm relationship governance in the German automotive industry.

GTM is appropriate for qualitative theory building research, but the resultant theories need further testing. Research is necessary to identify the transferability of the collaborative enterprise governance concept to other industries than automotive, to other organisational areas than R&D and to product and service settings that are less complex and innovative.

The paper helps researchers make more informed use of GTM when engaging in qualitative theory building research in OM.

There is a lack of explicit and well‐informed use of GTM in OM research because of poor understanding. This paper addresses this deficiency. The collaborative enterprise governance framework is a significant contribution in an area of growing importance within OM.

This chapter critically reviews the literature on authentic leadership (AL) that emerged in response to scandals in private- and public-sector organisations, drawing on theories, concepts and methods from other disciplines. The author finds that AL lacks a consensus definition, and that quantitative research has largely been at the level of employees rather than executives or board members. The review reveals 12 categories of criticisms. Schaefler advocates inductive qualitative research on the major concerns of executive leaders and means of addressing them via group dynamics, maintaining that exploring processes of AL in real-world settings would complement existing quantitative research and contribute to the development and extension of AL theory.