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Identifies the significant role of conceptual research methods in theory building and contrasts it with the theory‐testing research currently prevalent in operations management. The research stages of description, explanation and testing are used to distinguish between theory building and theory testing. Short‐circuiting any one of these stages results in dysfunctional research activities which produce war stories, black boxes, or ivory‐tower prescriptions. Defines some terms relevant to conceptual research methods and describes different conceptual classification schemes. Finally, discusses the differences between conceptual models, frameworks, and theories and illustrates each method with examples from the literature.

The purpose of this study is to diagnose the trajectory of influential conceptual articles in developing a research stream. The authors uncover the knowledge diffusion through influential conceptual articles and identify characteristics that make conceptual articles influential in their field.

This study draws on scientometrics, specifically an integrated approach combining quantitative citation counts with qualitative citation practices analysis that offers a comprehensive understanding of the nature and context of citations. The authors use the case of customer engagement – a prominent contemporary marketing and service research stream – to explore the trajectory of influential articles in shaping a new research stream.

This research shows that influential articles contribute to the reciprocal knowledge diffusion within and outside their home discipline. They provide anchor points for conceptual framing, conceptual refining and conceptual reconciliation – three application patterns of citations that are pivotal to navigate theory discovery and theory justification in a research field.

The study analyzes the early impact period of two influential customer engagement articles to understand the developments leading to the establishment of a new research stream. Future research drawing on automated citation and bibliometric methods may consider extended time periods.

This study traces the trajectory of influential articles in marketing and service research. The authors identify characteristics of influential conceptual articles, and recommend practices to develop a conceptual paper with the potential for an influential trajectory. It shows that while marketing and service research has a tradition of “borrowing” theories from other fields, seminal articles “lend” theories to other fields.

As the field of leadership education continues to prioritize learning in leadership, it is important to ask the question: What do we know about the learning process itself? Conceptual change, a learning framework used in educational psychology, can help to explain learning in leadership. Research on conceptual change in the social sciences is emergent and ripe for further exploration. Until the results of such research are readily available, there are some pedagogical tools produced by conceptual change researchers that leadership educators might find valuable in curriculum design. This paper introduces conceptual change theory and research to leadership educators as a viable framework from which to research learning in leadership, and presents pedagogical tools that encourage deeper learning through conceptual change

Transformational leadership is one of the most recent conceptualizations of leadership concepts. It has been specified as an important mechanism of introducing organizational change. Transformational leadership has received substantial research attention over the last two decades. As a result, transformational leadership research has created considerable knowledge about the transformational leadership phenomenon. It, however, has also generated several conceptual issues and addressing these issues is necessary for advancing transformational leadership research. Highlights six important conceptual issues that the research has generated. Also outlines the significance of each of these six issues and then provides a critical commentary based on these issues. In pointing out research implications, outlines the required research for addressing these issues and provides an outline of how research for addressing them can be approached. Finally, indicates some of the implications of this paper for practice.

The purpose of this article is to give an overview of the development of a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) conceptual model for the management of research data at a South African university.

The research design of this article consists of empirical and non-empirical research. The non-empirical part consists of a critical literature review to synthesise the strengths, weaknesses (limitations) and omissions of identified VRE models as found in literature to develop a conceptual VRE model. As part of the critical literature review concepts were clarified and possible applications of VREs in research lifecycles and research data lifecycles were explored. The empirical part focused on the practical application of this model. This part of the article follows an interpretivist paradigm, and a qualitative research approach, using case studies as inquiry method. Case studies with a positivist perspective were selected through purposive sampling, and inferences were drawn from the sample to design and test a conceptual VRE model, and to investigate the management of research data through a VRE. Investigation was done through a process of participatory action research (PAR) and included semi-structured interviews and participant observation data collection techniques. Evaluation of findings was done through formative and summative evaluation.

The article presents a VRE conceptual model, with identified generic component layers and components that could potentially be applied and used in different research settings/disciplines. The article also reveals the role that VREs play in the successful management of research data throughout the research lifecycle. Guidelines for setting up a conceptual VRE model are offered.

This article assisted in clarifying and validating the various components of a conceptual VRE model that could be used in different research settings and disciplines for research data management.

This article confirms/validates generic layers and components that would be needed in a VRE by synthesising these in a conceptual model in the context of a research lifecycle and presents guidelines for setting up a conceptual VRE model.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how practical relevance of management accounting knowledge relates to research paradigms and theoretical pluralism.

The paper is conceptual in nature.

As the management accounting discipline is considered to be an applied discipline, a number of authors claim that management accounting research should develop relevant theory that can be used in practice. This call for increased practical relevance of management accounting knowledge interrelates with a debate on the desirability of theoretical pluralism and paradigm diversity in management accounting research. Drawing on the work of Nicolai and Seidl, the paper distinguishes different forms of practical relevance, and analyses the effects of theoretical pluralism on these different forms. The paper argues how theoretical pluralism particularly enhances relevance in a conceptual sense rather than an instrumental sense. The conceptual relevance of research may further be enhanced by interpretive research that acknowledges complexity and that has the potential to challenge the performativity of mainstream management accounting knowledge, without challenging the pursuit of efficiency as such. This is different from critical research. The instrumental relevance stemming from mainstream management accounting research entails de‐contextualization and simplification, and might create unintended self‐fulfilling prophecies.

The paper broadens the concept of relevance so that it includes conceptual relevance and legitimative relevance. It links these concepts of relevance to three research paradigms: a mainstream paradigm, an interpretive paradigm and a critical paradigm. For each paradigm, relevance is related to the use of theory.

The paper broadens the concept of relevance and advocates the pursuit of conceptual relevance, particularly through interpretive research.

Scholars in the field of higher education take many approaches to apply theory in empirical research. However, this wide array of theoretical applications has prompted confusion among scholars who seek to integrate and understand how theory is situated in higher education research. This chapter explores the conceptualization, application, and visibility of theory in higher education research by presenting discourse from field leaders and discussing methodological definitions of theory, theoretical frameworks, and conceptual frameworks. Additionally, we conducted a summative content analysis of 239 empirical articles from the Review of Higher Education over a 10-year period, with the goal of understanding how theories were framed and applied in a subset of research. We conclude by reiterating the importance of theory in the study of higher education and providing strategies for effective theory application.

Companies are increasingly leveraging digital technologies toward innovation strategies that deliver novel features to customers sequentially through successive new product generations (i.e., successive innovation). Extant literature examining successive innovation is both limited and fragmented across marketing and management literatures. Our goal is to synthesize literature on concepts related to successive innovation (such as versioning and upgrades) to identify the core dimensions of successive innovation and provide a cohesive framework to guide future research in this domain.

Given the equivocality in understanding the conceptual domain of successive innovation, we review and synthesize literature across three disciplinary domains: marketing, management, and information and decision sciences. Based on the emerging patterns from the literature review, we develop a conceptual framework of successive innovation with the aim of moving the discussion toward greater theoretical clarity.

Based on the literature review and synthesis, we identify three core-dimensions that define successive innovation and compare these across digital and physical product realms: coexistence, embeddedness, and adoption controllability.

Our proposed conceptual dimensions of successive innovation, and discussion of differences across physical and digital product domains, offer important directions for future research and a common vocabulary.

As physical and digital successive innovations can differ in coexistence, embeddedness, and adoption controllability, firms need to consider relevant barriers to adoption of successive product generations and select appropriate strategies to promote and communicate successive innovation. Our proposed successive innovation conceptual dimensions help managers comprehend the complexity of arranging such innovation in business and consumer segments.

Our contribution to the emerging literature on successive innovation is threefold. First, by conducting a comprehensive literature review, we integrate insights from different fields of inquiry (i.e., marketing, management, and information and decision sciences). Second, based on the synthesis of the literature, we offer a conceptual framework of successive innovation, which aims to move the discussion toward greater theoretical clarity. Third, based on our review and conceptual framework, we discuss a set of future research directions to guide academic research efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to make two main contributions: first, showcase the diversity of service research in terms of the variety of used theories and methods, and second, explain (post-publication) success of articles operationalized as interest in an article (downloads), usage (citations), and awards (best paper nomination). From there, three sub-contributions are derived: stimulate a dialogue about existing norms and practices in the service field, enable and encourage openness amongst service scholars, and motivate scholars to join the field.

A mixed method approach is used in combining quantitative and qualitative research methods while analyzing 158 Journal of Service Management (JOSM) articles on several criteria such as their theory, methodology, and main descriptive elements (e.g. number of authors or references) and then using automated text analysis (e.g. investigating the readability of articles, etc.).

The results show that the JOSM publishes a large variety of articles with regard to theories, methods of data collection, and types of data analysis. For example, JOSM has published a mixture of qualitative and quantitative articles and papers containing firm-level and customer-level data. Further, the results show that even though conceptual articles create the same amount of interest (downloads), they are used more (citations).

This paper presents many descriptive results which do not allow for making inferences toward the entire service research discipline. Further, it is only based on one service research journal (JOSM) through a five-year span of publication.

The results have a number of implications for the discipline that are presented and discussed. Amongst them are that: the discipline should be more open toward conceptual articles, service research shows an imbalance toward theory testing, there is more potential to work with transactional data, and writing style should be more accessible (i.e. readable).

This paper is the first to conduct an in-depth analysis of service research articles to stimulate dialogue about common publishing practices in the JOSM and to increase the openness of the field.

Over the past several decades, instructional leadership has gradually gained increasing currency as a key role of school principals throughout much of the world. This is also the case in Malaysia where educational research, policy and practice have brought the instructional leadership role of the principal front and center. The purpose of this paper is to assess the conceptual models, research methods, and foci of scholars in the study of principal instructional leadership in Malaysia over the past 30 years.

Systematic methods were used to identify all studies conducted in Malaysia that had used the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS) (Hallinger, 1982/1990/2015) as the data collection instrument. This search yielded a database of 120 studies completed between 1989 and 2016 written in both English and Bahasa Malay. Common data were extracted from the 120 research reports, coded and entered into a MS Excel spreadsheet for analysis. Quantitative methods were employed to analyze modal trends and synthesize patterns in the data across the studies.

The search identified 120 PIMRS studies, 90 percent of which had been conducted since 2005. This represented a surprisingly large corpus of studies. Over 75 percent of the Malaysian studies of principal instructional leadership had been conducted as graduate (master and doctoral) theses, relatively few of which had achieved publication in journals. The authors’ analysis found that most studies had used lower order (i.e. bivariate, direct effects) conceptual models and relied heavily on descriptive and simple correlational statistical tests. The lack of consistent results within the database of studies was attributed largely to limitations in research design and quality.

The 120 PIMRS studies conducted in Malaysia comprise a surprisingly large corpus of research on principal instructional leadership. Indeed, the Malaysian corpus is second only to the USA in terms of the number of PIMRS studies of principal instructional leadership. Nonetheless, limitations in the research models and methods employed in these studies suggest a need for stronger methodological training before Malaysian scholars can achieve the goal of contributing useful knowledge to the local and global knowledge base. Specific recommendations are offered for strengthening the quality of research.

The recent expansion of higher education in Malaysia – like other developing societies – has yielded progress in the scope of research production. However, numerous challenges remain in transforming the potential for useful knowledge production from graduate research into reality.

This is the first review of research on principal leadership conducted in Malaysia. The review follows efforts by scholars to systematically identify the boundaries of knowledge in educational leadership and management within East Asian societies (e.g. China, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan and Hong Kong). Moreover, this is the first review of research that examines the use of the PIMRS in a single society.