Rethinking Approaches to Management Research During Times Marked by Rare, Yet Increasingly Impactful Events
In this article, Vanessa C. Hasse reflects upon what drove her interest in researching rare but impactful events, as well as the implications associated with their inherent complexity and increasing frequency. The full argument is laid out in her recently published commentary, “From trailing behind to shaping the curve: Researching rare and impactful events for societal benefit,” in Business & Society.
In recent times, an increasing number of phenomena that seem rare and unexpected, even unprecedented, have unfurled upon societies around the world with massive impact. Often, the specific manifestations of such inherently complex events (e.g. artificial intelligence or infectious disease outbreaks, including the Covid-19 pandemic) are difficult to predict in foresight, leaving communities largely underprepared. The driving motivation for the recently published commentary was thus to explore how management research can aid in mitigating the negative impact such events exert upon businesses and societies at large.
As a starting point, I explored how the above examples are represented in publications across 24 leading management journals (1950-2023). The results were striking in terms of how clearly they demonstrated an inherent tendency: both phenomena remained largely absent from publications during their decades-long latencies but received sudden attention following the onset of their exponential phases. This suggests that much of management research trails behind the curve – with consequential implications for global health, economic activity, and peace. With little scholarly insights ahead of the most impactful phase, business executives and policymakers are left to determine responses that may lack in scientific grounding and rely on after-the-fact guidance that becomes outdated quickly.
I thus endeavored to explore possible reasons for this “ex-postism” tendency across management research. First, management research is rooted in a paradigm focused on deriving predictions from existing theory. While this has aided significant scientific advances, it largely incentivizes research on non-outlier phenomena. After all, how could something be studied rigorously when it has not (yet) materialized? Second, certain contexts may be overrepresented in management research. Infectious disease outbreaks, for instance, occur with relative frequency in lower-income contexts but were only reflected in publications once the Covid-19 outbreak reached pandemic status, impacting countries across all income levels. Third, quantitative conventions within management research are often based on assumptions of normal distributions, leading researchers to malleate outlier data into shape. As a result, phenomena which are rare but have the potential to exert massive impact are largely disregarded.
A call for a paradigm shift towards “ex-anteism” in management research is thus imperative – but actionable suggestions are non-trivial, given realities such as limited space in leading journals, opportunity costs for scholars, and reviewer inclinations towards non-outlier phenomena. Inspired by recent work from Ali Aslan Gümüsay, Juliane Reinecke, Pratima Bansal, Garima Sharma, and others, three avenues seemed most promising. First, management research can generate novel insights by tapping into the rich tradition of imaginative theorizing. Focused on critiquing plausible pathways instead of generating predictions with large degrees of freedom, these models optimize for adaptability and antifragility. Second, management research should embrace the distribution of data (including outliers) and contextualization through qualitative approaches and wider temporal/spatial lenses. Finally, to construct better warning systems, management scholars ought to lead in building widely spun co-creative knowledge networks involving a diversity of stakeholders. Especially the latter offers an opportunity for elevating the usefulness of management research for societal benefit – after all, the next unexpected event is already on its way.
