Читать книгу An Introduction to Management Studies - Thomas Bieger - Страница 17

Developing a new product requires the interaction of various factors: marketing (incorporation of customer needs), development, production, finance and controlling (securing the necessary investments), and compliance (with rules and legislation). In contrast, preparing a company takeover requires finance and compliance specialists to provide valuations and due diligence (careful examination of the acquisition object), to draft contracts (legal competence), and to support internal and external communications (communication competence). These two examples show that an integrative view is necessary for solving management tasks at every level of the organization. This principle applies not only to the required competencies and the associated corporate functional areas, but also to assessing how one’s own actions impact the various environments and stakeholders. Actors must also take into account the short- and long-term consequences of their actions — which points to the three dimensions (functions, stakeholders, time horizons) of integrative thinking.

Accordingly, various exponents of classical management research (e.g., Peter Drucker and Henry Mintzberg) followed an integrative approach. For example, in Concept of the Corporation (first published in 1946), Drucker described management as “a specific organ doing specific kind of work and having specific responsibilities” (Drucker, 1993). In his view, the rise of management as a discipline is probably the most important development in the 20th century: “In this century, [29] society has become a society of organizations. Every major social task in this society is being performed in and through large, managed institutions” (Drucker, 1973, p. 545). Other scholars have also highlighted that management is a decision-making and acting organ, i.e., actor. For instance, Henry Mintzberg’s remarkable Mintzberg on Management (1991) describes how managers cope with various tasks at the same time. Based on an observational study, he concludes that managers briefly hold problems in their hands like a juggler, before processing and sending them back into “orbit” for further processing (Mintzberg, 1991, p. 33).

St. Gallen management research has also explored the needs and requirements of management as an acting organ. Thus, Ulrich, Krieg, and Malik (1976) observed that “the purpose of business studies is to provide actors with the knowledge needed in specific problem situations” (p. 135).

Thus, in order to best serve management and managers, researchers often prioritized “relevance” (i.e., whatever serves life and efficiency) over “rigor” (i.e., scientific substantiation) — well, at least until business studies also began developing a stronger scientific approach. For instance, Gulati (2007, p. 776, based on Gorden & Howell, 1959; Pierson, 1958), noted that “The question first arose in the 1950s and 60s with multiple voices suggesting that management research was aspiring to be relevant at the expense of the rigor observed in other social sciences” (see also, e.g., Gordon & Howell, 1959; Pierson, 1959). There was an increasing orientation toward social science principles and theories, for example, from economics or sociology. One example was the development of strategies based on industry economics such as economies of scale, economies of scope, and economies of density. This approach was associated with a differentiation of management research, as evident in various disciplines. More and more, research became oriented toward individual functions and subdisciplines. For example, marketing as a research area differentiated itself as part of business studies; within marketing, other research areas (e.g., customer insight or brand management) emerged as subdisciplines with their own research communities.

[30] While this stronger scientific orientation enabled placing findings more strongly on micro-foundations, it made a deeper problem orientation more difficult (Nickerson & Argyres, 2018). For example, marketing research developed increasingly sophisticated explanations for constructs and theories such as perceived fairness or perceived customer value. However, 1980s heuristics (e.g., the dominance standard model) are still used in practice to tackle essential questions such as designing an integrated marketing mix (cf. Kühn, 1985).