Evidence in Management Research: Some Conceptual Issues

Defining Domain Of Management Research With A Focus On Practice

According to Rousseau, Manning and Denyer (2008) management & organisational science encompasses theory and research on organizations and associated human behaviours, as workers, managers, and customers. Clarckson (1995) goes a step further as he visualises corporation as a system of primary stakeholder groups and observes that a corporation’s survival & continuing success requires that various stakeholder groups continue as a part of corporation’s stakeholder system. This in turn depends upon ability of a corporation’s managers to create sufficient wealth, value or satisfactions for the stakeholders. He also acknowledges power of secondary stakeholder groups like media which can harm a corporation. Clarckson (1995) observes that corporate data is available in terms of relationship of organisation with respect to various stakeholder groups since most corporations define obligations, responsibilities, & accountability for managers with respect to these groups. Hence, in this paper we use ‘stakeholder framework’ to classify managerial practices. We believe that using ‘stakeholder management’ as an organising principle for domain of management research can be a starting point in reducing the research – practice gap. Organisational practices can be broadly classified as external stakeholder (Customers, Suppliers, Investors, Government, Public, etc.) related (ESP) and internal stakeholder related (employees) (ISP). Generally, research on external stakeholders related practices includes domains of marketing, finance & strategy, while research on internal stakeholders includes domains of human resources, operations & systems.

A core aim of scientific research is to arrive at objective, true beliefs about the subject matter of the discipline: about what sorts of entities are to be found, what their properties are, and what causal relations obtain among them (Daniel, 1993). This clearly indicates that identifying causal relations among entities is one of the goals of research though not the only goal. Hence we propose that from the point of view of reducing gap between management research & practice, domain of management research be described in terms of internal & external stakeholder related practices besides their antecedents, moderators and consequences.