Pennings, J.M.

Wijk, C.G. van

English

Research Papers in Economics

http://oss.sagepub.com
Organization Studies 
DOI: 10.1177/017084068300400316 
 1983; 4; 295  Organization Studies
Johannes M. Pennings and C. Gilles van Wijk 
  Letter to the Editor: à la Recherche de la Normalité Perdue
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Normalit&eacute; Perdue
The  Discussion Note from Jean Claude Thoenig  on US  management  research (OS3/3)  stirs up  the
kinds of emotions that often become activated dunng  our encounters wUh  organization scientists
-  from  the European  side of  the Atlantic. As  European-American management  researchers we  have
always felt a certain degree  of  marginality because we  have learned to appreciate the hypernormal
organization science as  it  struggles along in  the United States while still  experiencmg a strong
affinity to our European brethren and their ways of advancing the field of organization theory.
Taking all  considerations together we acknowledge that  research on this  side  has sometimes
degenerated into sterile dustbowl empiricism but feel that there is still sufficient creative critical
mass  to expect the advancement  of the field to be primarily resting on the US  shoulders. Perhaps,
because of sheer market size, as Thoenig suggests, Europeans  collectively have little chance to
counteract the directions of scientific research m  the United States.
Since Thoenig  recognizes  the overwhelming  influence of US  organization theory and  since both  his
institution as well as many  other institutions of higher learning are major  consumers  of American
research output, it becomes  important to rectify his misconceptions  of US  management  research.
Such rectification may be useful, especially because his stereotypes are often shared by others,
many  of whom might never have much exposure to the activities behind the US  stage. Thoenig
’ 
could peek behind the stage but his observations are somewhat  one-sided and seem to have been
’ 
shaped by his European preconceptions rather than by trying to be an ethnomethodologist who
seeks  to gain an undistorted description of  his observations. As  European-American  management
researchers, we  are not immune  to the distorting  effects  of our  stereotypes  but  as msiders  we  may  at
&dquo; 
least present  an  alternative view of the US scene. Granted  that our  views  reflect stereotypes  too, we
wish to review three central points in Thoenig’s notes.
First, Thoenig argues that the reward system of US  universities instills competitiveness, which  is
partly the reason for the sterile nature of  their research. Secondly, he claims that US  management
research displays a  strong inclination toward quantitative, irrelevant, nonpractical, and sterile
work which  is out of tune wnh  its subject matter. Finally, he asserts that the departmental struc-
ture of US  business schools have evolved into ’politicized cultures’ which are not responsive to
pragmatic (i.e., corporate) needs.
There exists a good  deal of ’myth’ about the decried and celebrated US  academic reward system
whose  effects are so neatly captured by the ’publish or pensh’ slogan. Tenure-granUng  decisions
hang  as Damocles’ swords above the heads  of those pitiful hard-working academicians who  try to
_  slug it  out by working long hours to crank out as many papers as possible. In Europe, tenure is
granted  within two  or  three years  if not  at the  date  of  appomtment,  so  that the university  employees
do  not have  to worry  about  job  security but instead can  choose  between  ’publish’ or’retirement’ on
the job. They can devote all their time to research and teachmg, rendering their output high on
,  ’profundity’ and perhaps not high on ’quantity’.
’ 
We  do not disagree that the US tenure system is  flawed.  It  can lead to researchers foregoing
,  profundity for quantity,  it  can create an unhealthy dependence of the have-nots on the haves
’ 
whereby  the latter enjoy  considerable influence over  the former. Yet  in the dominant  universities,
including those that were visited by Thoenig, the tenure system has also led to an environment
where  the researcher has to show  his potential contribution  to the field. He  cannot  retire at the age
of 28  or 30, the common  age for getting a Ph.D. We  strongly believe that, if European  universities
denied  mcoming faculty  the  choice  of  ’retirement  on  the  job’,  European contributions  to
organization theory could be much more extensive than they are now.
In fact, the US  tenure system might not go far enough,  it would be better if every faculty member
were  evaluated  every  decade  or  so,  such  that  he/she  would  not  decline  into  a  state  of
semiretirement  as sometimes  happens. Fortunately, however,  numerous  academicians  do  not need
that sword  of Damocles, since they continue to perform beyond  the stage of  securing tenure. The
correctness  of  the tenure  decision  is as  often  corroborated  by  the continuation  of  a persons’s  output
as  it  is  challenged  by  those  who  treat  its  conferred  job  security  as a ’blank  check’  for
semiretirement. Overall we  feel that tenure granting can be conducive to the creation of  a strong
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research  culture where  faculty  at various  levels subscribe to academic  values. This would  certainly
be the case in the prominent  institutions Thoenig  visited, where  the tenure  decision process  is very
thorough and where projections  are  made about a  person’s  future  commitment to  research
productivity.
What  of  the apparent trend toward  sterile research? To  some  extent we  agree with Thoenig  about
certain streams of research. The three decades  of work  on  situational determinants of leadership
effectiveness, for example, have yielded numerous  dissertations and  publications, but we  are not
sure they have provided  theoretical insights into the role of  leadership  in organizations. However,
it is easy to find more  encouraging examples, where  investigators have found  scope  to experiment
with novel and  provocative  ideas. So  we  challenge  Thoenig’s  view  that US  research  is hypernormal.
There may be pockets of hypernormality such as leadership research or structural contingency
research. There are also inroads into new  fields. They  include organizational phenomenology  and
the pervasive trend towards  qualitative, metaphorical, and  ethnomethodological research. There
is  widespread  interest  in  ’risky’  new topics,  such  as  organizational  culture,  organizational
linguistics, decision making  as a retroactive justification of behaviour, and the usefulness (sic) of
organizational research. Journal issues and  conferences are devoted to qualitative methodologies
or to the usefulness of results.
Clearly such trends are quite compatible with Kuhn’s observations where he argues that  the
presence of hypernormal research  reflects  the  inherent weaknesses of a  prevailing  research
paradigm. Varieties  of  other  paradigms  are at an embryonic  stage waiting  to gain acceptance. Thus
US  conditions can be characterized as a state of  transition with both an adherence to traditional
views (such as structural contingency theory) and multiple ’franc tireurs’ (such as organizational
phenomenology and Habermasian, critical theory).
The third issue that surfaces in Thoenig’s note is somewhat odd, coming from an organization
theorist. It seems  almost  a truism  that no  matter how  we  divide an  organization up  into subsystems
of roles, political factions will evolve that centre around the status quo. There are a few business
schools that have abstained from departmentalizing themselves, but those schools are not less
politicized than departmentalized ones. There  are always the various professions whose presence
in the business schools leads to the emergence of political rivalries, regardless of whether their
existence is organizationally recognized. This  is most  clearly borne out  in issues of  promotion and
tenure where parochial (i.e., political) considerations as well as merit enter prominently into the
decision-making  process. The  implication  is that the  staffing of  business  schools  is rarely inspired by
a dean’s strategic mission statement but rather that it  reflects the pervasive incrementalism and
retroactive  sense  making so  pervasive  in  institutions  of higher  learning.  The absence  of  a
departmental  structure does  not lead to deans  having  wide  strategic discretion. In fact, the absence
of departmental decision-making structures impedes their discretion.
The  more  fundamental problem  is that US  business schools  are part of  universities, whose  collegial
decision-making  ideologies preclude the concept  of  dean  as the captain of  the  ship, who  directs the
future mission of his school. Rather, they render the schools highly inert.
We  do not agree that there is a disengagement from the needs and problems  of  organizations and
their managers. The recent interest  in  ’usefulness’ is  a case  in  point. As professional schools,
business schools have both access and exposure to the organizations ’out there’, an opportunity
that is often not accorded to traditional, ivory tower  departments. Indeed, imminent  issues of the
Administrative Science Quarterly will  deal with the usefulness of organization theory. Several
conferences are being held to address the same question.
This leads to an ambivalence between pragmatic usefulness and scientific innovation which may
explain the element of hypernormality, The old paradigm is needed as a source of fresh, useful
applications to management  problems. At  the same time, the nascent paradigms  require a degree
of insulation from pragmatism and even from established legitimacy so that they can come to
fruition. Eventually, they too will be subjected to the test of pragmatism and only those which
reach the stage of implementation will survive. However, this  is  no reason to neglect them, as
Thoenig does, since they signal  the progressive erosion of pockets of normal science and the
emergence of new and useful organization theory.
Johannes M. Pennings,
C. Gilles van Wijk
Graduate School of Business
Columbia University
New  York, USA
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Letter to the editor: A la Recherche de la Normalité Perdue.

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