An Archaeological Critique of ‘Evidence‐based Management’: One Digression After Another

Published date01 July 2015
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12109
Date01 July 2015
British Journal of Management, Vol. 26, 529–543 (2015)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12109
An Archaeological Critique
of ‘Evidence-based Management’:
One Digression After Another
Kevin Morrell, Mark Learmonth1and Loizos Heracleous
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Scarman Road, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK, and 1Durham
University Business School, Durham University, Millhill Lane, Durham DH1 3LB, UK
Corresponding author email: kevin.morrell@wbs.ac.uk
Fundamental problems remain with evidence-based management. We argue that, rather
than being addressed, these problems are treatedas digressions. One explanation for this
is an ongoing incoherence: the evidence-based approach relegates narrative to a ghetto
category of knowledge, but it is itself a narrative. Moreover, while this narrative is be-
coming more polished through repetition and selective assimilation of critique, it is also
becoming simplified and less interesting. A Foucauldian,archaeological analysis accounts
for this development by locating evidence-based management in a broader historical con-
text. This analysis showshow the roots of incoherence can be informed by older exchanges
between evidence and narrative.
Although scholarly debates advance, they do so in a
non-linear and sometimes circuitous direction.
(Wood and Budhwar, 2014, p. 2)
In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progres-
sive too, and at the same time . . . Digressions incon-
testably arethe sunshine; they are the life, the soul of
reading. (Sterne, 1985, p.95)
We examine the roots of evidence-based manage-
ment (EBMgt), adopting a method for framing
knowledge contrasting with that associated with
the ‘evidence’ in EBMgt. We analyse ostensibly
the high-water mark for EBMgt advocates, The
Oxford Handbook of Evidence-based Management
(hereafter The Handbook) (Rousseau, 2012), but
suggest The Handbook and advocates have been
unable to innovate theoretically. The movement is
more preoccupied with establishing jurisdictional
claims than with questions of science. The expla-
nation for a lack of theoretical progress is that
at the heart of EBMgt lies incoherence: advo-
cates denigrate narrative and narrative forms of
knowledge,1but are themselves relating a narra-
tive about research and practice in management
1In EBMgt discourse, ‘narrative’ is usually presented as
a straw man that is somehow defective, to be knocked
down in favourof something more scientific. This applies
most obviously in making the case for the systematic re-
view as a superior form of knowledgeproduction, but also
to the pathologizing of managers who resist evidence in
the form of scientific findings, and more widely still to
the idea that particular cases and circumstancesshould al-
ways be subordinatedto an evidence base. Madhavanand
Mahoney (2012, p. 85) call on Egger, Schneider and
Smith’s (1998) (here false) dichotomy, ‘that formal meta-
analysis of observational studies can be misleading and
that insucient attention is often given to heterogene-
ity does not mean that researchers should return to
writing highly subjective narrative reviews’. Frese et al.
(2014, p. 99) state, ‘Narrative literature reviews put to-
gether the literature in an unsystematic and often bi-
ased way’ (both documents that are themselves nar-
rative reviews). Pfeer and Sutton (2006, p. 4), in a
book that contains many excellent and illustrative sto-
ries, set severe limits on when stories are acceptable:
‘Good stories have their place in an evidence-based
world, in suggesting hypotheses, augmenting other (of-
ten quantitative) research, and rallying people who
will be aected by a change’. Giluk and Rynes-Weller
(2012, p. 141), at the same time as trying to address
© 2015 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.

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