Towards Common Ground and Trading Zones in Management Research and Practice
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12110 |
| Date | 01 July 2015 |
| Published date | 01 July 2015 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 26, 544–559 (2015)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12110
Towards Common Ground and Trading
Zones in Management Research
and Practice
A. Georges L. Romme, Marie-Jos´
eAvenier,
1David Denyer,2
Gerard P. Hodgkinson,3Krsto Pandza,4Ken Starkey5and Nicolay Worren6
Eindhoven University of Technology, Department of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences, PO Box
513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 1L´
eonard de Vinci pˆ
ole universitaire, Business Lab, 2Cranfield
University School of Management, Cranfield, UK, 3Warwick Business School, University of Warwick,
Coventry, UK, 4University of Leeds Business School, Leeds, UK, 5University of Nottingham, Nottingham,
UK, and 6BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway and Deloitte Consulting
Corresponding author email: a.g.l.romme@tue.nl
The purpose and nature of management scholarship is contested, evidenced by debates
about the ‘academic–practitioner divide’ and attendant remedies for addressing it, in-
cluding mode 2 and mode 3 research, engaged scholarship, evidence-based management
and design science. In this paper the authors argue that, without a culture of dialogical
encounter, management scholarship will never be able to emerge from its adolescence,
and management will not develop into the profession that it should and can become. The
central proposition is that the highly fragmented landscape of management (practice and
scholarship) lacks sucient capability for dialogue among the plurality of actors situated
across that landscape. Developing the dialogical capability ultimately required to break
this fundamental impasse demands, first, a shared sense of purpose and responsibility
(akin to the Hippocratic Oath in medicine) and, second, institutional entrepreneurship to
establish more and better ‘trading zones’. Drawing on the philosophy of pragmatism,the
authors further this endeavourby identifying and proposing key elements of a statement of
shared purpose and responsibility. Finally, they explore the nature and characteristics of
successful trading zones, highlighting particular examples that havealready been created
in management studies.
The authors are grateful to Joan van Aken, three anony-
mous reviewers and editor Georey Wood for helpful
comments on earlier versions of this paper. The authors
also would liketo acknowledge the participants in a work-
shop conducted at the BAM conference in 2013, during
which the idea for this paper initially arose. Our attempt
in the first half of this paper to define a shared norm
can be considered as an alpha test as to whether a group
of seven scholars and practitioners with highly dierent
backgrounds and epistemic preferences could subscribe
to such a norm.
[The copyright line for this article was changed on
October 11, 2016 after original online publication.]
Introduction
The purpose and nature of management schol-
arship is contested (Whitley, 1984a, 1984b),
evidenced by numerous debates on the academic–
practitioner divide and attendant ways of ad-
dressing it, such as Mode 2 and 3 research,
engaged scholarship, pragmatic science, evidence-
based management (EBMgt) and design science
(e.g. Anderson, Herriot and Hodgkinson, 2001;
Bartunek, 2011; Grey, 2001; Hodgkinson and
Rousseau, 2009; Hu and Hu, 2001; Pandza
and Thorpe, 2010; Rousseau, 2006; Van de Ven
and Johnson, 2006; Weick, 2001). In this respect,
© 2016 The Authors British Journalof Management published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of 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.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is
non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Common Ground and Trading Zones in Management 545
the British Journal of Management has a long
history of furthering debates on the purpose and
nature of management scholarship (e.g.MacLean,
MacIntosh and Grant, 2002; Starkey and Madan,
2001; Tranfield and Starkey, 1998; Tranfield,
Denyer and Smart, 2003). More recently, however,
these debates appear to have been subdued.
A prominent example is the discourse on Mode
2 research and related ways to connect rigour and
relevance. Whereas Tranfield and Starkey’s (1998)
initial advocacy of Mode 2 (inspired by Gibbons
et al., 1994) and a number of subsequent com-
mentators (e.g. Hu and Hu, 2001; Hodgkinson,
Herriot and Anderson, 2001; Starkey and Madan,
2001) expressed optimism for a future formanage-
ment scholarship based on teamwork and trans-
disciplinarity, Bartunek (2011) has observed more
recently that, contrary to initial expectations, the
Mode 2 discourse has failed to make substantial
progress. As such, disputes on the purpose and na-
ture of management research appear to have taken
on some characteristics of language games, rather
than of a discourse that would evoke productive
movement (Bartunek, 2011; Starkey, Hatchuel and
Tempest, 2009).
Another, no less prominent, example is the
design science perspective that has been arising
in management studies (e.g. Romme, 2003; Van
Aken, 2004; Jelinek, Romme and Boland, 2008;
Hodgkinson and Starkey, 2011). Some early work
in this area (e.g. Van Aken, 2004, 2005) pre-
sented design science as an alternative to the so-
cial science roots of management scholarship.The
juxtaposition of explanatory and design sciences
was initially helpful, because it raised important
questions about management studies as a field
(e.g. Avenier, 2010; Mohrman, 2007; Pandza and
Thorpe, 2010). Other workin this area has pursued
a more integrative approach, arguing that science-
oriented and design-oriented perspectives are dif-
ferent but complementary ingredients of the fu-
ture of management research (Jelinek,Romme and
Boland, 2008; Romme, 2003; Sarasvathy, 2003). A
related dispute on whether critical realism would
provide an adequate philosophical foundation for
management research as a design science (e.g.
Hodgkinson and Starkey, 2011, 2012; Willmott,
2012) has not convergedtowards a shared position.
In this paper, we aim to reignite the debate con-
cerning the nature and purpose of management re-
search. Our central proposition is that the highly
fragmented landscapes of management research
and practice lack the capability to enable the se-
ries of conversations among the plurality of ac-
tors, which are ultimately required in order to
break the current impasse. We will argue that a
shared sense of purpose and responsibility (Rolin,
2010) and more ‘trading zones’ in which com-
munities with disparate meanings and logics are
able to collaborate despite global dierences (Gal-
ison, 1997) are essential to foster this essential
capability.
In this respect, Mary Parker Follett (1927, p. 73)
captured the essence of management as a profes-
sion by arguing that it connotes ‘a foundation of
science and a motive of service’. Similarly, Simon
(1967) argued at the time that the key challenge in
designing business schools as professional schools
was to synthesize science and practice in both
research and teaching. Although the nature of
professionalism in management is by no means
settled (Augier and March, 2011), the general
consensus is that management currently is not
a profession, ‘even though it might and should
be’ (Pfeer, 2012, p. ix) (see also Khurana and
Nohria, 2008; Rousseau, 2012a). Most business
schools have, therefore, abandoned the quest for
professionalism and have lost their independence
as arbiters of relevant knowledge and profes-
sional practice (Khurana, 2007). In this paper,
we argue that some normative and socio-political
‘common ground’ needs to be developed to create
necessary (although insucient) conditions for
management scholarship to contribute more force-
fully to the professionalization of management
practice.
As such, this paper contributes to the dis-
course on fragmentation within the academic com-
munity of management scholars (Whitley, 1984a,
2000) and debates concerning the divide between
practitioners and scholars (e.g. Anderson, Herriot
and Hodgkinson, 2001; Kieser, Nicolai and Seidl,
2015; Tranfield and Starkey, 1998) and suggests
how these challenges might be addressed. We ar-
gue that, without dialogues cutting across the en-
tire profession, managementscholarship will never
be able to emerge from its adolescence (cf. Star-
buck, 2006) and management will not develop into
the professional discipline that it should and can
become.
Our argument proceeds as follows. First, the
need for a culture of dialogical encounter in man-
agement studies is explored further. We partic-
ularly address the need for normative common
© 2016 The Authors British Journalof Management published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British
Academy of Management.
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