You Can't Expect Rationality from Pregnant Men: Reflections on Multi‐disciplinarity in Management Research
| Date | 01 March 1997 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.00036 |
| Published date | 01 March 1997 |
| Author | Reva Berman Brown |
Introduction
The paper questions the possibility, first, that a
distinctive approach to management research
exists which is multi-disciplinary in nature, and
secondly, that this specific approach can be chosen
as a particular one from among all those others
which can also be applied, which are not multi-
disciplinary. It is suggested, however, that this
premise belongs to the same family as that under-
lying the paper’s title. It makes grammatical sense
and it is logical; it is also both absurd and impos-
sible. What is at issue is the nature of manage-
ment itself. (For the purposes of this paper, the
term ‘Management’ encompasses all the various
terms used to refer to the knowledge-area con-
cerned with the management of organizations.)
The basic premise of the argument to be pre-
sented is that management is not one monolithic,
self-contained discipline, but rather a composite
of multi-disciplines. To paraphrase the words of a
popular song, like love and marriage, management
research and multi-disciplinarity go together like
a horse and carriage, because management, in its
very essence, is multi-disciplinary. There is thus
no mono-disciplinary approach to management
research, and the issue of multi-disciplinarity in
such research does not require special attention.
Multi-disciplinarity is an integral and defining feat-
ure of management, and the multi-disciplinary
research approach is not one among others; it is
the only approach that can be used.
The argument to support this view is provided
in the first section, which looks at the academic
discipline and attempts to hold this slippery con-
cept still for long enough to describe its appear-
ance and to attempt to reveal its nature. The next
section discusses how management never was, is
not now, and can never be a single discipline; and
the final section reflects on the complications
and compensations of management’s distinctive,
multi-disciplinary nature.
British Journal of Management, Vol. 8, 23–30 (1997)
You Can’t Expect Rationality from
Pregnant Men: Reflections on
Multi-disciplinarity in
Management Research
Reva Berman Brown
Nene College, Faculty of Management and Business, Park Campus, Boughton Green Road,
Northampton NN2 7AL, UK
The paper attempts to debate and answer two questions: (1) Does multi-disciplinary
research in management constitute a distinctive approach? To which the brief answer
is ‘no’, because multi-disciplinary research is not one approach among all those others
which can also be applied when researching management. Multi-disciplinary research
into management is, as it were, the only game in town. (2) Can we rationally choose
multi-disciplinary research into management as such at all? To which the response is
also ‘no’, because management research and multi-disciplinarity are inseparable, by
reason of the fact that management is, in its very essence, multi-disciplinary, rather than
mono-disciplinary, in nature.
© 1997 British Academy of Management
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