Tutorial 1_ Deep Thinking

Professor Mark Palmer Queens University Belfast

Questions
How low can you go?

How deep can you go?

Thinking deeply about research

Going beyond the Lets google it culture Social science and science Primacy of theory Meta thinking reflection and reflexion Learning to become abstract and multi-layered Conceptualizing phenomena

Muller-Lyer Visual Illusion

More Clarity? Examples of best practice in business schools

Management research has a bad habit of identifying what it sees as best practice, erecting a management theory around it, only to find, all too soon, that the firms and managers associated with the latest management fad are not what they seemed. For instance, Harvard Business School best practice case studies of Enron proliferated prior to its downfall, as did cases of Sir Fred Goodwin, former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, as a model of leadership.

Gary Hamel (2000), acclaimed by many as the world's leading strategy guru, built a theory of business revolution, innovation and transformation on an analysis of Enron.

Are we studying hagiography? Do we view leaders or firms in a hagiographic manner? Are you a business hagiographer ?

hagiography the writing and critical study of the lives of the saints; hagiography - a biography that idealizes or idolizes the person (especially a person who is a saint).

 Shift from the macro to the micro in theorising (Mundane) Cognition tradition have focused largely on everyday memory (Cohen & Conway, 2008), Everyday on decision making (Woll, 2002); Everyday attention given the importance of attention in the performance of our day-to-day lives. Everyday practice - Strategy as practice

Everyday theorising attentive to the automatic

Taken-for-granted Examples
Workshops PowerPoint presentations Critical instances or moments Meetings Email logs

Exercise 1: Exercising your mind; Tell me a story with schemata?

a concept, similar to a universal but limited to phenomenal knowledge, by which an object of knowledge or an idea of pure reason may be apprehended. Past, Present and Future

Exercise
What are your chronic schemata? Which schemata do managers use?
How managers conceptualize competitors, market boundaries and strategic groups?

How do managers (you) simplify their(your) environment? How do managers (you) categorize their (your) competitors?

Examples: Mental Schemas to Interrogate Opportunities

SW Schema strength and weaknesses ABC Schema antecedents, behaviour, and consequences (intended and unintended) SPI Schema Symptoms, Problems and Issues (e.g. coldsore!) Material commercialization and natural

E.g. SWOT Matrix-as-Schemas

Do you suffer from chronic schemata fatigue?

YES

The Law of the Instrument: Maslow's (1966) and Kaplans (1964) Golden Hammer
Give a boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"

Cognitive Schema to Learn: Analysis of markets

Porac (1989) seminal study found that the managers they interviewed had a hierarchical categorization of their competitive space, for example, starting broadly with textiles, then narrowing to knitwear (vs. hosiery and lace), then full-fashioned classic (vs. fashion which had its own subsets of fully fashioned and cut and sew), and finally high quality (vs. the rest). Found that their own network acts as an information filter by narrowing the range of market data to that which is of immediate concern to the core participants (Porac et al., 1989, p. 409)

Cognitive taxonomy Scottish Knitwear Industry

(Labelling)

Questions as signalling schemata Tools as schemata (eg. SWOT) Jargon as schemata (eg. TQM) Artefacts as schemata (eg. Flip charts, PowerPoint slides) Roles as schemata (Sales Director, Engineer, Accountant) But.. What about omissions ?

Groupthink - Why?
Education? Professional training - CIM? Industry associations, affiliations? Red Queen effect? Lemmas lemmas effect? Information sources? Mimicry? .. (discuss?)

dformation professionnelle
Narrow-minded instrumentalism "looking at things from the point of view of one's profession" Regulatory capture, the tendency for regulators to look at things from the point of view of the profession they are regulating

A prisoner of our own mind?

Our Domestic Success? Our International Failures? Our Role? Our .?(Discuss)

Imprisoned by ourselves or our roles?

Stanford studies August 1420, 1971
The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. Twelve students were selected out of 75 to play the prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Another twelve of the same 75 were selected to play the Guards. Roles were assigned randomly to the 24 men. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond what was expected, leading the officers to display authoritarian measures and ultimately to subject some of the prisoners to torture. Implications for you?

Sound familiar? Myopia

Professor Theodore Levitt
The vision of most firms is too constricted by a narrow understanding of what business they are in [Levitt, 1960] He illustrated how oil firms redefined their business as energy rather than just petroleum

The tyranny of the served customer or the domestic market

The established hierarchy rules are in their favour

Prisoner of .
Inscription rather than ascription Imprisoned by inscription Understanding why?

Thinking starts by noticing (awareness, attentive, mindful)

How are you at self monitoring? High or Low? that individuals differ meaningfully in the extent to which they can and do engage in the expressive control required for the creation of appropriate self-presentations (Snyder, 1974). High: Faced with a social situation, high self-monitors ask: Who does this situation want me to be and how can I be that person? Low: Faced with a social situation, these true-to-themselves individuals ask: Who am I and how can I be me in this situation? (Snyder, 1979)

Hearing and Listening to Phenomena

To whom? customers, colleagues, managers, stakeholders etc. We hear with our ears, but we listen with our eyes and bodies as well, we see gestures, expressions, postures- bodies speak and we listen and understand, but hearing is much more narrow . .. there is more to listening than meets the eardrum, far more than the hearing of words. Listening to what someone says can be as dependent on our knowing them as upon our hearing of their words .... In listening we pay attention not to the sound of the person, but to the person of the sound (Forester 1980, page 222)

Why Listen (to data)?

Weick's (1978: 52) statement that "to control a thing you have to listen to it."

In Weick's (1978: 58) terminology, being loosely coupled suggests an inner mental attentiveness, a tight coupling to the words of a fellow interactant.

Theoretical Underpinning
Sensemaking is the ability or attempt to make sense of an ambiguous situation. More exactly, sensemaking is the process of creating situational awareness and understanding in situations of high complexity or uncertainty in order to make decisions. It is "a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places, and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively" (Klein et al., 2006a).

Automatic Processing of the Everyday Humdrum

After practice, some tasks no longer require attention. Three criteria for automatic tasks:
Occur without intention. Required reaction times are short The tasks are over-learnt or well-practiced No conscious awareness/Cant be introspected. Dont interfere with other activities. Fast processes -- the brain does them automatically, they are a basic feature

You can tell how the process of automatization is going by doing dual task studies (primary and secondary).

Automatic Processing
Read the Words. Say the colours Which is harder?

Automatic Processing Paying Attention

You did the Stroop task! The interpretation is that you automatically read the word. If thats the task, the colour doesnt interfere because you dont automatically register that. If youre supposed to name the colour, automatic reading messes you up. Paying attention in the research field
Sometimes you have to concentrate on something in which you have no interest. Sometimes you have to not think about something in which you have an interest.

Binary thinking and categorization

Planned or unplanned Intended or unintended Incremental or radical Evolutionary or revolutionary Emergent or realized Induced or autonomous Recurrent or unprecedented And many more!

Perceptual Screening: Duality thinking rather than bi-polor

DUALITY ORGANIZING AND STRATEGIZING Which ever way you look at it, each defines and is defined by the other See Pye, A. Pettigrew, A.(2006) Strategizing and Organizing: Change as a Political Learning Process, Enabled by Leadership Long Range Planning, 39(6): 583-590.

A way with words

Never cross ...[anybody] with a barrel of ink! Dont criticise your peers in the literature (relationship conflict)
Affect/effect Clichs Its/its Acronyms Percent/%

Action and the importance of Inaction

Management practice
is defined as a social activity, constructed through the actions, interactions and negotiations of multiple actors (Jarzabkowski et al., 2006) What are the processes of giving voice? What are the processes oppressing voice? (silencing of others) When does one become (or stop becoming) a strategist? How does one maintain the status of being a strategist? Who has a voice across different times/periods/places? How does management cope with the (restless) continuous cycle of strategy-making?

A Contested Process: What actors do

and

After the death of Princess Diana, HM Queen Elizabeth II struggles with her reaction to a sequence of events What is written/said and dont do remained not written/unsaid? What happened and what could not happen? Why are certain things picked up whilst others remain left on the table? Why do actors refuse to do it? How do firms react to strategy from a remote source?

Three types of bias

1. 2. 3.

Response Bias Measurement Bias Non-Response Bias

1. Response Bias
Response bias can affect the results of a survey if people answer questions in the way they think the questioner wants them to answer rather than according to their true beliefs

 A leading question is a question which suggests the correct answer due to the way it is asked. Dont you think that Mark Palmer should be reelected as mayor of Belfast? A loaded question also suggests the correct answer, but it does so by providing information within the question. Mark Palmer has helped create new jobs in the city of Belfast. Do you think he should be reelected as mayor of Belfast?

2 Measurement bias
refers to survey questions that restrict certain answers from being given, even though they dont necessarily suggest the one right answer. A common example is a multiple choice question about a matter of opinion.

Who do you think is the best female tennis player of all time? a) Martina Navratilova b) Chris Evert c) Billie Jean King d) Serena Williams e) Other:____________ Although this question does not necessarily suggest the one right answer, it could restrict someone from naming a player not on the list.

3. Non-Response Bias
Non-response bias is not the opposite of response bias. Rather, non-response bias occurs if the people who choose not to respond differ from those who respond in some important characteristic.

Example of Non-Response Bias

A restaurant manager decides to ask customers to fill out a survey dealing with food quality. Thirty percent of the customers respond. Of those that respond, many complain about poor food quality. This could be a case of non-response bias, because many of the people who were satisfied with the food dont feel the need to respond, whereas people who were upset with the food want to vent their frustration.

Respondent bias

Requires researchers to manipulate research instruments positive and negative. Requires researchers to consider the indirect indicators eg. Narcissistic behaviour

Indirect identification of Narcissism

Prominence of the CEOs photograph in the annual report CEO prominence in company press releases CEOs use of first person singular pronouns (I, Me, Mine, My, Myself versus plural pronouns such as we, us, our, ourselves) His or her cash compensation (salary and bonus) divided by that of the second highest-paid executive in the firm

Narcissists?
(Caveat emptor: smiling assassins)

Prominence of the CEOs photograph in the annual report

Subtle and not-so-subtle on the website search under expert in ABS!

Indicating performance, too

Today were all one big happy (US) team!!

Back in 2000 : Wheres the Performance?

In 1992 a different (larger family) picture!!

Varies across sectors/industries: What Rules?

CEO prominence in company press releases

CEOs use of first person singular pronouns

Exercise 2
Students will consider and sense make in their laboratory environment.

Students to discuss the environment and its social psychology dynamics.

Students to discuss the ontology and epistemology of researching the laboratory environment. Students to make a list of interrogating questions about the laboratory environment.

Reflection Question
Are there any parts of the tutorial you would like me to say a bit more about?

References on theory-building and theoretical contributions

Bartunek, J. M., Rynes, S. L., & Ireland, R. D. 2006. What makes management research interesting and why does it matter? Academy of Management Journal, 49(1): 9-15. Bergh, D. 2003. From the Editors: Thinking strategically about contribution. Academy of Management Journal, 46(2): 135-136

Corley, K. & Gioia, D. Building theory about theory building: What constitutes a theoretical contribution? Academy of Management Review, 36 (1): 12-32 Davis, Murray S. 1971. Thats interesting! Philosophy and Social Science, 1 (4): 309-344. Gioia, D. A., & Pitre, E. 1990. Multiparadigm perspectives on theory building. Academy of Management Review, 15: 584-602.

References on theory-building and theoretical contributions

Huff, A. S. 1999. Writing for Scholarly Publication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Rindova, V. P. 2008. Publishing theory when you are new to the game. Academy of Management Review, 33(2): 300-303.
Suddaby, R. 2010. Editors Comments: Construct clarity in theories of management and organization. Academy of Management Review, 35 (3) 346-358. Van de Ven, A. H. 1989. Nothing is quite so practical as a good theory. Academy of Management Review, 14(4): 486-489. Whetten, D. A. 1989. What constitutes a theoretical contribution? Academy of Management Review, 14: 490-495. Weick, Karl. 1995. What theory is Not, Theorizing is, Administrative Science Quarterly, 40: 385-390.