Hello,
Wanted to do a little promotion of an academy symposium hosted by the SIM
division that is applicable to OB scholars, but which may be off the radar
map. See details below:
Program Session #: 1058 | Submission: 15725 | Sponsor(s): (SIM)
Scheduled: Tuesday, Aug 15 2006 8:30AM - 10:10AM at Hilton Atlanta in
Crystal Ballroom B & E
The Problem of Old Wine in New Bottles: Consolidating Knowledge in
Management Science
Presenter: Daniel Denison; IMD;
Presenter: Timothy A Judge; U. of Florida;
Presenter: Thomas J. Donaldson; U. of Pennsylvania;
Presenter: Thomas M. Jones; U. of Washington;
Presenter: Corey Phelps; U. of Washington;
From Scientific Management's inaugurating notion of finding the one best
method for effectiveness, the field has seen a wonderful blossoming ideas
about organizations and the management thereof. However, this blossoming has
had some concomitant side-effects which are deleterious to the field's
future development. Namely, it is disturbingly easy to find constructs and
measures which overlap tremendously, but which continue to develop in
parallel without any reference to each other. This not only holds across
fields, but even within disciplines and sub-disciplines. A proliferation of
superfluous labels and measures make it difficult to assess what has already
been established in the literature or which measures are most appropriate
for a given research question. The position taken by this panel is that, for
a number of topics, the field would benefit from a consolidation of ideas,
and that this requires doing the uncomfortable work of identifying redundant
terms and measures. The aim of this symposium is to argue that while we've
become very good at creating new ideas, we appear less able to show how
those ideas overlap and converge. As such, this symposium calls on the
relevant actors to streamline the field of management by looking back over
our accomplishments to identify where theories and measures overlap to
significant degrees; and then to clear up those redundancies and ambiguities
for the benefit of the field.
Hope to see you there, ~ Will Felps (Panel Chair; U of Washington)