Phenomenon-based Research in Management and Organisation Science: When is it Rigorous and Does it Matter?

Recently, the editors of Long Range Planning called for more phenomenon-based research. Such research focuses on identifying and reporting on new or recent phenomena of interest and relevance to management and organisation science. In this article, we explore the nature of phenomenon-based research and develop a research strategy that provides guidelines for researchers seeking to make this type of scientific inquiry rigorous and relevant. Phenomenon-based research establishes and describes the empirical facts and constructs that enable scientific inquiry to proceed. An account of the study of open source software development illustrates the research strategy. Rigorous phenomenon-based research tackles problems that are relevant to management practice and fall outside the scope of available theories. Phenomenon-based research also bridges epistemological and disciplinary divides because it unites diverse scholars around their shared interest in the phenomenon and their joint engagement in the research activities: identification, exploration, design, theorising and synthesis.

Introduction

Recently, several scholars have criticised the strong devotion to theory that they believe characterises management and organisation science (Hambrick, 2007; Helfat, 2007; Miller, 2007). Hambrick noted that too strong a focus on theory is likely to “prevent the reporting of rich details about interesting phenomena for which no theory yet exists” (Hambrick, 2007:1346). Phenomena can be defined as regularities that are unexpected, that challenge existing knowledge (including the extant theory) and that are relevant to scientific discourse. Thus, the aim of phenomenon-based research is to capture, describe and document, as well as conceptualise, a phenomenon so that appropriate theorising and the development of research designs can proceed.

Although it has often been forgotten in the current debate on epistemology in our discipline, phenomenon-based research has a long tradition in management and organisation science. As for well-known research on relevant phenomena, Bartlett and Ghoshal's work (1989) on transnational corporations was phenomenon-driven in the sense that the authors claim explicitly to have begun their process of inquiry by observing interesting phenomena and then identifying and describing their salient aspects. Bartlett and Ghoshal (2002) acknowledge that they do not believe “the transnational corporation really came out of any… literature” (p. 13) and have described their research as an act of hypothesis creation rather than of hypothesis testing. Acknowledging the great importance of Bartlett and Ghoshal's work to international management, Cheng (2007) noted that the phenomenon-motivated research of the former has yielded breakthrough knowledge and new theory (p. 29). Similarly, Lavie (2006) identified a phenomenon-driven approach in the rapidly evolving literature on alliance formation that had stemmed from the accumulation, proliferation and significance of interfirm alliances in recent years (p. 638). Cheng observes that traditional views of the firm such as the resource-based theory have limited explanatory power in accounting for the strategic behaviour and performance of connected firms and suggests the need to integrate and extend them, adopting an overtly interdisciplinary approach. An additional example, the phenomenon of emergent strategy, led Mintzberg and colleagues to spend many years studying the patterns that were visible in streams of management decisions (Mintzberg, 1978; Mintzberg and Waters, 1985), and their work has profoundly influenced the field of strategic management.

Although expectations regarding the outcomes of phenomenon-based research are high, there have been few systematic analyses of possible strategies for ensuring that the rigour of this type of research matches that of other unorthodox research strategies.² What characterises such strategies? Prior work has suggested that researchers need to formulate broad, open-ended research problems that are framed in “terms of the importance of the phenomenon and of the lack of plausible existing theory” (Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007, p. 26). Because the researcher has no way of knowing what puzzling issues may emerge from observations, a priori hypothesising regarding specific relationships among the variables may prevent the proper identification of the problem. Edmondson and McManus (2007) suggested that qualitative approaches should be used to address topics about which little or no previous theory exists because such topics concern new phenomena (p. 1161). However, as the editors of LRP suggested in a recent article (Baden-Fuller et al., 2008), there is room for systematic work on the research strategies that can be used in phenomenon-based research. This paper aims to close this gap in the literature by presenting a five-step framework for conducting such research. We illustrate the framework using the case of a prominent technological and social phenomenon: that of open source software (OSS).

In recent years, management and organisation science have been heavily influenced by the emergence of several new phenomena that have attracted scholarly interest. Failures in corporate governance, the environmental impact of firm-level conduct, the rapid diffusion of social networking and social entrepreneurship are examples of such phenomena. However, OSS has characteristics that make it an ideal illustrative example of the phenomena explored in phenomenon-based research. First, OSS is a wide-ranging phenomenon that affects many actors, including individuals, firms and public institutions in such diverse areas as education, science, business and public administration. Moreover, because of this widespread impact, many scholars and practitioners are likely to be familiar with OSS. Second, OSS has a long history as a social movement that began in the 1970s, and has progressively evolved into a more commercially viable product (Fitzgerald, 2006). During the last decade, OSS attracted such unremitting scholarly interest that scientific research has been able to characterise its evolution and social dynamics appropriately. Consequently, we can use OSS to document how phenomena emerge as objects of study in the social sciences. Third, the OSS case allows us to illustrate all five steps of the strategy we propose for conducting phenomenon-based research. As will be shown in greater detail, the scientific exploration of the OSS phenomenon was coupled with the continuous emergence of new puzzling issues. These issues engendered a wide variety of research problems that were investigated using diverse research methods. At every point in time, it was possible to document the existence of OSS-related research issues with scholarly investigations that were still in their infancy or other issues on which mature research had already been produced. Finally, OSS is a multifaceted phenomenon that includes components that are of interest in various scientific disciplines. Our account of the study of OSS may make it easier to apply the research strategy and lessons learned from OSS to new multifaceted phenomena.

Phenomenon-based research is of great interest and importance for several reasons. In the social sciences, as in science, new phenomena that require explanation are continually appearing. The resulting research problems stimulate investigations that are interesting in their own right, rather than being mere opportunities for theory testing (Hacking, 1983; Simonson et al., 2001). Phenomenon-based research supports a general tendency on the part of the top-tier journals in our field (e.g., Academy of Management Journal, MIS Quarterly or Organization Science) to publish research that is relevant (Vermeulen, 2007; Fendt et al., 2008) and interesting (Bartunek et al., 2007) and that has a significant impact on managerial decisions (Pfeffer, 2007).

Phenomenon-based research represents an important early phase in scientific inquiry. In seeking to account for complex phenomena, researchers avoid beginning their analyses with the a priori formulation of hypotheses. No currently available theory has sufficient scope to account for the phenomenon or the relevant cause-and-effect relationships associated with it, and no research design or methodology is considered superior to others as a means of exploring different aspects of the phenomenon. Initial studies generate insights based on exploratory work, yielding data and research strategies that inform subsequent research. Therefore, the lack of appropriate theory generates attempts to make sense of preliminary results and data. A long period of observation of the phenomenon must often transpire before theorising can proceed. Observing phenomena creates new research problems and constructs that later form the foundation for the development of new theories (see Colquitt and Zapata-Phelan, 2007). This mode of scientific inquiry may generate breakthrough knowledge that reshapes the scientific discourse in management and organisation science.

Furthermore, phenomenon-based research promises to help researchers to overcome the relevance-rigour divide that has been much debated in management and organisation science (Kharuna, 2007; Davies, 2006). Straub and Ang (2008) suggest two causes for this divide. First, researchers have been unable or unwilling to transform academic knowledge into actionable, pragmatic knowledge that is useful to practitioners. Second, strong adherence to established theories has made researchers inept at uncovering problems that are of interest to practitioners or at developing solutions to those problems (Hambrick, 2007: 1346). Rynes observed that publication policies that favour theory development and testing create a lack of incentive for academic researchers to study “important or emerging phenomena that cannot be linked to the current theoretical frameworks” (Rynes, 2007: 1380; see also Raelin, 2007; Vermuelen, 2007). Nevertheless, phenomena rank highest in terms of practitioner interests. As early as 1993, Daft and Lewin observed that “the cataclysmic changes occurring in the environment of organisations call for research that does not presume to test normal science hypotheses” (Daft and Lewin, 1993: ii). To help managers succeed in a continually evolving and complex world, Daft and Lewin proposed that scholars begin searching for and investigating important phenomena.³

This paper is organised as follows. In the next section, we characterise phenomena and phenomenon-based research in management and organisation. In Section 3, we propose a strategy for researching phenomena, which we illustrate with research on the phenomenon of OSS. Finally, we discuss the implications of our work and conclude.