Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Management History, Volume 15, Issue 2
Welcome to the second issue of Journal of Management History’s 15th volume. It has been my intention as Editor of the journal to live out the notion of internationalisation that many colleagues will know is one of my passions as a scholar. I am pleased to present this issue as an example of the extent to which the issues explored in the journal, the methods by which those issues are explored and, indeed, the explorers themselves, are truly international. Papers from colleagues in Europe, Asia and the USA consider issues and events rooted in Europe, Asia and the USA, by way of case studies,historical examination of primary sources and application of contemporary theorising, to draw generalisable conclusions and lessons that are applicable for scholars and managers in each and all of Europe, Asia and the USA. We begin the issue with a topic that has great contemporary resonance –entrepreneurship – and then present a series of diverse but related topics for consideration. The issue concludes with another Brief Note from Art Bedeian,as we continue to move the “interesting stuff” from the bottom of the page to the top.
In the first article, Popper’s (1957) The Poverty of Historicismis the vehicle by which Murphy (2009) reviews the current state of entrepreneurship research and theory, explains why current models do not adequately explain entrepreneurial phenomena, and develops the outline for a distinct entrepreneurship research paradigm. For Murphy (2009), entrepreneurship research should include designs that predict failure; should shift toward developing an “opportunity” construct and explaining variance in opportunities; should emphasize novel arrangements of empirical elements of entrepreneurship that are themselves also novel; should provide for greater utilization of nonparametric statistics and case studies; and should orient itself away from delineating composite factors comprising an entrepreneurial discovery, toward delineating the factor constellations likely to accompany, or liable to prevent, the entrepreneurial discovery.
One entrepreneur in the early twentieth century, who conceived and implemented a number of innovative marketing practices, making his company successful after others became bankrupt, was Louis DeLamater (Greenwood et al., 2009). DeLamater’s business was trams (street trolleys and streetcars), which are making a comeback in the twenty-first century. The key to DeLamater’s success in Grand Rapids Michigan, Greenwood et al.(2009) explain, was customer focus. It is worthy of note that, 80 years later,there is a new transit system being planned for Grand Rapids, essentially following the old streetcar lines and relying on rider input as a basis for service provision (Greenwood et al., 2009).
As a period of great progress and, perhaps, even greater devastation, two events in the latter category marked the beginning and middle of the twentieth century – World War I (the “Great War”, 1914-1918) and World War II (1938-1945). To the extent that the seeds for the second are seen to have been sowed in the events surrounding and immediately arising from the first, it is appropriate to juxtapose the next two papers, addressing aspects of each in turn – Grattan (2009) examines the mismanagement of relationships between the Allies in World War I, while Ahlstrom and Wang (2009) consider decision-making by the French General Staff as a basis for France’s 1940 defeat by Germany in World War II.
The focus of Grattan’s (2009) paper is on the strategy formulation process in the special circumstances of an alliance. His examination is carried out through the lens provided by the events of World War I, in which the Allies(France, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, Japan and, later, America) combined to defeat the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria). In many ways it is a “Zen” approach to the study of the issue, since it is designed to enlighten insofar as it exposes the extent to which the nations opposing the Central Powers had no single strategy but, rather, a series of national initiatives that were barely co-ordinated with their partners. It was the unity of military command, achieved only in the final months of the war,which led to the greater effectiveness of the allied armies.
With these events in mind, Grattan (2009) identifies what firms that ally themselves need to do to achieve the “victory” they anticipate from the alliance – firms need to overcome the tendency to concentrate on their own operations and be prepared to appoint an “alliance manager” with the power to make the partners work effectively as a team; their aims must be harmonised with those of their partners, understanding that the strategy is for the benefit of all partners; and it needs to be recognised that some “sovereignty”must be sacrificed in the wider interests of the alliance.
Whether “groupthink” was coined by Irving Janis, drawing on George Orwell’s 1984 notion of “doublethink” (Hart, 1991), or we accept the more prosaic etymology of Safire (2004), recognising William Whyte’s initial use of the term in a Fortune article in 1952 to refer to“a rationalized conformity – an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well,”the one million results that I was returned from a recent Google search suggest the word certainly has purchase in the English language. In any event, the concept of groupthink, defined by Janis (1972, p. 9) as:
A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action […]
Has been used to understand the dynamics of group decision making from the local boardroom to America’s engagement in international crises such as the Bay of Pigs, the Korean War of the 1950s, the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, and the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster.
It is this framework that, Ahlstrom and Wang (2009) apply to understanding the reasons for France’s defeat by Germany in 1940, during World War II,arguing that the presence of groupthink in the French General Staff during the interwar years had a deleterious effect on France’s defence preparations. Using documentary evidence, Ahlstrom and Wang (2009) identify a series of groupthink symptoms which led to the downplaying of important information, a failure to question vital assumptions about German capabilities, and the misapplication of new military technology. The result was an inability to respond to innovative German technology and operational strategy. Through their work here, Ahlstrom and Wang (2009) add to the growing richness of groupthink case studies that can be used to inform teaching and practice regarding decision making in groups.
Following World War II, the “Japanese post-war economic miracle”was the name given to Japan’s record period of economic growth, considered to be due mainly to the Japanese government’s economic interventionism, in particular through its Ministry of International Trade and Industry (Ellington,2004). Another reason for this success, as suggested, inter alia, by Tackney (2009), is Japan’s post-World War II working rules of industrial relations. Less well-known, perhaps, are the continental European jurisprudence origins of Japan’s industrial relations practices, which Tackney (2009)explores. Using a source-comparative method, he demonstrates these linkages, not only to European jurisprudence, but also to Roman Catholic social teaching. In the 1986 movie Gung Ho! (aka Working Class Man), actor Michael Keaton plays the role of the factory foreman who must mediate the clash of work attitudes between the foreign management and the local labour when a Japanese car company buys an American plant. With the benefit of Tackney’s (2009)insights, this may have been a more straightforward process.
Readers may be familiar with another American comedy film, Cheaper by the Dozen, starring actor Steve Martin, but not necessarily aware that the title is taken from a biography of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, written by two of their 12 children, Frank Jr and Ernestine (Gilbreth and Carey, 1948). Around the same time DeLamarter was making a success of the Grand Rapids streetcar system,Lillian Gilbreth was making her way in the world as a single mother of 12 children, following the untimely death of partner Frank (Mousa and Lemak, 2009). This is part of the story that Mousa and Lemak (2009) tell in their efforts to re-emphasize the attempts to reemphasize the role of the Gilbreth’s work as foundational to modern process management systems, to highlight the important and long-lasting impacts of that work on the fields of management, operations management, and industrial engineering, and to suggest that more attention needs to be given to the human interface in such systems. It is perhaps not surprising that Drucker (1954, p. 280) was moved to observe approvingly of their work that“… it may well be the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers”.
Once again, Art Bedeian, this time with co-author, Shannon Taylor, helps to move the interesting stuff to the top of the page, with a brief note about the Gilbreths, their interest in eugenics and the children’s experiences with Barbara Burks, a psychologist who was involved in testing the children as part of broader research on IQ and IQ testing (Taylor and Bedeian, 2009). Among other things it highlights the importance of understanding scholars not just in terms of the works they produce and the words they write but also the relationships they develop and the networks within which they are embedded, if we are to properly understand their ideas.
David Lamond
