Walking the walk as well as talking the talk: replication and the normal science paradigm in strategic management research

摘要

Strategy research has matured into an active field of investigation, merging sociology, psychology and economics into a rich melange with a strong focus on organizational performance. As in its parent disciplines, the related fields diat make up organizational studies and much of social science, papers emphasizing statistical inference are commonplace. For example, of die 70 articles published in Strategic Organization {SO!) since its inception barely five years ago, 29 - or more than 40 percent - have included statistical tests of some sort. Nevertheless, not one of these articles has included any explicit replication of past results — a crucial check on research using statistical inference.1 The purpose of our discussion is to urge scholars in strategic management to think more carefully about die need for replication and ways that we can encourage it. We begin by reviewing the literature on the importance of replication to the kinds of methodologies diat are widely used in strategic management, related disciplines and social science more generally. Next, we review the multiple articles that have documented and discussed the paucity of replication research, the reasons for this and the costs associated with it. We then discuss policies that have been adopted by journals in the social sciences and offer specific recommendations for policies that can be adopted by strategic management journals, including Strategic Organization.