Leadership, entrepreneurship, and suggestions for future research

Citation

Carraher, S. (2014), "Leadership, entrepreneurship, and suggestions for future research", Journal of Management History, Vol. 20 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMH-08-2013-0038

Leadership, entrepreneurship, and suggestions for future research

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Management History, Volume 20, Issue 1

Welcome to Volume 20 No. 1. As I am writing this editorial I have moved to Texas and come back from the annual Academy of Management conference. I had a meeting with the publisher of the JMH – Juliet Harrison – and learned a lot about the journal and how we are doing compared to other journals. The industry standard for assigning papers to reviewers is two weeks, while we are at 2.1 days. The industry standard for review turnaround time is six weeks, while for us it is 7.7 days. From submission to first decision the industry standard is three months, while for us it is 16.8 days. From 2011 to 2012 the total number of submissions has more than doubled. In 2012 we had a 28.8 percent acceptance rate. For 2013 thus far it has been 18.1 percent and for the last 12 months it has been 17.1 percent. We are still seeking to have the journal reclassified as an A on the Australian Business Dean Council’s list, as we are the only journal affiliated with an Academy of Management Division which is not classified as an A or A*. As I write this editorial, according to Publish or Perish, the number of citations for Journal of Management History papers has increased from 2,548 to 2,691 since the last issue. Our h index is still 22 but our g index has increased to 36. We have no paper that has been cited 22 times and our most cited paper remains Roehling (1997). The most cited paper per year is Murphy et al. (2006) at 11.88 citations per year. We also have an Age Weighted Citation Rate of 291, so we are getting cited more and more over time. With the last issue I mentioned that we had dropped to a 20.0 percent acceptance rate and we are at a 17.1 percent acceptance rate. When I finish processing all of the papers currently in the ScholarOne system we’ll have just under a 17 percent acceptance rate. While I am working on this editorial I am also accepting the first papers for the third issue of Volume 20. By the end of Volume 20 we are currently looking at well under a 15 percent acceptance rate, and it may be under 10 percent. I’d like to be able to say that this is because of the journal having a great editor – but its more because we have an increase in submissions, rather than the actions of the editor. I’d personally like to thank all of the wonderful reviewers and authors who give so freely of their time to increase the quality of the journal – thank you! Dan Dayton and Sherry Sullivan were the Outstanding Reviewers for 2012 and they were recognized at the AOM. Since writing the last editorial I have also traveled around 130,000 miles and been to four continents and had over 25 academic presentations. With our next issue we’ll also begin including an interview section with the first interview being with Jane Dutton. I also got to talk with the publisher about the possibility of increasing the number of papers included in the JMH – a long way from not being able to have our own journal. We are also looking at expanding the size of acceptable papers as we are running over our estimated page limits – but fortunately it is quality writing.

The first article included in this issue is “Leadership in the fluid moral economy of conspicuous consumption: insights from the moralizing tales of Cleopatra and Antony” by Sally Riad of Victoria University of Wellington. This paper was originally scheduled to be in the last issue but when I saw that we could have a mini-special issue focusing on the founders of management history – this paper was moved in to this issue. This article argues that there is insight to be gleaned from drawing together strands from the leadership literature with the literatures on moral economy and conspicuous consumption. The premise is that views of leader conspicuous consumption are shaped by their moral economy, the interplay between moral attitudes and economic activities. The article juxtaposes tales of Cleopatra and Antony’s display of wealth with current media accounts to contribute to the leadership literature on ethics, specifically its intersection with power and narrative representation. She adopts an analytic approach, with an international orientation and an interdisciplinary perspective in order to acknowledge the role of narrative representation in shaping leadership and the psychological ambivalence with which societies approach their leaders’ practices. Her focus here is on desire-disdain and discipline-decadence. Cleopatra and Antony’s conspicuous consumption generated a legacy of condemnation for millennia. Drawing from the retellings of their story, four moralizing representations – by Plutarch, Shakespeare, Sarah Fielding and Hollywood – are analyzed and juxtaposed with current media accounts. Altogether, the article combines the interest in leadership across history with moralizing perspectives on the display of wealth by leaders.

The next paper is “Ian Macneil and relational contract theory: evidence of impact” by Josetta McLaughlin of Roosevelt University, Jacqueline McLaughlin of North Carolina State University, and Raed Elaydi of Roosevelt University. This article describes the work of Ian Macneil, a legal scholar advocating the use of relational contract theory and behavioral norms to evaluate exchange relations in business. The purpose is to show through bibliometric and comparative analyses that Macneil has influenced management scholarship and dialogue about relational contract theory to an extent not recognized by management scholars. Evidence of impact is evaluated through a bibliometric analysis of primary and secondary citations. This is followed by a comparison of Macneil’s theory with four theories – integrated social contract theory, stakeholder theory, transaction cost theory, and rational choice theory. Results indicate that Macneil has had a substantial impact on researchers working in different business disciplines, from marketing to economics and management. Bibliometric analysis reveals that his work is widely cited, suggesting that Macneil’s contribution extends beyond legal scholarship to influence business scholarship. I would really like to see more work of this type completed and submitted to the JMH. In particular, I’d really like to see papers done like this about Daniel A. Wren and Jo Ann Carland. As additional interviews are done I think that it would also be nice to include this type of analysis for each individual interviewed.

The third article “The Physician of Packingtown: the life and impact of Dr. Caroline Hedger” by Benjamin D. McLarty of Louisiana State University and Peter A. Rosen of the University of Evansville illustrates the instrumental role of physician Caroline Hedger during the first half of the twentieth century, with her emphasis on worker health, which influenced American society and helped to improve working and living conditions of people across the US. They draw on archival newspaper clippings, original journal articles and books written by the subject, historical manuscripts and other labor history resources to pull together information on this topic in a unique way to give a broad view of the impact of Hedger and her important role not only for the city of Chicago, but the nation as a whole. They conclude that Hedger was an instrumental force and tireless advocate for the improvement of public health and social change. This paper is followed by “Reviewing the North American Society for Sport Management” by Chad S. Seifried also of Louisiana State University. He explores the development of the North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) and maps the foundation that specific individuals, historical works, and historians provided the founders of that organization and the field of sport management in general. He illustrates that some of the critical founding members of sport management and NASSM drew upon the training of historians, with special emphasis from business history, and reacted to specific prompts to create the field (i.e. sport management). Over time, sport management scholars have moved away from their small historical base and more toward true quantitative and qualitative preferences. He advocates that while this has helped the field gain some respectability within contemporary preferences, the re-utilization of historical methods and/or perspectives can help serve the future of sport management and business/management history research toward the study of emerging topics.

The next paper “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the science of management: the illusion of free will” is by Florian Vauleon of Purdue University – Calumet. He argues that in 1759, three years before the first publication of Rousseau’s Social Contract, Adam Smith published The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, in which he discussed legal, political, and psychological theories about society. Smith distinguished two types of legislators: the first is the man of “public spirit” and the second the “man of system.” It might be interesting for a future paper to take a look at Rousseau’s work and compare it to Frederick Taylor’s work. The final paper “Institutional entrepreneurship as emancipating institutional work: James Meredith and the integrationist movement at Ole Miss” is by Jack Smothers of the University of Southern Indiana, Patrick J. Murphy of DePaul University, Milorad M. Novicevic, of the University of Mississippi and John H. Humphreys of Texas A&M University – Commerce. They proposed an action-interaction-process framework to extend research on institutional entrepreneurship. The framework examines an actor’s characteristics, interactions in an institutional context, and the process by which entrepreneurial action is accomplished. Via a sociohistorical archival method of narrative analysis, they apply the action-interaction-process framework to an exemplary case of institutional entrepreneurship – the case of James Meredith and the integrationist movement at the University of Mississippi in the 1960 s. They show that institutional entrepreneurs who maintain little power and influence over the institutional field must form strategic alliances to mobilize constituents and capitalize on the convergence of resources in the social setting. Through the process of collective action, institutional entrepreneurs can overcome resistance to change and displace inequitable institutional policies while establishing new practices and norms. This research provides a stronger approach to examining institutional entrepreneurship and institutional entrepreneurs, the interaction between the institutional entrepreneur and the social context in which he/she operates, and the process by which inequitable institutionalized norms are reformed through collective action. This approach is useful to researchers examining institutional entrepreneurship or any area in which power disparity plays an important role. More research examining other issues like this could also be useful for future papers for the JMH.

I trust that you’ll enjoy these articles as much as I have and that they’ll provide you with ideas for future research which you can submit to the Journal of Management History.

Shawn Carraher

References

Murphy, P.J., Liao, J. and Welsch, H.P. (2006), “A conceptual history of entrepreneurial thought”, Journal of Management History, Vol. 12, pp. 12–35
Roehling, M.V. (1997), “The origins and early development of the psychological contract construct”, Journal of Management History, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 204–217