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Theory and method in international business research
Vol.5, No. 3, pp. 233-245, 1996 Copyright© 1996ElsevierScienceLtd Printed in GreatBritain.All rights reserved 0969-5931/96 $15.00 + 0.00
International Business Review
Pergamon
S0969-5931 (96)00008-X
Theory and Method in International Business Research* Peter J. Buckleyt and Malcolm Chapman$ School of Business and Economic Studies, ESS Building, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK Abstract -- International business research represents an excellent testing ground for multidisciplinary research. Indeed, it has been considered as a test case for a unified social science approach. This paper (1) examines previous attempts to achieve interdisciplinarity in international business research, (2) confronts the key difficulties in achieving interdisciplinarity in this context, (3) traces the intellectual heritage of interdisciplinary approaches and (4) suggests ways forward. This paper goes on to examine research design and methods in order to achieve the goals thus delineated. Arguments are presented which advocate an approach which is comparative and longitudinal. The importance and types of comparator are examined (spatial comparators, historical comparators, counterfactual comparators) and the importance of the time dimension in management research is stressed. The third part of the paper examines one particular approach -- an attempt to combine economics and social anthropology in an analysis of the management of cooperative strategies. This focuses attention on research method and on the nature of the evidence in management research. Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd
Key Words -- International Business, Interdisciplinary Research, Social Anthropology, Economics, Methodology.
1. Interdisciplinary Approaches to International Business It could be expected that the academic study of international business would, perforce, be interdisciplinary. However, large areas of teaching and research in international business have been dominated by the extension of core disciplines into the international arena. These developments (international marketing, international finance etc.) have followed international economics in feeding back new concepts and empirical work into the core discipline but have led to only m o d e s t a m o u n t s of c r o s s - f e r t i l i z a t i o n with other "international" subjects. As Buckley (1991, p. 9) put it developments have been "vertical" rather than "horizontal". Recently there have been calls for greater degrees of interdisciplinarity (or transdisciplinarity) in approaches to international business. Examples include Toyne (1989), Dunning (1989) and Casson (1988a, b). Dunning presents an i n g e n i o u s line of a r g u m e n t which sees scholars and d i s c i p l i n e s as complementary assets, needing to be combined in optimum proportions for maximum efficiency. Casson's (1988a) paper sees international business as a test case for a unified social science approach. *This paper derived from work carried out under ESRC Research Project W11425 1001. #Peter J. Buckley is Professor of International Business and Director of the Centre for International Business, University of Leeds (CIBUL). SMalcolm Chapman is Lecturer in International Business in the same institution.
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It is possible to underestimate the difficulties in constructing interdisciplinary frameworks. Individual scholars in international business, and in management generally, frequently come from a single (or at least singledominant) disciplinary background. Single researchers can, and do, modify these world views by retraining and relearning in new areas. The challenge can also be met by building interdisciplinary teams of researchers. The creation and sustainability of such teams requires constant effort to be paid to the differences in language, concepts, culture and professional boundaries which separate disciplines. One way forward is to mould key concepts across disciplinary boundaries. Examples of key concepts which have travelled across disciplinary boundaries include transaction costs (Williamson, 1975) and growth by internalization (Coase, 1937; Buckley and Casson, 1976). An additional transmission mechanism has been that the salience of certain concepts has been recognized by key researchers in disparate disciplines. The prime example in international business is "culture". Culture, both business culture and national culture, has long been treated as a residual by economists and economics related disciplines. Its centrality has long been noted by, among others, social anthropologists. The rigorous analysis of culture from an economics perspective by Casson (1991) therefore immediately builds bridges to other disciplines. What is equally important is that the new "interdisciplinary" core concepts should show themselves to be tractable and empirically relevant. In the case of international business the analysis of joint ventures has developed by the integration of standard economic concepts with "new" concepts such as forbearance, reciprocity and trust (Buckley and Casson, 1988). This is partly achieved, rather ironically, by the plasticity of the methodology of economics. Buckley and Casson (1993) use what they regard as the core concept of economics (optimization) and a supporting core element (equilibrium), in combination with a multiplicity of specific assumptions, which then enable widespread adoption of economic modelling techniques. Examples of this methodology include the combination of economics, geography and social anthropology focused on the issue of multinational enterprises in less developed countries (Buckley and Casson, 1991). For instance, a link can be made between national culture and transactions cost analysis by the observation that the cohesion of certain societies may enable the reduction of transaction cost because of high levels of trust between members of the society which reduces the necessity for (expensive) legal recourse or guarantees. Similarly, Boddewyn (1988) applies internalization theory to markets in political information and influence. This extension works because of the care with which the concepts are applied and it illuminates an area previously thought conceptually intractable. This paper does not seek to argue that economics is a completely monolithic subject. The authors note elsewhere (Buckley and Chapman, 1996) that there are significant challenges to orthodoxy from other schools of economic thought -- notably evolutionary economics (see Nelson and Winter, 1982), Austrian economics (Von Mises, 1962; Dolan, 1976; Kirzner,
235 1992), institutional economists (Veblen, 1958), and the post-Keynesian school (see Journal o f Post-Keynesian Economics) - - but that orthodox economics has to a perhaps surprising degree shrugged off such challenges, or absorbed some of the insights of these schools in ways least damaging to the orthodox fabric (Buckley and Casson, 1993). For this paper it is sufficient to note that there is wide and general consensus across all these schools that quantitative and statistical approaches are a suitable and integral part of economic method.* There is also an argument for attempting to deconstruct concepts in an interdisciplinary fashion. A case in point is the rather superficial concept of "competitive advantage". The understanding of this concept requires the u n r a v e l l i n g of issues of l o c a t i o n a l a d v a n t a g e , i n n o v a t o r y c a p a c i t y , entrepreneurial judgement and possibly into issues of cumulative causation. Each of these underlying concepts (or theories) requires understanding from more than one viewpoint and more than one disciplinary stance. S i m i l a r l y , the k e y actor in i n t e r n a t i o n a l b u s i n e s s r e s e a r c h -- the multinational corporation -- is often under-represented as an organization, amenable to organizational analysis.
2. Comparative Studies in International Business The impact of Japan as a first-rate "non-Western" (non-Judaeo-Christian) economic power has given a powerful impetus to comparative studies in international business research. There has been a long and fruitful tradition of "comparative management" which has, in particular, drawn attention to the conceptual and empirical pitfalls in comparative work. Much of the difficulty and excitement of comparative research lies in the area of research methods (See Lonner and Berry, 1986). An illustration of the difficulties and frustrations of comparative analysis was recently given by Adler et al. (1989). The comparative perspective is particularly challenging because, as Etzioni and Dubow (1970, p. viii) point out "the comparative p e r s p e c t i v e is more than a scientific technique -- it provides a basic intellectual outlook". There can be few of us who do not believe that we have something to learn from other cultures and societies but the issues of how real diferences are to be identified and how they relate to other elements in society are of crucial analytical importance. A current illustration of this is the controversy over the transferability or otherwise of Japanese management practices. Are these practices rooted in unique Japanese cultural traits? Or can they be extracted, transferred and transplanted on a piecemeal basis? Such controversies are not new. In 1952 Arnold Toynbee opined that fragments of a culture, such as its technological advances, were much more likely to have an impact on another culture than an attempt to introduce a way of life en bloc (Toynbee, 1953). Social anthropologists would typically look sceptically at this idea, wedded as they are to holistic and contextual analyses; a fragment of
*The authors would like to thank an anonymous referee for insisting on this point.
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one culture when transferred to another, takes on a new contextual meaning. Toynbee concedes this contextual point, however, going on to note that the piecemeal absorption which he describes may have profound long term effects, pulling in related elements from the exported culture. How often have we observed developing countries' desire to obtain advanced technology without the associated cultural dominance? Lest this be thought far removed from international business practice, note the increase in "new forms" of nonequity technology deals under pressure from this demand. Difficulties of conceptualization of the units of comparison and crosscultural verification (Etzioni and DuBow, 1970, " I n t r o d u c t i o n " ) are compounded when one of the major actors, the multinational enterprise, is actually itself a transnational entity. The basic problem in comparative research arises from the monumental nature of the task. The great strength of comparative research is that it provides a carefully specified "counterfactual" -- the situation existing in the country with which comparisons are being drawn. However difficulties arise from abstracting from the investigator's own cultural bias which is likely to impinge on objectivity (Campbell, 1970). The method of comparative research can be very precise. Indeed it is analytically more rigorous than single country studies as it provides measurable counterfactuals. However the difficulty of carrying it out arises from the large amount of information necessary. Because of this a focus on "the local, the concrete, the specific" (Rokkan, 1970) is more likely to lead to immediate, short term results than the careful design of comparative work. A further obvious, but important difficulty exists. This is language difference in comparative research. Even the most expert translations and retranslations can produce differences of meaning (Phillips, 1970; Brislin, 1986). The underlying difficulty arises in the nuances of meaning as expressed through language. Cultural biases in language are not easy to exclude. Of crucial importance to the comparative method in research is choosing the right comparator. There are three basic possibilities (Buckley et al., 1988, p. 195). First, there is the historical comparison -- the situation relative to a different point of time. Second, there is the spatial comparison -- relative to a different locational, national, cultural or regional point. Third, there is the counter factual comparison -- what might have been had not a particular action been taken or event occurred (this method has been used to good effect by cliometricians). Of great importance in this type of research method is to ensure that as many factors as possible are held constant other than the research object which is being comparatively analysed. If we see quantitative studies and longitudinal case-studies as opposites, unreconcilable, and used exclusively by different groups of researchers, this is no doubt to take too black-and-white a view of the matter. The most openminded researchers, of course, use both. They may, however, as a result, find it difficult to a c c o m m o d a t e their findings within a clear theoretical framework. It may be suggested that statistics collected primarily for other purposes and over large samples are: (i) more objective in comparison with
237 the "subjectivity" of interviews, and (ii) more readily generalizable across a wide population. However, there are great difficulties in using data collected for other purposes: definitions may not be congruent, particularly where cross-cultural comparisons are being made (see Buckley and Chapman, 1994). Good compromises are often made by business historians, who have proved successful in combining aggregative data and archival material in focusing on key research issues. International business lends itself to this type of analysis and it is relatively well developed. Analyses of firms and nations over time are well established. National comparisons are the stock-in-trade of the international business research community which often takes advantage of the uniqueness of the multinational enterprise -- the s a m e firm operating in different national environments. Paired groups of firms (e.g. of different national ownerships within the same market) are also utilized. Counterfactual comparisons are also frequent, particularly in the analysis of foreign direct investment outcomes. The actual situation is often contrasted with "the alternative position" -- what would have happened if the investment under scrutiny had not taken place. The difficulty, of course, lies in specifying the feasible (or most likely) alternative position. The remainder of this paper examines a case study of a research project which involves the collaboration of an anthropologist and an economist. It illustrates the problem challenges and outcomes of a project which is both comparative and longitudinal.
3. Application to the Management of Cooperative Strategies The research project to which these reflections relate, is a study of a small number of companies. The aim of the project is to study how companies, and the people within them, decide upon the mixture of market and hierarchy, arm's-length dealing and internalization, cooperation and confrontation, that is appropriate to them. It is considered important that the project should look at these issues over time, so that the research is 'longitudinal' (compare Pettigrew, 1989). As shown in a parallel paper (Buckley and Chapman, 1996) there are great difficulties in reconciling the theoretical bases of economics and social anthropology. Speaking in broad, crude terms anthropology takes a holistic view of society, uses native p e r s p e c t i v e s in w h i c h s u b j e c t i v i t y and interpretation are to the fore and suggests multiple approaches to rationality whereas economics has claims to objectivity, scientific positive approaches and is largely rationalist. The theoretical and practical differences between social anthropology and economics have implications for the way in which they gather and assess knowledge. These can be discussed under "methodology", but it is clear that they are closely tied to fundamental philosophical differences between the two subjects. The discussion so far might be regarded as "theoretical"; what follows is overtly a discussion of "method": the two must be regarded as closely linked, however.
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The theoretical opposition has, we might say, a methodological opposition built into it -- a series of practices appropriate to their respective disciplines. Again, the opposition is not one-dimensional, or unilinear, but we might say that it has in depth anthropological field work at one end, and statistical or mathematical analysis of quantitative data at the other.
In-depth Anthropological Fieldwork For social anthropologists, this formulation is a tautology: fieldwork is, by definition, in-depth. Since Malinowski, social anthropologists have taken a pride in length of fieldwork, and in fluent use of whatever language(s) was n e c e s s a r y for local c o m m u n i c a t i o n . They came to despise the use of interpreters. Because language-learning is a long-term activity, and for general reasons, they came to regard fieldwork as being necessarily of several year's duration. Good and influential work has been done on the basis of much less, but social anthropologists typically have no upper figure for how much fieldwork is desirable -- you can never do enough, and two years would probably be regarded as a working minimum. The method also involved what is often called "participant observation". This is important. A n t h r o p o l o g i s t s did not just " o b s e r v e " ; they also "participated": they tried, that is, to put themselves in the position of the people they were studying, to see through their eyes, to become, in a sense, one of them. All manner of philosophical and moral argument leaps into consideration, and we might only say, for brevity, that the enterprise of participant observation has produced some very worthwhile results. The method -- long-term fieldwork, use of local languages, and participant observation -- has often served as a definition of social anthropology, outlasting changes in theoretical orientation. A social anthropologist, working to this research pattern, often makes only one really serious foray into fieldwork in a lifetime, and spends the rest of a lifetime writing about it; this major fieldwork tends to take place during graduate student days, before a full time job makes such work impossible. Subsequent fieldwork is often either a re-visit to the initial site, or on a smaller and self-avowedly less satisfactory scale. The virtue of this kind of work is that a social anthropologist often does get to know the social set-up very well indeed. Other forms of social study have a tendency to seem superficial or trivial, to one that has engaged in such fieldwork. One of the drawbacks of social anthropological knowledge gained in this way, is that it is limited to a specific social environment. It is not self-evident that a social anthropologist trained in this way is able to generalize. Social anthropology, by its very nature, is a highly personal activity. One way to generalize is for an individual social anthropologist to carry out more than one tour of fieldwork, in different societies. Most social anthropologists try to get at least two in during a lifetime. There are obviously very low limits to the possibilities in this direction. In the 1950s, some social anthropologists attempted to be rigorously
239 numerical, and were not particularly successful. The attempt, and the failure, had the effect of causing them to dislike and mistrust numerical methods. The trend, since the middle 1960s, has been towards language, meaning, words and the like, and away from economics, politics, and numbers. Statistics, for good reasons and bad, have often evoked a hostile response from social anthropologists. Participant observation is, of course, a very simple idea. If you can become a member of a society, then it is easy to see that you would, by virtue of this, have access to many of its secrets. The approach is not without problems, but it is intuitively appealing. To do a social anthropological study of a corporation, using participant observation as classically understood, a researcher would need to work for the company for several years. Various problems arise, that were not fully anticipated when the anthropologist was working on a coral island:
(a) Disclosure. Anthropologists traditionally came back from exotic fieldwork with a total conviction that the world of their research (coral island, tropical jungle, mountain village) was totally separate from the world of their academic publication. The classic anthropological monograph was about illiterate people speaking another language on the other side of the world. An anthropologist could say what he or she pleased, without any thoughts of confidentiality, libel, ethics, law-suits and the like. An anthropologist could publish photographs of the naked savages, without any fear that the savages, or their children or grandchildren, would turn up demanding reparation and apology. Anthropologists today are almost morbidly sensitive about this kind of problem. This sensitivity is of relatively recent date, however, and as late as the early 1960s no problem was perceived. A company, unlike a primitive society, is potentially a highly sensitive and litigious organization. The researcher can have no illusions that the published findings will be confined, in their readership, to a small scholarly audience, or that the company in question will have no access to, no interest in, and no ability to read, the results. The information, moreover, is not just morally sensitive, but potentially commercially sensitive as well. This is not an issue with which social anthropologists have commonly had to deal. (b) Access. In m a n y s o c i e t i e s , there are no f o r m a l barriers to an anthropologist. Most anthropologists have not needed "permission" to go and do their study. They have simply moved in with their tent, or rented their flat, and begun making local contacts. Company research is not like that. We can readily suppose that if an anthropologist wandered vaguely into the executive dining room, sat down, and announced an intention of learning the local language and living there for three years, the security men would move in rather rapidly. The fact that all work must be done by permission, somewhat changes the nature of the enquiry, and the possible results. As noted above, however, responsibility to the "objects" of study is increasing everywhere in
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the anthropological universe, and to some extent the increase in problems of disclosure everywhere, reduces the difference arising from the access problem as between corporate and non-corporate research.
(c) Scope. Anthropologists tend to attempt to study the entirety of societies. This leaning towards holism has been important, since it helped to confirm the important break with atomistic positivism. It meant, however, for various reasons, that anthropologists had some difficulty bringing their methods back to "complex" societies. Because, if we are to follow the classical model, a social anthropologist studying (say) a pharmaceutical company is not just studying the company, but everything about the lives of everybody concerned, which leads out into all the other specialisms of modern academia -economics, demography, politics, religion, consumption, tourism, and so on. A manager's thought and actions within a company, could not be divorced from his or her thought and actions outside the company. This problem, within anthropology, has been extensively discussed; there is no space here for summary, but one might say that the characteristic solution so far has been to muddle through: "holism", in some form, remains a potent idea, and one which anthropologists are reluctant to abandon, however complex the social reality. Statistical and Quantitative Research Economics, through the notions of rational optimizing and equilibrium, and through a tacit teleology of survival, can study companies through externally available facts and figures, and consider the job satisfactorily done (at one level, at least). The complex internal activities that generate the externally available figures, the facts of c o m p a n y survival, are thereby rendered theoretically void -- this is the company as "black box", to which reference has already been made. This is caricature, as already noted; but not without a strong dose of verisimilitude. Researchers on companies do, of course, try to find out more about them than the externally available figures. When they do so, then they tend to enter the more general realm of what might be called "business studies research". Crudely put, there is a strong tendency for business studies to be positivist and numerical in research enquiry. There is not, typically, a great deal of room given to forms of interpretation, or existential doubt. If you cannot measure it, and count it, then it isn't there. This crude view however does a disservice to economists (or at least a sub set of them). Many economists have taken the view that economics is defined by its method, not by a body of settled conclusions. Examples include Keynes (1992): "The theory of e c o n o m i c s does not furnish a b o d y of settled conclusions immediately applicable to a policy, it is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions". Similarly Nobel prizewinner Ronald Coase (1978, p. 210) believes that "the main advantage which an economist brings to other social sciences is simply a way of looking at the world". A
241 recent examination of the core concepts of economics suggests that it rests on optimization, with secondary reference to equilibrium which is frequently not necessary, plus a flexible range of supporting assumptions (Buckley and Casson, 1993). On this reading, admittedly not universal, economics is far more flexible and accommodating to other social sciences than its more rigid advocates imagine. The claims that economics makes to "imperial" status within the social sciences rest on its flexibility not its universality, and this flexibility is one of method. A study of companies, from a business studies point of view, tends to require collection of data such that statistical tests of comparability and difference can be carried out. Statistical requirements, even the requirements of particular statistical software, might dictate the size of sample, the number of q u e s t i o n s , and so on. The m o s t l i k e l y m e t h o d s m i g h t be postal questionnaire, and structured questionnaire. Both of these are apt to the mechanisms of theory and hypothesis, which dominate business studies research. The statistical analyst might look at a single ethnographic study of one company, and ask what use it was? How could one example ever prove anything? The ethnographer might look at the statistical study, and argue that its claims to accuracy were false, since however sophisticated the analysis, the understanding of each individual case was so superficial as to be negligible. You cannot make great analyses with flawed data, however, fine your methods, any more than you can cook great dishes with rotten ingredients; it is no help having an expensive oven. So, even if the analysis confirms and disproves its hypothesis, reality has escaped it in a significant manner. It is no use asking ethnography what it can prove; at least ethnography makes a serious attempt to understand matters in their true complexity; if it is overwhelmed by this complexity, then that is only more evidence that, say, questionnaire analysis is leaving a great deal out.
Compromise So, each approach has good grounds for rejecting the other. Some of the issues can be clarified through a discussion of the theory/hypothesis structure. Anthropologists typically try to approach fieldwork with an entirely open mind. They have neither theory nor hypothesis, and regard this as a virtue -- a virtue that might be expressed as "not prejudging the e v i d e n c e " ; the importance attached to sympathy with "native categories" is congruent with this: how can you have a theory about something which might contradict your basic understanding of the world? From this perspective, a researcher armed with hypotheses might prove or disprove them, but the existence of a world which renders the hypotheses simply incoherent, senseless (rather than true or false), cannot be discerned. Anthropologists are on the watch for just such "worlds", and have little patience with the notion that research is a process of pre-formed hypothesis testing. Those wedded to the positivist method, by contrast, might well regard the anthropologist's "open mind" as a mere vacuity, an abdication of the intellect. The question then rapidly turns back
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upon the nature of knowledge itself, and upon those issues already discussed above -- the hypothesis-testers implicitly regard knowledge as determinate, achievable in totality, without internal contradiction, pre-existing in the world; the anthropologists, in contrast, regard knowledge as socially created, contradictory, inherently incomplete, multi-dimensional, always in the process of recreation and self-transformation, and so on. So when an economist and a social anthropologist sit down to try to devise a research programme for studying corporations, there are loud alarms and excursions making themselves heard off stage, both left and right. And when an economist and a social anthropologist sit down to interview a manager, the same questions and replies can, potentially at least, lead down very different paths of argument. One might wish to argue that there is no r e a s o n w h y i n - d e p t h anthropological fieldwork could not produce numerical data, which could be fed into the quantitative research machine. This is so, at least in principle. One might also wish to argue that there is no reason why structured interviews could not be used, with sensitivity, to make qualitative assessment of issues of (say) meaning. This is true as well. It is a matter of fact, however, as much as of theory, that the two approaches tend to proceed exclusively; and the matter of fact is underpinned by all the theoretical prejudices and oppositions that have been so far discussed. In the best of all possible worlds, it might be possible to imagine having the best of both -- a statistically valid and cross-comparable corpus of ethnographic reports based on long term fieldwork from a large number of companies. In practice, this is not possible, and some compromise is necessary. The ideal types at either end of the research spectrum are going to find material, in whatever compromise is reached, for criticism. Nevertheless, criticism from one end can be met by forms of rebuttal from the other, and vice versa. The criticisms from either end would have more force if there were any valid practical alternative to compromise. The compromise that has been reached is, in some ways, obvious enough long, r e p e a t e d , u n s t r u c t u r e d i n t e r v i e w s t o g e t h e r with participant observation where the company can tolerate it! To social anthropologists, such work can be presented as having virtues of generalizability and comparability that are typically lacking in the ethnographic genre. It can also be presented to anthropologists as tackling problems related to the modern world that anthropologists obviously ought to have tackled, but hardly ever have (anthropologists, as noted above, have a long-standing reluctance to engage with modern economic and business life; there are many reasons for this, which can be illuminated by the present work). To the statistically minded, the same research can be p r e s e n t e d as containing ethnographic richness, meaning, and so on, that economics, and business studies in general, too often leave out, gloss over, or minimize. Many research works in business studies are open to the criticism that the statistical analysis takes precedence over the validity of the data; this, at least, is a criticism that the current research hopes to avoid. -
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243 The reluctance of anthropologists to engage in " o n e - o f f ' interviews is understandable, given the above reflections; how can you generate the crucial element of contextual understanding, if you have no context? This again turns back to the question of whether knowledge, and information, are dependent or independent of context; anthropologists lean strongly to the view that they are context-dependent; economists, with an unqualified rationality at their backs, statistical techniques in hand, are able to persuade themselves otherwise. Part of the problem here, perhaps, is that economists are typically operating within a world which is familiar to them -- Western industrial capitalism, say; in this world, much that is strange and bizarre does not strike them as such: it offers them no challenge, and they offer no challenge back -- their knowledge is indeed highly dependent on context, but on a context which is so familiar that it is invisible. It almost goes without saying that an anthropologist would find it difficult to conceive of a study that was not "longitudinal". The idea that one could study a social phenomenon through one temporal snapshot is contrary to the ethic of fieldwork. The fact that such studies have been the norm in industrial economics, means that there is a great chasm of method between the two poles of research enquiry, as they have been discussed above -- a chasm, of course, that invites filling; anything that can be put in it will be better than nothing. If we wish to go further then we can follow Buckley and Casson who have said: all economics does is to infer from observed behaviour the nature of the preferences and beliefs that underlie it (Buckleyand Casson, 1993, p. 1051). In order to get at the nature of the "preferences and beliefs" to which Buckley and Casson refer, however, we need to go beyond "behaviour"; we need to look not'just at what people are "doing", in a behavioural sense (observable from an objective standpoint), but also at the meaning of their activity. This is a radical step, for some, and one which strays quickly into the social anthropological programme, with its attention to "native categories". The issues surrounding "meaning" are complex and indeterminate; no single "science" of meaning exists. Even so, social anthropologists have made some major contributions here. We might say that social anthropology has moved, radically, from behaviourist approaches (centred on the objective observer) to interpretive approaches (centred upon the social actor). This move, from behaviour to meaning, is one that has affected different social sciences in different ways; social anthropology has been transformed, economics little affected. Nevertheless, if economics is to pass from "observed behaviour" to "preferences and beliefs", as Buckley and Casson have suggested, then there would seem to be no option but to enter the realm of meaning, within which preferences and beliefs are generated and made intelligible.
4. Conclusion International business research provides some pointers for management
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researchers, and indeed social scientists in general. It is beginning to approach the p h e n o m e n a under analysis from a v i e w p o i n t w h i c h uses c o m p a r a t i v e methods to isolate key differences across space and longitudinal methods to isolate key developments over time. This is being achieved, and has to be achieved, by developing a set of core concepts which are analytically rigorous and tractable, yet remain flexible. This paper attempted to illustrate these d e v e l o p m e n t s by a project d r a w i n g on a h i g h l y positivist social science ( e c o n o m i c s ) and one relying on e t h n o g r a p h y (social a n t h r o p o l o g y ) . The m e t h o d s utilised, o p e n , o p e n - e n d e d , repeated i n t e r v i e w s and participant observation enable the comparative method to isolate differences so as to test rigorous yet flexible hypotheses without excluding "native categories". Acknowledgement -- The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for their
constructive comments on an earlier draft.
References Adler, N. J., Campbell, N. and Laurent, A. (1989) In Search of Appropriate Methodology: From Outside the People's Republic of China Looking In. Journal oflnternational Business Studies, Vol. 1, pp. 61-74. Boddewyn, J. J. (1988) Political Aspects of MNE Theory. Journal of International Business Studies, Vol. 3, pp. 341-364. Brislin, R. W. (1986) The Wording and Translation of Research Instruments. in Lonner, J. W. and Berry, J. W. (Eds), Field Methods in Cross Cultural Research. Sage, Beverly Hills. Buckley, P. J. (1991) The Frontiers of International Business Research. Management International Review, Vol. 31, pp. 7-22. Buckley, P. J. and Casson, M. (1976) The Future of the Multinational Enterprise, Macmillan, London. Buckley, P. J. and Casson, M. (1988) A Theory of Co-operation in International Business, in Contractor, F. J. and Lorange, P. (Eds) Co-operative Strategies in International Business. Lexington Books, Lexington MA. Buckley, P. J. and Casson, M. (1991) Multinational Enterprises in Less Developed Countries: Cultural and Economic Interactions, in Buckley, P. and Clegg, J. (Eds), Multinational Enterprises in Less Developed Countries. Macmillan, London. Buckley, P. J. and Casson, M. (1993)Economics as an Imperialist Social Science. Human Relations, Vol. 46, No. 9, pp. 1035-1052. Buckley, P. J. and Chapman, M. (1994)The Use of "Native Categories" in Management Research, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the British Academy of Management. Buckley, P. J. and Chapman, M. (1996) Economics and Social Anthropology -- Reconciling Differences. Human Relations, Vol. 49, pp. 55-94. Buckley, P. J., Pass, C. L. and Prescott, K. (1988) Measures of International Competitiveness: A Critical Survey. Journal of Marketing Management, Vol. 2, pp. 175-200. Campbell, D. T. (1970) Techniques for Determining Cultural Biases in Comparative Research, in Etzioni, A. and DuBow, F. L. (Eds), Comparative Perspectives: Theories and Methods. Little, Brown and Co., Boston. Casson, M. (1988a) The Theory of International Business as a Unified Social Science. University of Reading Discussion Papers in International Investment and Business Studies, No. 123, November. Casson, M. (1988b) Entrepreneurial Culture as a Competitive Advantage. University of Reading Discussion Papers in International Investment and Business Studies, No. 124, November. Casson, M. (1991) The Economics of Business Culture. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Coase, R. H. (1937) The Nature of the Firm. Economica (New Series) Vol. 4, pp. 386405.
245 Coase, R. H. (1978) Economics and Contiguous Disciplines. Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 17, pp. 201-211. Dolan, E. G. (Ed.) (1976) The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics. Sheed and Ward, Kansas City. Dunning, J. H. (1989) The Study of International Business: a Plea for a More Interdisciplinary Approach. University of Reading Discussion Papers in International Investment and Business Studies, no. 127, February. Etzioni, A. and DuBow, F. L. (Eds) (1970) Comparative Perspectives: Theories and Methods. Little, Brown and Company, Boston. Keynes, J. M. (1922) Introduction to Cambridge Economic Handbooks. Nisbet Press, Cambridge. Kirzner, I. (1992) The Meaning of Market Process. Routledge, London. Lonner, W. J. and Berry, J. W. (Eds) (1986) Field Methods in Cross Cultural Research. Sage, Beverly Bills. Nelson, R. and Winter, S. (1982) An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Pettigrew, A. M. (1989) Longitudinal Methods to Study Change: Theory and Practice, in Mansfield, R. (Ed.), Frontiers of Management Research and Practice. Routledge, London. Phillips, H. P. (1970) Problems of Translation and Meaning in Field Work, in Etzioni, A. and DuBow, F. L. (Eds) Comparative Perspectives: Theories and Methods. Little, Brown and Co., Boston. Rokkan, S. (1970) Recent Developments in Cross-national Research, in Etzioni, A. and DuBow, F. L. (Eds), Comparative Perspectives: Theories and Methods. Little, Brown and Co., Boston. Toynbee, F. L. (1953) The Worm and the West: BBC Reith Lectures 1952. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Toyne, B. (1989) International Exchange: a Foundation for Theory Building in International Business. Journal of International Business Studies, Vol. 1, pp. 1-18. Veblen, T. (1958) The Theory of Business Enterprise. Mentor, New York. Von Mises, L. (1962) Planning for Freedom, 2nd edn. Libertarian Press, South Holland, Illinois. Williamson, O. E. (1975) Markets and Hierarchies. Free Press, New York.
Theory and Method in International Business Research
International Business Review
Pergamon
S0969-5931 (96)00008-X
Theory and Method in International Business Research* Peter J. Buckleyt and Malcolm Chapman$ School of Business and Economic Studies, ESS Building, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK Abstract -- International business research represents an excellent testing ground for multidisciplinary research. Indeed, it has been considered as a test case for a unified social science approach. This paper (1) examines previous attempts to achieve interdisciplinarity in international business research, (2) confronts the key difficulties in achieving interdisciplinarity in this context, (3) traces the intellectual heritage of interdisciplinary approaches and (4) suggests ways forward. This paper goes on to examine research design and methods in order to achieve the goals thus delineated. Arguments are presented which advocate an approach which is comparative and longitudinal. The importance and types of comparator are examined (spatial comparators, historical comparators, counterfactual comparators) and the importance of the time dimension in management research is stressed. The third part of the paper examines one particular approach -- an attempt to combine economics and social anthropology in an analysis of the management of cooperative strategies. This focuses attention on research method and on the nature of the evidence in management research. Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd
Key Words -- International Business, Interdisciplinary Research, Social Anthropology, Economics, Methodology.
1. Interdisciplinary Approaches to International Business It could be expected that the academic study of international business would, perforce, be interdisciplinary. However, large areas of teaching and research in international business have been dominated by the extension of core disciplines into the international arena. These developments (international marketing, international finance etc.) have followed international economics in feeding back new concepts and empirical work into the core discipline but have led to only m o d e s t a m o u n t s of c r o s s - f e r t i l i z a t i o n with other "international" subjects. As Buckley (1991, p. 9) put it developments have been "vertical" rather than "horizontal". Recently there have been calls for greater degrees of interdisciplinarity (or transdisciplinarity) in approaches to international business. Examples include Toyne (1989), Dunning (1989) and Casson (1988a, b). Dunning presents an i n g e n i o u s line of a r g u m e n t which sees scholars and d i s c i p l i n e s as complementary assets, needing to be combined in optimum proportions for maximum efficiency. Casson's (1988a) paper sees international business as a test case for a unified social science approach. *This paper derived from work carried out under ESRC Research Project W11425 1001. #Peter J. Buckley is Professor of International Business and Director of the Centre for International Business, University of Leeds (CIBUL). SMalcolm Chapman is Lecturer in International Business in the same institution.
233
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It is possible to underestimate the difficulties in constructing interdisciplinary frameworks. Individual scholars in international business, and in management generally, frequently come from a single (or at least singledominant) disciplinary background. Single researchers can, and do, modify these world views by retraining and relearning in new areas. The challenge can also be met by building interdisciplinary teams of researchers. The creation and sustainability of such teams requires constant effort to be paid to the differences in language, concepts, culture and professional boundaries which separate disciplines. One way forward is to mould key concepts across disciplinary boundaries. Examples of key concepts which have travelled across disciplinary boundaries include transaction costs (Williamson, 1975) and growth by internalization (Coase, 1937; Buckley and Casson, 1976). An additional transmission mechanism has been that the salience of certain concepts has been recognized by key researchers in disparate disciplines. The prime example in international business is "culture". Culture, both business culture and national culture, has long been treated as a residual by economists and economics related disciplines. Its centrality has long been noted by, among others, social anthropologists. The rigorous analysis of culture from an economics perspective by Casson (1991) therefore immediately builds bridges to other disciplines. What is equally important is that the new "interdisciplinary" core concepts should show themselves to be tractable and empirically relevant. In the case of international business the analysis of joint ventures has developed by the integration of standard economic concepts with "new" concepts such as forbearance, reciprocity and trust (Buckley and Casson, 1988). This is partly achieved, rather ironically, by the plasticity of the methodology of economics. Buckley and Casson (1993) use what they regard as the core concept of economics (optimization) and a supporting core element (equilibrium), in combination with a multiplicity of specific assumptions, which then enable widespread adoption of economic modelling techniques. Examples of this methodology include the combination of economics, geography and social anthropology focused on the issue of multinational enterprises in less developed countries (Buckley and Casson, 1991). For instance, a link can be made between national culture and transactions cost analysis by the observation that the cohesion of certain societies may enable the reduction of transaction cost because of high levels of trust between members of the society which reduces the necessity for (expensive) legal recourse or guarantees. Similarly, Boddewyn (1988) applies internalization theory to markets in political information and influence. This extension works because of the care with which the concepts are applied and it illuminates an area previously thought conceptually intractable. This paper does not seek to argue that economics is a completely monolithic subject. The authors note elsewhere (Buckley and Chapman, 1996) that there are significant challenges to orthodoxy from other schools of economic thought -- notably evolutionary economics (see Nelson and Winter, 1982), Austrian economics (Von Mises, 1962; Dolan, 1976; Kirzner,
235 1992), institutional economists (Veblen, 1958), and the post-Keynesian school (see Journal o f Post-Keynesian Economics) - - but that orthodox economics has to a perhaps surprising degree shrugged off such challenges, or absorbed some of the insights of these schools in ways least damaging to the orthodox fabric (Buckley and Casson, 1993). For this paper it is sufficient to note that there is wide and general consensus across all these schools that quantitative and statistical approaches are a suitable and integral part of economic method.* There is also an argument for attempting to deconstruct concepts in an interdisciplinary fashion. A case in point is the rather superficial concept of "competitive advantage". The understanding of this concept requires the u n r a v e l l i n g of issues of l o c a t i o n a l a d v a n t a g e , i n n o v a t o r y c a p a c i t y , entrepreneurial judgement and possibly into issues of cumulative causation. Each of these underlying concepts (or theories) requires understanding from more than one viewpoint and more than one disciplinary stance. S i m i l a r l y , the k e y actor in i n t e r n a t i o n a l b u s i n e s s r e s e a r c h -- the multinational corporation -- is often under-represented as an organization, amenable to organizational analysis.
2. Comparative Studies in International Business The impact of Japan as a first-rate "non-Western" (non-Judaeo-Christian) economic power has given a powerful impetus to comparative studies in international business research. There has been a long and fruitful tradition of "comparative management" which has, in particular, drawn attention to the conceptual and empirical pitfalls in comparative work. Much of the difficulty and excitement of comparative research lies in the area of research methods (See Lonner and Berry, 1986). An illustration of the difficulties and frustrations of comparative analysis was recently given by Adler et al. (1989). The comparative perspective is particularly challenging because, as Etzioni and Dubow (1970, p. viii) point out "the comparative p e r s p e c t i v e is more than a scientific technique -- it provides a basic intellectual outlook". There can be few of us who do not believe that we have something to learn from other cultures and societies but the issues of how real diferences are to be identified and how they relate to other elements in society are of crucial analytical importance. A current illustration of this is the controversy over the transferability or otherwise of Japanese management practices. Are these practices rooted in unique Japanese cultural traits? Or can they be extracted, transferred and transplanted on a piecemeal basis? Such controversies are not new. In 1952 Arnold Toynbee opined that fragments of a culture, such as its technological advances, were much more likely to have an impact on another culture than an attempt to introduce a way of life en bloc (Toynbee, 1953). Social anthropologists would typically look sceptically at this idea, wedded as they are to holistic and contextual analyses; a fragment of
*The authors would like to thank an anonymous referee for insisting on this point.
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one culture when transferred to another, takes on a new contextual meaning. Toynbee concedes this contextual point, however, going on to note that the piecemeal absorption which he describes may have profound long term effects, pulling in related elements from the exported culture. How often have we observed developing countries' desire to obtain advanced technology without the associated cultural dominance? Lest this be thought far removed from international business practice, note the increase in "new forms" of nonequity technology deals under pressure from this demand. Difficulties of conceptualization of the units of comparison and crosscultural verification (Etzioni and DuBow, 1970, " I n t r o d u c t i o n " ) are compounded when one of the major actors, the multinational enterprise, is actually itself a transnational entity. The basic problem in comparative research arises from the monumental nature of the task. The great strength of comparative research is that it provides a carefully specified "counterfactual" -- the situation existing in the country with which comparisons are being drawn. However difficulties arise from abstracting from the investigator's own cultural bias which is likely to impinge on objectivity (Campbell, 1970). The method of comparative research can be very precise. Indeed it is analytically more rigorous than single country studies as it provides measurable counterfactuals. However the difficulty of carrying it out arises from the large amount of information necessary. Because of this a focus on "the local, the concrete, the specific" (Rokkan, 1970) is more likely to lead to immediate, short term results than the careful design of comparative work. A further obvious, but important difficulty exists. This is language difference in comparative research. Even the most expert translations and retranslations can produce differences of meaning (Phillips, 1970; Brislin, 1986). The underlying difficulty arises in the nuances of meaning as expressed through language. Cultural biases in language are not easy to exclude. Of crucial importance to the comparative method in research is choosing the right comparator. There are three basic possibilities (Buckley et al., 1988, p. 195). First, there is the historical comparison -- the situation relative to a different point of time. Second, there is the spatial comparison -- relative to a different locational, national, cultural or regional point. Third, there is the counter factual comparison -- what might have been had not a particular action been taken or event occurred (this method has been used to good effect by cliometricians). Of great importance in this type of research method is to ensure that as many factors as possible are held constant other than the research object which is being comparatively analysed. If we see quantitative studies and longitudinal case-studies as opposites, unreconcilable, and used exclusively by different groups of researchers, this is no doubt to take too black-and-white a view of the matter. The most openminded researchers, of course, use both. They may, however, as a result, find it difficult to a c c o m m o d a t e their findings within a clear theoretical framework. It may be suggested that statistics collected primarily for other purposes and over large samples are: (i) more objective in comparison with
237 the "subjectivity" of interviews, and (ii) more readily generalizable across a wide population. However, there are great difficulties in using data collected for other purposes: definitions may not be congruent, particularly where cross-cultural comparisons are being made (see Buckley and Chapman, 1994). Good compromises are often made by business historians, who have proved successful in combining aggregative data and archival material in focusing on key research issues. International business lends itself to this type of analysis and it is relatively well developed. Analyses of firms and nations over time are well established. National comparisons are the stock-in-trade of the international business research community which often takes advantage of the uniqueness of the multinational enterprise -- the s a m e firm operating in different national environments. Paired groups of firms (e.g. of different national ownerships within the same market) are also utilized. Counterfactual comparisons are also frequent, particularly in the analysis of foreign direct investment outcomes. The actual situation is often contrasted with "the alternative position" -- what would have happened if the investment under scrutiny had not taken place. The difficulty, of course, lies in specifying the feasible (or most likely) alternative position. The remainder of this paper examines a case study of a research project which involves the collaboration of an anthropologist and an economist. It illustrates the problem challenges and outcomes of a project which is both comparative and longitudinal.
3. Application to the Management of Cooperative Strategies The research project to which these reflections relate, is a study of a small number of companies. The aim of the project is to study how companies, and the people within them, decide upon the mixture of market and hierarchy, arm's-length dealing and internalization, cooperation and confrontation, that is appropriate to them. It is considered important that the project should look at these issues over time, so that the research is 'longitudinal' (compare Pettigrew, 1989). As shown in a parallel paper (Buckley and Chapman, 1996) there are great difficulties in reconciling the theoretical bases of economics and social anthropology. Speaking in broad, crude terms anthropology takes a holistic view of society, uses native p e r s p e c t i v e s in w h i c h s u b j e c t i v i t y and interpretation are to the fore and suggests multiple approaches to rationality whereas economics has claims to objectivity, scientific positive approaches and is largely rationalist. The theoretical and practical differences between social anthropology and economics have implications for the way in which they gather and assess knowledge. These can be discussed under "methodology", but it is clear that they are closely tied to fundamental philosophical differences between the two subjects. The discussion so far might be regarded as "theoretical"; what follows is overtly a discussion of "method": the two must be regarded as closely linked, however.
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The theoretical opposition has, we might say, a methodological opposition built into it -- a series of practices appropriate to their respective disciplines. Again, the opposition is not one-dimensional, or unilinear, but we might say that it has in depth anthropological field work at one end, and statistical or mathematical analysis of quantitative data at the other.
In-depth Anthropological Fieldwork For social anthropologists, this formulation is a tautology: fieldwork is, by definition, in-depth. Since Malinowski, social anthropologists have taken a pride in length of fieldwork, and in fluent use of whatever language(s) was n e c e s s a r y for local c o m m u n i c a t i o n . They came to despise the use of interpreters. Because language-learning is a long-term activity, and for general reasons, they came to regard fieldwork as being necessarily of several year's duration. Good and influential work has been done on the basis of much less, but social anthropologists typically have no upper figure for how much fieldwork is desirable -- you can never do enough, and two years would probably be regarded as a working minimum. The method also involved what is often called "participant observation". This is important. A n t h r o p o l o g i s t s did not just " o b s e r v e " ; they also "participated": they tried, that is, to put themselves in the position of the people they were studying, to see through their eyes, to become, in a sense, one of them. All manner of philosophical and moral argument leaps into consideration, and we might only say, for brevity, that the enterprise of participant observation has produced some very worthwhile results. The method -- long-term fieldwork, use of local languages, and participant observation -- has often served as a definition of social anthropology, outlasting changes in theoretical orientation. A social anthropologist, working to this research pattern, often makes only one really serious foray into fieldwork in a lifetime, and spends the rest of a lifetime writing about it; this major fieldwork tends to take place during graduate student days, before a full time job makes such work impossible. Subsequent fieldwork is often either a re-visit to the initial site, or on a smaller and self-avowedly less satisfactory scale. The virtue of this kind of work is that a social anthropologist often does get to know the social set-up very well indeed. Other forms of social study have a tendency to seem superficial or trivial, to one that has engaged in such fieldwork. One of the drawbacks of social anthropological knowledge gained in this way, is that it is limited to a specific social environment. It is not self-evident that a social anthropologist trained in this way is able to generalize. Social anthropology, by its very nature, is a highly personal activity. One way to generalize is for an individual social anthropologist to carry out more than one tour of fieldwork, in different societies. Most social anthropologists try to get at least two in during a lifetime. There are obviously very low limits to the possibilities in this direction. In the 1950s, some social anthropologists attempted to be rigorously
239 numerical, and were not particularly successful. The attempt, and the failure, had the effect of causing them to dislike and mistrust numerical methods. The trend, since the middle 1960s, has been towards language, meaning, words and the like, and away from economics, politics, and numbers. Statistics, for good reasons and bad, have often evoked a hostile response from social anthropologists. Participant observation is, of course, a very simple idea. If you can become a member of a society, then it is easy to see that you would, by virtue of this, have access to many of its secrets. The approach is not without problems, but it is intuitively appealing. To do a social anthropological study of a corporation, using participant observation as classically understood, a researcher would need to work for the company for several years. Various problems arise, that were not fully anticipated when the anthropologist was working on a coral island:
(a) Disclosure. Anthropologists traditionally came back from exotic fieldwork with a total conviction that the world of their research (coral island, tropical jungle, mountain village) was totally separate from the world of their academic publication. The classic anthropological monograph was about illiterate people speaking another language on the other side of the world. An anthropologist could say what he or she pleased, without any thoughts of confidentiality, libel, ethics, law-suits and the like. An anthropologist could publish photographs of the naked savages, without any fear that the savages, or their children or grandchildren, would turn up demanding reparation and apology. Anthropologists today are almost morbidly sensitive about this kind of problem. This sensitivity is of relatively recent date, however, and as late as the early 1960s no problem was perceived. A company, unlike a primitive society, is potentially a highly sensitive and litigious organization. The researcher can have no illusions that the published findings will be confined, in their readership, to a small scholarly audience, or that the company in question will have no access to, no interest in, and no ability to read, the results. The information, moreover, is not just morally sensitive, but potentially commercially sensitive as well. This is not an issue with which social anthropologists have commonly had to deal. (b) Access. In m a n y s o c i e t i e s , there are no f o r m a l barriers to an anthropologist. Most anthropologists have not needed "permission" to go and do their study. They have simply moved in with their tent, or rented their flat, and begun making local contacts. Company research is not like that. We can readily suppose that if an anthropologist wandered vaguely into the executive dining room, sat down, and announced an intention of learning the local language and living there for three years, the security men would move in rather rapidly. The fact that all work must be done by permission, somewhat changes the nature of the enquiry, and the possible results. As noted above, however, responsibility to the "objects" of study is increasing everywhere in
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the anthropological universe, and to some extent the increase in problems of disclosure everywhere, reduces the difference arising from the access problem as between corporate and non-corporate research.
(c) Scope. Anthropologists tend to attempt to study the entirety of societies. This leaning towards holism has been important, since it helped to confirm the important break with atomistic positivism. It meant, however, for various reasons, that anthropologists had some difficulty bringing their methods back to "complex" societies. Because, if we are to follow the classical model, a social anthropologist studying (say) a pharmaceutical company is not just studying the company, but everything about the lives of everybody concerned, which leads out into all the other specialisms of modern academia -economics, demography, politics, religion, consumption, tourism, and so on. A manager's thought and actions within a company, could not be divorced from his or her thought and actions outside the company. This problem, within anthropology, has been extensively discussed; there is no space here for summary, but one might say that the characteristic solution so far has been to muddle through: "holism", in some form, remains a potent idea, and one which anthropologists are reluctant to abandon, however complex the social reality. Statistical and Quantitative Research Economics, through the notions of rational optimizing and equilibrium, and through a tacit teleology of survival, can study companies through externally available facts and figures, and consider the job satisfactorily done (at one level, at least). The complex internal activities that generate the externally available figures, the facts of c o m p a n y survival, are thereby rendered theoretically void -- this is the company as "black box", to which reference has already been made. This is caricature, as already noted; but not without a strong dose of verisimilitude. Researchers on companies do, of course, try to find out more about them than the externally available figures. When they do so, then they tend to enter the more general realm of what might be called "business studies research". Crudely put, there is a strong tendency for business studies to be positivist and numerical in research enquiry. There is not, typically, a great deal of room given to forms of interpretation, or existential doubt. If you cannot measure it, and count it, then it isn't there. This crude view however does a disservice to economists (or at least a sub set of them). Many economists have taken the view that economics is defined by its method, not by a body of settled conclusions. Examples include Keynes (1992): "The theory of e c o n o m i c s does not furnish a b o d y of settled conclusions immediately applicable to a policy, it is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions". Similarly Nobel prizewinner Ronald Coase (1978, p. 210) believes that "the main advantage which an economist brings to other social sciences is simply a way of looking at the world". A
241 recent examination of the core concepts of economics suggests that it rests on optimization, with secondary reference to equilibrium which is frequently not necessary, plus a flexible range of supporting assumptions (Buckley and Casson, 1993). On this reading, admittedly not universal, economics is far more flexible and accommodating to other social sciences than its more rigid advocates imagine. The claims that economics makes to "imperial" status within the social sciences rest on its flexibility not its universality, and this flexibility is one of method. A study of companies, from a business studies point of view, tends to require collection of data such that statistical tests of comparability and difference can be carried out. Statistical requirements, even the requirements of particular statistical software, might dictate the size of sample, the number of q u e s t i o n s , and so on. The m o s t l i k e l y m e t h o d s m i g h t be postal questionnaire, and structured questionnaire. Both of these are apt to the mechanisms of theory and hypothesis, which dominate business studies research. The statistical analyst might look at a single ethnographic study of one company, and ask what use it was? How could one example ever prove anything? The ethnographer might look at the statistical study, and argue that its claims to accuracy were false, since however sophisticated the analysis, the understanding of each individual case was so superficial as to be negligible. You cannot make great analyses with flawed data, however, fine your methods, any more than you can cook great dishes with rotten ingredients; it is no help having an expensive oven. So, even if the analysis confirms and disproves its hypothesis, reality has escaped it in a significant manner. It is no use asking ethnography what it can prove; at least ethnography makes a serious attempt to understand matters in their true complexity; if it is overwhelmed by this complexity, then that is only more evidence that, say, questionnaire analysis is leaving a great deal out.
Compromise So, each approach has good grounds for rejecting the other. Some of the issues can be clarified through a discussion of the theory/hypothesis structure. Anthropologists typically try to approach fieldwork with an entirely open mind. They have neither theory nor hypothesis, and regard this as a virtue -- a virtue that might be expressed as "not prejudging the e v i d e n c e " ; the importance attached to sympathy with "native categories" is congruent with this: how can you have a theory about something which might contradict your basic understanding of the world? From this perspective, a researcher armed with hypotheses might prove or disprove them, but the existence of a world which renders the hypotheses simply incoherent, senseless (rather than true or false), cannot be discerned. Anthropologists are on the watch for just such "worlds", and have little patience with the notion that research is a process of pre-formed hypothesis testing. Those wedded to the positivist method, by contrast, might well regard the anthropologist's "open mind" as a mere vacuity, an abdication of the intellect. The question then rapidly turns back
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upon the nature of knowledge itself, and upon those issues already discussed above -- the hypothesis-testers implicitly regard knowledge as determinate, achievable in totality, without internal contradiction, pre-existing in the world; the anthropologists, in contrast, regard knowledge as socially created, contradictory, inherently incomplete, multi-dimensional, always in the process of recreation and self-transformation, and so on. So when an economist and a social anthropologist sit down to try to devise a research programme for studying corporations, there are loud alarms and excursions making themselves heard off stage, both left and right. And when an economist and a social anthropologist sit down to interview a manager, the same questions and replies can, potentially at least, lead down very different paths of argument. One might wish to argue that there is no r e a s o n w h y i n - d e p t h anthropological fieldwork could not produce numerical data, which could be fed into the quantitative research machine. This is so, at least in principle. One might also wish to argue that there is no reason why structured interviews could not be used, with sensitivity, to make qualitative assessment of issues of (say) meaning. This is true as well. It is a matter of fact, however, as much as of theory, that the two approaches tend to proceed exclusively; and the matter of fact is underpinned by all the theoretical prejudices and oppositions that have been so far discussed. In the best of all possible worlds, it might be possible to imagine having the best of both -- a statistically valid and cross-comparable corpus of ethnographic reports based on long term fieldwork from a large number of companies. In practice, this is not possible, and some compromise is necessary. The ideal types at either end of the research spectrum are going to find material, in whatever compromise is reached, for criticism. Nevertheless, criticism from one end can be met by forms of rebuttal from the other, and vice versa. The criticisms from either end would have more force if there were any valid practical alternative to compromise. The compromise that has been reached is, in some ways, obvious enough long, r e p e a t e d , u n s t r u c t u r e d i n t e r v i e w s t o g e t h e r with participant observation where the company can tolerate it! To social anthropologists, such work can be presented as having virtues of generalizability and comparability that are typically lacking in the ethnographic genre. It can also be presented to anthropologists as tackling problems related to the modern world that anthropologists obviously ought to have tackled, but hardly ever have (anthropologists, as noted above, have a long-standing reluctance to engage with modern economic and business life; there are many reasons for this, which can be illuminated by the present work). To the statistically minded, the same research can be p r e s e n t e d as containing ethnographic richness, meaning, and so on, that economics, and business studies in general, too often leave out, gloss over, or minimize. Many research works in business studies are open to the criticism that the statistical analysis takes precedence over the validity of the data; this, at least, is a criticism that the current research hopes to avoid. -
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243 The reluctance of anthropologists to engage in " o n e - o f f ' interviews is understandable, given the above reflections; how can you generate the crucial element of contextual understanding, if you have no context? This again turns back to the question of whether knowledge, and information, are dependent or independent of context; anthropologists lean strongly to the view that they are context-dependent; economists, with an unqualified rationality at their backs, statistical techniques in hand, are able to persuade themselves otherwise. Part of the problem here, perhaps, is that economists are typically operating within a world which is familiar to them -- Western industrial capitalism, say; in this world, much that is strange and bizarre does not strike them as such: it offers them no challenge, and they offer no challenge back -- their knowledge is indeed highly dependent on context, but on a context which is so familiar that it is invisible. It almost goes without saying that an anthropologist would find it difficult to conceive of a study that was not "longitudinal". The idea that one could study a social phenomenon through one temporal snapshot is contrary to the ethic of fieldwork. The fact that such studies have been the norm in industrial economics, means that there is a great chasm of method between the two poles of research enquiry, as they have been discussed above -- a chasm, of course, that invites filling; anything that can be put in it will be better than nothing. If we wish to go further then we can follow Buckley and Casson who have said: all economics does is to infer from observed behaviour the nature of the preferences and beliefs that underlie it (Buckleyand Casson, 1993, p. 1051). In order to get at the nature of the "preferences and beliefs" to which Buckley and Casson refer, however, we need to go beyond "behaviour"; we need to look not'just at what people are "doing", in a behavioural sense (observable from an objective standpoint), but also at the meaning of their activity. This is a radical step, for some, and one which strays quickly into the social anthropological programme, with its attention to "native categories". The issues surrounding "meaning" are complex and indeterminate; no single "science" of meaning exists. Even so, social anthropologists have made some major contributions here. We might say that social anthropology has moved, radically, from behaviourist approaches (centred on the objective observer) to interpretive approaches (centred upon the social actor). This move, from behaviour to meaning, is one that has affected different social sciences in different ways; social anthropology has been transformed, economics little affected. Nevertheless, if economics is to pass from "observed behaviour" to "preferences and beliefs", as Buckley and Casson have suggested, then there would seem to be no option but to enter the realm of meaning, within which preferences and beliefs are generated and made intelligible.
4. Conclusion International business research provides some pointers for management
T h e o r y and M e t h o d in International Business Research
244 International Business Review 5,3
researchers, and indeed social scientists in general. It is beginning to approach the p h e n o m e n a under analysis from a v i e w p o i n t w h i c h uses c o m p a r a t i v e methods to isolate key differences across space and longitudinal methods to isolate key developments over time. This is being achieved, and has to be achieved, by developing a set of core concepts which are analytically rigorous and tractable, yet remain flexible. This paper attempted to illustrate these d e v e l o p m e n t s by a project d r a w i n g on a h i g h l y positivist social science ( e c o n o m i c s ) and one relying on e t h n o g r a p h y (social a n t h r o p o l o g y ) . The m e t h o d s utilised, o p e n , o p e n - e n d e d , repeated i n t e r v i e w s and participant observation enable the comparative method to isolate differences so as to test rigorous yet flexible hypotheses without excluding "native categories". Acknowledgement -- The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for their
constructive comments on an earlier draft.
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