Global Strategy - blog

 

In recent times, there has been a lot of discussion about the questionable practices of scholars, universities and publishers. In a related fashion, the economist Ronald Coase once said that "if you torture the data long enough, Nature will confess." He referred to a common research practice of flexibly changing one's model, collecting more data and using different measures until you find interesting and publishable results; it is likely that at some point you will find statistically significant results purely by chance. For a qualitative researcher, flexibility is a good thing. In fact, going back and forth between data and theory is the primary mode of doing qualitative research. However, in quantitative research, flexibility is somewhat counter-intuitively considered a bad thing. Let me explain.

As an occasional observer and sometimes an adviser in public sector strategy processes, one may easily ask to what extent business strategy is applicable in the strategic management of, for example, universities? Or to be more specific: what kind of strategic management would be of any help in public sector strategizing? The specification is important as (a) firms generally are a rather bad benchmark for any activities meant to last longer than three years. A statistical fact is that most for-profit firms die young; die painfully; or otherwise cease to exist. In this sense, there is not much to learn from the sudden success stories which may be explained more by random evolutionary processes than skillful strategic thinking. Even less we may learn from the constant failures of small and large firms. Also, what organizations optimize (profit, survival, efficient public good production) already makes for-profit organizations entirely different relative to non-profit organizations. The specification is also important because (b) strategy practices differ considerably from firm to firm. To keep things simple: there is two ways (bad and good) for strategic management. (1) many firms still follow 'old-school' strategy based on belief that top management have super-human skills in seeing into future, and acting accordingly. This 'old-school' approach respects strategic planning, control, heavy administrative processes, and other activities meant to hamper innovativeness and emergence. From a performance and survival perspectives, this approach is like flipping a coin because we still not have managers with those super-human qualities (called as 'psyches'’ in science fiction).

In ‘Holy Smoke’, a famous Jane Campion film, PJ Waters (Harvey Keitel) and Ruth (Kate Winslet) are engaged in an epic psychological struggle that eventually spoils the life of Waters yet also emotionally affects Ruth’s interpretation of life. In one central scene, PJ Waters requests Ruth to “be kind”. Linked to an academic context ‘being kind’ means respecting (a) earlier work done in the field; (b) giving value on the work of close-by faculty members; and (c) longer term academic traditions. Having good manners never hurts. However, ‘being kind’ specifically helps you to communicate with your supervisors, enhances your understanding of yourself as a part of academic continuum, and results in better research. Be kind!

Attending a talk last week about contingency in science (held as part of CPNSS project ‘Contingency and Dissent in Science) left me rather confused. As I found it, the concept of contingency, at least at the LSE, seems to be a name (or a subset-not in a strictly set-theoretical sense!) of the nowadays quite classical realism-antirealism debate. That is, I found no references to Rorty. Although quite understandable, it still seems odd to pass the ‘practical turn' of the 1980s in one sentence, just slightly overlooking some significant parts of more recent developments in philosophy. On the other hand, the bent is quite reasonable considering the institutional traditions.

A weird thing has taken place a couple of times now... I have been to a very weak lecture and asked some of my peers their opinions about them. To my surprise, I generally get totally contrasting views of my own. People tend to be extremely fascinated about those lectures I mostly dislike.

On Monday, a workshop took place at the LSE CPNSS as a part of project called ‘Contingency and Dissent in Science'. The day was loaded with four speakers, all hovering around the topic matter. All the presenters provided interesting insights to the general matter; due to the limitations of this account, I am going to concentrate on one of them.