untitled by Juan Pardo

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361-372 081029 Jack (D)

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Jack

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International management and ethnography

Interestingly, and to be fair, the authors do qualify their claims in places, with words like ‘predominantly’ and ‘usually’, suggesting they are aware that their representations cannot stand in for everything, and that counterpositions do exist within the bodies of literature in which they have an interest. I am puzzled, then, as to why these openings to more nuanced representations of the field are not pursued, even through the use of endnotes. There is much recent writing in international management which suggests that research in the area, however we place boundaries around it, is a little more substantively and conceptually diverse than some of the bold assertions indicate (adverbs aside). International management is one area in which there are regular attempts to document the state of the field. Such ‘survey’ work, perhaps indicative of the need of researchers in the area to bring into existence their field of study, involves exercises in the categorization, codification and tabulation of published research into international management in terms of substantive themes, conceptual foci, country and context of study and methodological preference (for instance, Peterson, 2004; Thomas et al., 1994; Wright and Ricks, 1994). Even a cursory look at some of these surveys suggests an ever emergent diversity in IMR, a diversity which can also be seen in methodological terms in the growing number of publications/calls for papers/research emphasizing the need for qualitative research methods and broader constructionist epistemologies in international business. This includes, to name a few, a Blackwell Handbook (edited by Punnett and Shenkar, 1996), an Edward Elgar Handbook (edited by Marschan-Piekkari and Welch, 2004), a special issue of Management International Review (2006), numerous individual journal articles, wider writings on ethnography and international management (Brannen, 1996; Sharpe, 2004), and books and articles illustrating a postcolonial critique of (comparative) management and organization studies (Prasad, 2003; Westwood, 2001, 2004). Such surveys of the field and these individual pieces together represent some diversity in international management research and openings to other epistemic and methodological forms. The authors are, I guess, gesturing to such diversity through the qualifying adverbs in their text. However, the lack of any concerted attention to them does create something of a misleading impression of the field to those not familiar with it. I am not saying that international management is a site of epistemological openness and methodological pluralism. There is, however, a growing interest in non-functionalist and non-positivist approaches. To re-iterate then, in this first section of my response, I am not necessarily contesting the authors’ labelling of the prevailing epistemological and methodological preferences of international management, nor arguing against the central thrust of this article. I am, however, suggesting that the representation of the object of critique might have been nuanced further and situated more carefully in ‘the literature’ (sic).

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