Improving Your Case Method Skills: Two Methodological Pieces by Michael Scriven

The philosopher and polymath Michael Scriven has written extensively on the logic of explanations. Here are two of his most valuable pieces. The first one is how one can make good inferences from single case studies and the second one one explanations in history.

1. Scriven, M. (1974). Maximizing the Power of Causal Investigations: The Modus Operandi Method. In W. J. Popham (Ed.), Evaluation in education: Current applications: 68-84: McCutchan Pub Corp. Download

2. Scriven, M. (1966). Causes, Connections, and Conditions in History. Philosophical Analysis and History. W. H. Dray, Harper & Row: 238-264.  Download

 

Scaffolding in Economics, Management, and the Design of Technologies

This chapter reviews the ideas that have been developed to describe the emergence and change of structures in three fields: Economics, Management, and Design of Technologies. The chapter focuses on one empirical setting, the economy, and more specifically how firms, industries, and technologies change over time. Today’s industrialized economies are very different from the economies before the industrial revolution. The chapter presents key theoretical ideas from evolutionary economics, management, and technology that try to explain why and how economy has been so dramatically transformed over the past 400 years. You can download a draft of chapter here or find the book in your library or buy it at Amazon.com or MIT Press.

Excerpts from Arthur Stinchcombe’s on “Theoretical Methods in Social History”

Ten years ago I read Stinchcombe’s “Theoretical Methods in Social History”. I recently reread the parts that I had highlighted and I thought it useful to share some key passages.[1]

One does not apply theory to history; rather ones uses history to develop theory. [2]
——
It is rather that the fashion in quantitative history has come to be that one must agree to be voluntarily ignorant of the any evidence other than numbers. [3]

As the argument develops, it will become clear why I am unenthusiastic about most quantitative history. Let me state the argument in capsule form.
For a number, say a count, to be theoretically interesting, it has to be a count of a comparable instance. What instances comparable for a scientist is that those instances have identical causal impact. Thus a count is more illuminating, the more theory and the more detailed examination of the facts went into making the instances counted comparable. But this ordinarily means that making a count should be the last stage of a scientific enterprise, a stage reached only after an extensive development of theory on what makes instances comparable. Is the proletarian in the Vyborg district of Petersburg or in the Baltic Sea Fleet equivalent in impact on the Russian Revolution to a proletarian in Moscow? Trotsky convinces me he was not (and if the proletarian was a she, in either place, she was not equivalent to a male proletarian either). Consequently, a count of proletarians in Russia in 1917 is fact of relatively little interest. [4]

A count should be the last stage of a theoretically oriented social research, after one has got to the point where one is willing to sacrifice theoretical advance. [5]

——
But if general concepts consist in the analogies between elements and if they are deeper if the analogies are deeper, then the basic investigatory task of concept formation is the deepening of analogies.

Far from it being the case that the most powerful general theorists ignore details, the precise opposite is true. Social theory without attention to detail is wind; the classes it invents are vacuous, and nothing interesting follows from the fact that A and B belong to the class;
“theoretical” research appears as a species of wordy scholasticism, arranging conceptual angels in sixteen fold ranks on the head of a purely conceptual pin.

But if conceptual profundity depends on the deep building of analogies from one case to another, we are likely to find good theory in exactly the opposite place from where we have been taught to expect it. For it is likely to be those scholars who attempt to give a causal interpretation of a particular case who will be led to penetrate deeper analogies between cases. [6]

——

Thus it is vain to seek sensible causal sentences about “nobilities” until we find out whether the nobilities were something like the same sort of thing in different countries. The only way to do that is to build up from and analogies and differences among acts.  And what makes acts causally analogous is similarity in what people want and what they think they need to do to get it. [7]

——

Since a class is logically the same thing as a set of equivalences among members of a class, a causal generalization in historical materials is a set of analogies between particular causal assertions.  A causal generalization is, “When royal governments have outlived their usefulness, weak kings or stars reign without governing and fall easily.” This is equivalent to asserting an analogy between the statement, “Tsar Alexander’s unwillingness or inability to decide what to do about the war caused events that led to revolution,” and “Louis XVI’s lack of clarity about the purposes and role of the Estates General caused events that led to revolution.” When the generalization appears in the history of the Russian Revolution, it appears as an “interpretation,” and has not particular claim to generality.

By the simple act of asserting that two instances are alike, however, a class, a concept, is created, a generalization about it is offered, some evidence is brought forth, and we are embarked on a scientific enterprise.

A detailed analysis of what the tsar wanted from his cabinet and the Duma, what Louis XVI wanted from the Estates General, and in what respects these were similar, set us on the path of a giving a realistic and useful definition of the waffle-word “weak” in the generalization.
The moral of this book is that great theorists descend to the level of such detailed analogies in the course of their work. Further, they become greater theorists down there among the details, for it is the details that theories in history have to grasp if they are to be any good. [8]

[1]: Stinchcombe, A. L. (1978). Theoretical Methods in Social History. New York, Academic Press.

[2]: p. 1

[3]: p. 5

[4]: p. 5-6

[5]: p. 7

[6]: p. 20-1

[7]: p. 120

[8]: p. 123-124

My Editorial Statement for Management & Organization Review

MOR is the official journal of International Association for Chinese Management Research. While the journal is focused on China, comparative studies of China and other countries are highly appropriate for the journal.

I am interested in detailed studies of how technologies, organizations, industries and supporting institutions evolve over time. Methodologically, I hope to attract comparative case studies that are rich in descriptive data that is both quantitative and qualitative.  I also hope to attract historical case studies.  Papers that feature particularly innovative companies or organizational and institutional structures are of particular interest.

Examples of papers that illustrate work of interest to this editorial area can be found here.

Collection of Research Methods articles in SO!

SO! has pulled together the collection of articles on research methods that the journal published over the years. I for one will come back to these articles. I suspect many doctoral students will find them useful.

Ann Langley: Over the years, Strategic Organization has published a number of very useful and insightful articles on research methods for studying strategy and organization. This section of the website groups together a collection of the most interesting articles of this type. Both quantitative and qualitative researchers will find ideas for novel approaches and pointers for enhancing the quality of their research among these contributions.

SO! Collection on Research Methods

AOM 2013: Two workshops I am participating in: History and Design Evolution

History and Strategy: Toward an Integration of Theory and Method History and Strategy

New Presentation Slides for Download. Click here.
Program Session #: 80 | Submission: 14401 | Sponsor(s): (BPS, MH, TIM)
Scheduled: Friday, Aug 9 2013 11:45AM - 1:45PM at WDW Swan Resort in Swan 10

Organizer: Steven Kahl; Dartmouth College (TUCK);
Organizer: Brian S. Silverman; U. of Toronto;
Participant: David A. Kirsch; U. of Maryland;
Participant: Huseyin Leblebici; U. of Illinois;
Participant: J Peter Murmann; Australian School of Business, UNSW;

While historical research has played a central role in the development of the strategy literature, it remains underrepresented in strategy journals. This PDW explores how historical analysis can inform strategy research. As the strategy field continues to develop dynamic models of strategy, the historical perspective can provide unique perspective, and could potentially even develop a history-based theory of strategy. Yet, doing historical research in strategy faces methodological challenges given its different approach to the development of theory and use of evidence. Consequently, this PDW addresses the different opportunities available to strategy scholars to engage in the historical method. The format of the PDW is a combination of 1) presentations in which scholars experienced in conducting historical analysis within the strategy and organizational fields discuss the challenges of doing this work and 2) interactive breakout sessions in which participants break into smaller groups to discuss design of a historical study in topical strategy research areas, such as dynamic capabilities and industry evolution. These breakout sessions will help identify how the historical approach can make novel theoretical contributions and reveal roadmaps for pushing this work further.

Search Terms: History/Historical Analysis , Strategy , Theory and Methods

Architectural Strategy and Design Evolution in Business Ecosystems: Opportunities and Challenges
Ecosystem Design and Strategy

Program Session #: 279 | Submission: 10331 | Sponsor(s): (TIM, BPS, ENT, OMT)
Scheduled: Saturday, Aug 10 2013 10:15AM - 12:45PM at WDW Swan Resort in Swan 3

Organizer: Richard Tee; EPFL;
Organizer: Christopher L Tucci; Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne;
Organizer: C. Jason Woodard; Singapore Management U.;
Panelist: Rahul Kapoor; U. of Pennsylvania;
Panelist: Andrea Prencipe; Luiss Guido Carli U.;
Discussant: Carliss Baldwin; Harvard U.;
Discussant: J Peter Murmann; Australian School of Business, UNSW;
Moderator: Elizabeth J. Altman; Harvard Business School;
Panelist: Arnaldo Camuffo; Bocconi U.;

In the last few years, we have seen increased attention to business ecosystems and related phenomena such as industry architectures, platforms, and value networks. While these phenomena present exciting research opportunities, they also raise daunting challenges. For example, business ecosystems are often characterized by complex structures (e.g., intricate links, nested layers, and fuzzy boundaries), as well as complex dynamics (e.g., co-evolution of strategic behavior, technology, and competitive outcomes). Reasoning about strategic design choices in such turbulent environments is difficult and uncertain. Yet, the way an ecosystem’s participants shape the artifacts they produce and their relationships with each other can profoundly affect the ecosystem’s evolutionary trajectory. And while the significance of these design choices has been recognized, the theoretical and methodological tools needed to study them rigorously remain underdeveloped. This PDW aims to address this gap in two ways. First, we will examine the existing body of scholarship that bears on the topic of how firms navigate and strategize in business ecosystems, with an eye toward identifying open research questions that hold particular promise. Second, we will discuss how the emerging research community on business ecosystems can begin to address these questions, with an emphasis on the required advances in architectural representation techniques, data collection, and empirical analysis.

Search Terms: business ecosystems , architectural strategy , design evolution

Honoring the late Steve Klepper

Steve Klepper, who has been an inspiration to so many of us, recently passed away. At the 20th anniversary of the CCC colloquium, we honored Steve Klepper. The video captures very nicely how much Steve touched an entire generation of doctoral students working on the intersection of industry evolution and technological innovation.

Nelson, Richard R. (born 1930)

This short article is my entry on Richard R. Nelson in the Encyclopedia of Strategic Management

Richard R. Nelson (b. 1930) is an American economist who has had a significant influence on the field of strategic management. The fundamental question driving his work is how societies can be organized to improve their material well-being. In answering this question, Nelson identifies sustained technological innovation and a diverse range of often industry-specific institutional structures as the key engines of economic growth. He sees business firms as playing a key role in the growth process because firms are the carriers of the knowledge and abilities required to produce the complex product and services that characterize modern economies.

Keywords: evolutionary theory, firms, innovation, organizational capabilities, patents, Carnegie School, RAND Corporation; science policy, tacit knowledg

Richard R. Nelson is an American economist whose principal aim has been to develop a deeper understanding of technological change and economic growth. His career-spanning work on technological change (e.g., Nelson, 1962, 1993) has shaped scholarly thought in economics and many other fields. In the field of strategic management, Nelson has wielded strong influence on the study of innovation and how firms develop. This influence is based in large part on the landmark book that he and Sidney G. Winter published in 1982 under the title An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. As of May 2012, the book had received approximately 6,000 Web of Science Citations and 23,000 Google Scholar citations, making it one of the foundational texts in strategic management. The book has had such a strong impact on the field of strategic management for several reasons: First, it builds on the Carnegie School’s (Cyert and March, 1963) influential notion of routines as the key building block for organizational decision-making. Second, it offered a coherent theory of how firms and industries acquire capabilities through an evolutionary process that, of necessity, involves innovation and a substantial degree of trial and error. In explaining the sustained competitive advantage of individual firms there are two broad traditions. The first one points to favourable external market structures and the second to resources lying inside the firm that are difficult to trade, imitate and replicate. Nelson and Winter (1982) combine these traditions in their evolutionary view of capability development where markets select out those firms that do not have sufficient capabilities to compete.
Nelson’s long-term research on innovation (e.g. Nelson, Mowery and Fagerberg, 2006), intellectual property rights (e.g. Levin et al., 1987) and the larger institutional environment (e.g. Nelson, 1993; Nelson and Sampat, 2001) in which innovative activity takes place has also been very influential in strategic management because his ideas help explain how firms gain and lose competitive advantage.
Knowing a few details of Nelson’s biography can help to provide a better understanding of the intellectual trajectory of his work. He grew up in Washington, DC, in a family headed by a government economist who was trying to help the US economy get back on track in the wake of the Great Depression. After completing high school in the US capital (Winter, 2000), Nelson went on to study at Oberlin College in Ohio, a private liberal arts college, which has long been associated with progressive causes. He received a bachelor’s degree from the college in 1952 and then went to Yale, enrolling in the Ph.D. programme in economics. By today’s standards the ‘science of economics’ as implemented in the curriculum of the Yale Ph.D. programme was conceived broadly. It included, for example, economic history as a required field of study. Nelson (2003b) explains:

‘The orientation to economics as a discipline at Yale was very much that the goal of the subject was the understanding of real empirical phenomena, and that an important use of that understanding was to guide policy making to improve the human condition. Good economic theory was an important aspect of that understanding. But it was not all of that understanding; a
good economist also ought to know a considerable amount of economic history, be a good
empirical analyst, and also have a strong common-sense understanding of the economic world.’

Nelson completed his Ph.D. thesis in just three years, being awarded a Ph.D. degree in 1956. He had become convinced that technological advance was the key factor driving economic growth (Nelson, 2007) but realized that he knew too little about technology. Taking advantage of a scholarship programme offered by the US government, Nelson then enrolled in undergraduate engineering and science courses at MIT to complement his Ph.D. training in economics and he subsequently worked for a decade at the RAND Corporation, focusing on policy questions related to the organization of innovation and national security. Nelson (2003b) later described the research ethos at RAND as follows:

‘While methodological
 rigor was required [at RAND], the researchers knew that their principal task was to get the problem right, and to illuminate real solutions to the real problem.’

This means that both his graduate student days at Yale and the decade at RAND, which was interrupted by a stint on the Council of Economic Advisors in Washington, during the Kennedy Administration, solidified Nelson’s approach to research, focusing on explaining real problems. In 1968, Nelson left RAND to become professor of economics at Yale University and in 1986 he moved to Columbia University where he is presently a professor emeritus and director of the Center for Science Technology and Global Development.
For Nelson the central ‘real’ problem is to understand how society can bring about economic growth. When Nelson began his career as an economist, evidence had emerged that economic growth historically was not simply a matter of adding more labour or capital in the economy. Long-term data series on the US economy had shown that increases in productivity were at the core of economic growth and that only a small amount of this growth of output per worker was due to increased capital use per worker. This meant that technological change was likely playing a central role in productivity increases that allowed the average worker to generate ever larger amounts of goods and services (Nelson, 1962). For an economist interested in economic growth, the key questions therefore become: What is the optimal rate of investment in innovative activity? To what extent should the government be involved in funding and organizing innovative activity? and How should policymakers trade off the potential benefits of encouraging innovation through patents and the costs of granting temporary monopolies with patents?
To provide better answers to these questions, throughout his career Nelson mixed theoretical and empirical analyses. In an early paper (Nelson, 1959), Nelson showed mainly through theoretical analysis that basic R&D has the classic externality problem and that for this reason profit-seeking firms would underinvest in basic science since they would not be able to fully capture the returns from such investment. To provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between basic and applied research, Nelson next investigated how economically important new technologies such as the transistor actually came about (Nelson, 1962) and how new technologies diffused in the economy to lift overall productivity levels (Nelson, 1968). One central conclusion that Nelson reached by comparing technical change in the agricultural, medical and aircraft sectors is that the nature of the innovation process and the organizational and institutional factors facilitating it differed from sector to sector across the economy (Nelson and Winter, 1977).
A basic fact about technological innovation highlighted early on in Nelson’s work (1959) is the inherent uncertainty involved in the process of innovation: Ahead of time actors do not know which research efforts will yield great results and which will be a waste of time. This means that the only way to arrive at effective solutions is to carry out parallel experiments and reallocate resources as more is learned about the relative merits of alternative solutions (Nelson, 1962). The strength of capitalist economies is precisely that competing firms engage in a parallel search for new products and new ways to make them (Nelson and Winter, 1977). In Nelson’s theoretical writings, the diversity of firm capabilities and strategies are a fundamental engine of progress precisely because no one can predict in advance which strategy will turn out to be most effective (Nelson, 1991).
Nelson’s influence in strategic management is based in large measure on being able to construct a theoretical explanation for how firms are able to develop the capabilities to organize the often exceedingly complex research, development and production processes that characterize modern economies (Dosi, Nelson and Winter, 2000) where increasingly sophisticated products and services sweep away old ones (Nelson and Winter, 1977). Just how sophisticated the capabilities of firms are that can turn out such products as the modern commercial aircraft or notebook computers comes into full view when we remind ourselves of the limited abilities of a single individual human being (Nelson, 2003a). The theoretical structure unifying Nelson’s work on technological, corporate and industrial change is evolutionary theory. Modern technologies and firms come about through a combination of three processes: an inheritance mechanism that conserves already accumulated accomplishments; a variation mechanism that tries out multiple novel approaches; and a selection mechanism that identifies the more effective ones (Nelson and Winter, 1982). The explanatory power of this approach has been shown in many empirical studies of firms and industries (e.g. Mowery and Nelson, 1999; Murmann, 2003) and led to Nelson’s influence.
Nelson’s scholarly impact in part is due to his skill in organizing research projects in which he enlisted leading scholars to collaborate on an important topic and create a product that was much better than would have been produced if the scholars had worked in isolation. The most celebrated examples of this leadership skill are the volumes on The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity (1962) and on National Innovation Systems (1993).
Through both his writings and extensive personal interactions, Nelson has also had a direct influence on many other strategy scholars who in turn have had a large impact on the field. For example, David Teece’s ideas on how firms can appropriate returns from innovation (Teece, 1986) and on dynamic firm capabilities (Teece, Pisano and Shuen, 1997) owe a great deal to Nelson. Helfat’s publications on dynamic firm capabilities (e.g. Helfat and Peteraf, 2003) are building on the foundations laid by Nelson and his frequent collaborator Sidney Winter. The same is true of Kogut and Zander’s (1992) work on capability replication as well as the work of a large number of other innovation and strategy scholars.

Selected works

1959. The simple economics of basic scientific research. Journal of Political Economy 67, 297–306.

1962 (ed.). Introduction. The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors, NBER Special Conference Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

1968. A ‘diffusion’ model of international productivity differences in manufacturing industry. American Economic Review 58, 1219–1248.

1977 (with S. G. Winter). In search of a useful theory of innovation. Research Policy 6, 36–76.

1982. The role of knowledge in R&D efficiency. Quarterly Journal of Economics 97, 453–470.

1982 (with S. G. Winter). An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

1987. (with R. C. Levin, A. K. Klevorick, S. G. Winter) Appropriating the returns from industrial research and development. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 3 (special issue on microeconomics), 783–820.

1991. Why do firms differ, and how does it matter? Strategic Management Journal 12, 61–74.

1993 (ed.). National Innovation Systems. New York: Oxford University Press.

1999. (ed with D. Mowery)  Sources of Industrial Leadership: Studies of Seven Industries. New York: Cambridge University Press.

2000 (ed. with G. Dosi and S. Winter) The Nature and Dynamics of Organizational Capabilities. New York: Oxford University Press.

2001 (with B. N. Sampat). Making sense of institutions as a factor shaping economic performance. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 44, 31–54.

2003a. On the uneven evolution of human know-how. Research Policy 32, 909–922.

2003b. Sid Winter: origins and factors shaping our joint work developing an evolutionary theory of economic change. Paper presented at conference in honor of Sidney Winter at University of Pennsylvannia, 16 October 2003, Evolutionary Theory in the Social Sciences.

2006 (with D. C. Mowery and J. Fagerberg). The Oxford Handbook of Innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2007. Understanding economic growth as the central task of economic analysis. In Perspectives on Innovation, ed. F. Malerba and S. Brusoni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References

Cyert, R. M. and March, J. G. 1963. A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Helfat, C. E. and Peteraf, M. A. 2003. The dynamic resource‐based view: capability lifecycles. Strategic Management Journal 24, 997–1010.

Kogut, B. and Zander, U. 1992. Knowledge of the firm, combinative capabilities, and the replication of technology. Organization Science 3, 383–397.

Murmann, J. P. 2003. Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: The Coevolution of Firms, Technology, and National Institutions. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Teece, D. J. 1986. Profiting from technological innovation: implications for integration, collaboration, licensing and public policy. Research Policy 15, 285–305.

Teece, D. J., Pisano, G. and Shuen, A. 1997. Dynamic capabilities and strategic management. Strategic Management Journal 18, 509–533.

Winter, S. G. 2000. The evolution of Dick Nelson. Paper presented at the Richard Nelson Fest, Columbia University, 13 October 13, 2000, Evolutionary Theory in the Social Sciences.

Touchstones: Examples of Excellent Papers

Empirical Papers
Here are examples of excellent papers that I encourage people to use as touchstones and imitate when written small-n or case study papers.

Danneels, E. (2011). “Trying to become a different type of company: dynamic capability at Smith Corona.” Strategic Management Journal 32(1): 1-31.

Mirabeau, L., & Maguire, S. (2014). From autonomous strategic behavior to emergent strategy. Strategic Management Journal, 35(8): 1202-1229.

Miller, R., M. Hobday, T. Leroux-Demers and X. Olleros (1995). “Innovation in Complex System Industries: the Case of Flight Simulation.” Industrial and Corporate Change 4(2): 363-400.

Murmann, J. P. (2013). “The Coevolution of Industries and Important Features of their Environments.” Organization Science 24(1): 58-78.

Siggelkow, N. (2002). “Evolution toward Fit.” Administrative Science Quarterly 47(1): 125-159.

On Method
Here are some methodological texts that I found particularly useful in helping me refine my case study design skills.

Stinchcombe, A. L. (1968). Constructing Social Theories. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Stinchcombe, A. L. (1978). Theoretical Methods in Social History. New York, Academic Press.

Ragin, C. C. (1987). The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative strategies. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Glaser, B. G. and A. L. Strauss (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago, Aldine Pub. Co.

Stinchcombe, A. L. (2005). The logic of social research. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Scriven, M. (1974). Maximizing the Power of Causal Investigations: The Modus Operandi Method. In W. J. Popham (Ed.), Evaluation in education: Current applications: 68-84: McCutchan Pub Corp. Download

I will refine this list in future years.

Research Project on Innovative Firms and Sectors in China

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