Anne Bartel-RadicProfessor of Management Sciences at Sciences Po Grenoble and at the CERAG laboratory
How would you define objectivity in your discipline?
Objectivity means making explicit the extent to which we are subjective as researchers. The social sciences are concerned with human beings and life in society - in which we are at one and the same time stakeholders, both as individuals and as researchers. Whatever the purpose of a research project, or the subject, we are never perfectly neutral, never entirely outside the subject. We're all born into a particular country, continent, era or social milieu, and through our experiences and backgrounds, we develop our own opinions, attitudes and emotions with regard to the subject of our research: the human being and how he or she makes society. Questioning our assumptions about our subjects, and reporting on them, is in my view the first step towards ensuring, if not the objectivity, then at least the scientificity of our work.
Management sciences are defined by the fact that they are " action sciences ", in the same way as engineering sciences. The aim of our research is not only to describe, understand and explain how organizations work, but also to formulate recommendations for action, for those who "manage" organizations, whether public, private or associative. To this end, management sciences draw heavily on various "neighbouring" sciences of the humanities and social sciences, such as sociology and psychology, economics, anthropology and, to a lesser extent and without this list being exhaustive, history, law and political science. We adopt their theoretical frameworks - and hence their fundamental research findings and methods - while applying them to questions relating to the management of organizations and the actors within them.
This raises the question of how to ensure the usefulness of research. From the outset of a research project, we make explicit not only the expected conceptual contributions, but also the practical difficulties that the results should help to resolve. But researchers in management science are in no way consultants whose work helps companies to increase their profits.
The question of the impact of research is increasingly coming to the fore. The intended impact is much broader: how can we ensure that organizations contribute to major societal issues? Scientific associations, such as the European Academy of Management (EURAM), explicitly list the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals to which the research presented contributes for each of the discussion groups at its annual conference. The goals of "decent work and economic growth", "industry, innovation and infrastructure" and "collaborating to achieve the goals" are very much the focus of management science research, but the discipline covers the full range of environmental, health and social issues.
Is researcher neutrality possible and desirable?
This question has been the subject of debate the origins of the discipline. It concerns the researcher's "epistemological the researcher's "epistemological posture", an inescapable and sometimes feared in any doctoral thesis in Management Sciences. Within the the field of intercultural management, several colleagues, including Christoph Barmeyer, who is coming to Sciences Po Grenoble in September 2019 as a visiting professor, have published an article in which they group work in the field into four paradigms.
The positivist paradigm aims for objective knowledge, independent of the researcher. The results obtained must be reproducible by other researchers carrying out the same carry out the same study. Positivist research in intercultural management consider national cultures as independent of one another, and approach them and approach them through the prism of dimensions that make it possible to identify and quantify cultural differences. This trend has publications, but it is also increasingly criticized.
The interpretive paradigm sees cultures as interpretations shared by members of a group, developed through interaction within these groups and passed on through socialization to newcomers. This "other major paradigm" in the field of intercultural management conducts mainly qualitative research, showing the particularities of a culture and how it influences the management of organizations. The studies observe the uniqueness of a culture (rooted in history), but also its mutual influences (e.g. in globalization), evolutions (over generations and innovations, such as digital technology) and the complexity of multiple levels of culture (social, organizational, regional, religious... alongside the national level).
The postmodern paradigm, also known as constructivist, focuses on language and discourse and discourse, and shows how "realities" emerge from them locally and temporarily. A study of mergers and acquisitions between Swedish companies showed how cultural differences between the two countries cultural differences between the two countries do not "automatically" lead to integration difficulties for the two merging companies. It depends on how the players evoke and mobilize cultural differences in their and mobilize cultural differences in their discourse. or rather a difficulty.
Finally, the critical paradigm explicitly raises the question of the link between culture and power. It sees national culture as a discourse in which the dominant and the dominated are pitted against each other, potentially resisting this domination. Within organizations, critical research considers hierarchy to be absolutely non-neutral. We can see that, in a company that claims to include cultural diversity in its projects, the reality of management tends to dismiss divergent points of view.
To conclude with an answer to the question posed: researcher neutrality is possible, but not desired in all paradigms. Positivism and interpretativism aim to describe a reality that is independent of the researcher, whereas the researcher's biases are claimed in the postmodern and critical paradigms.
How important are methods to you as a researcher?
There is no science without methods. These an absolutely essential part of my research. I mobilize qualitative and quantitative methods, and I like to vary my methods, and even innovate.
A very common research method in management science is that of qualitative case studies. An organization, a company, a team or a project is approached as a "case" on which to gather as much information as possible, either already publicized in the press or through company communications, or gathered by the researchers through interviews with members of the organization or direct observation of their work or exchanges. We then carry out a content analysis of the texts thus compiled. This may involve the study of a single case, which is then very in-depth, or comparisons of multiple cases, sometimes based on the quantification of key case characteristics.
Quantitative methods in management science are often based on questionnaire data collection. The unit of analysis is then individuals, often as consumers or employees. I used this method to find out whether international experience increases intercultural competence. As the answer was mixed, I'm continuing to dig into the question of how international experience helps develop these skills, notably through thestudy conducted since 2017 with Sciences Po Grenoble students at the end of their year of international mobility. As in my previous research, in this questionnaire we use the critical incident technique to measure whether respondents correctly understand and interpret intercultural situations. Little did we know at the outset of the study that, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic would turn our lives, and the international mobility of our students, upside down - providing, nonetheless, a particularly interesting context in which to explore new understandings.
But self-administered questionnaires and semi-structured interviews carry the risk of response bias: respondents may present themselves in a light they consider more favorable, and rationalize situations a posteriori. What's more, questions are generally decontextualized and uncorrelated with contradictory constraints. As part of the InterCCom project I lead, we have developed an innovative research methodology that uses serious digital games as experiments. As part of his doctoral research, Hamza Asshidi created a game to conduct an experiment on responsible corporate behavior. Players are assigned the role of employees in a multinational company. They have to carry out various tasks: contacting a prospect in Turkey, recruiting a new employee, supervising the installation of a new production line in Nigeria, or controlling the finances of a subsidiary in Colombia. All under the orders of manager Mr. Smith, who constantly reminds us of the imperatives of performance and budget. Each situation in fact addresses a dimension of corporate social responsibility according to ISO 26000. This research has shown the relative uselessness of a code of (good) conduct signed on hiring to guide employee behaviour - a result that would probably not have been obtained by interviewing employees or their managers! The whole point of experiments is to put participants in a situation, with all the constraints that this implies.
Could you present an example of research, ideally from your own work, to illustrate the issues and tensions surrounding objectivity and neutrality in your discipline?
One of the concepts at the heart of my is intercultural competence. Intercultural competence is the ability to understand the specificities of of intercultural interactions, and to adapt to this specificity. specificity. The debate surrounding the assessment of intercultural competence reveals the issues and tensions surrounding objectivity and neutrality. As a prerequisite to any research or position position, we need to ask ourselves about the reasons for and objectives of using assessment tools. In what contexts and for what are we seeking to assess intercultural competence? In the context of management and organizations, three main configurations coexist.
The first use of instruments instruments for measuring intercultural competence is in companies and organisations. organizations. In the context of human resources management and recruitment recruitment, assignment of tasks or internal promotion, we seek to know whether a person whether an individual possesses the intercultural competence considered required for the position in question, or in the context of goal attainment or skills or skills assessments. There is often a major career issue at stake, and opinions can differ!
A second use of intercultural competence measurement tools is an individual, personal one. The individual evaluates himself/herself, with a view to self-knowledge, career orientation and learning. In this case, it is desirable that the tool offers learning paths in addition to the possibility of assessment.
Finally, tools for measuring intercultural competence used by researchers questioning, among other things, the impact of intercultural intercultural competence on the performance and leadership of international or leadership of international teams, or on the creation of links between subsidiaries of a multinational company. What's important here is the scientific nature instruments, and their consistency with the epistemological and methodological framework of the study.
Intercultural competence is a complex complex, multidimensional concept that cannot be assessed without first asking its definition. It is essential to determine clearly which aspects of intercultural aspects of intercultural competence we wish to assess. Is it a "cultural cultural" competence specific to a particular culture? A "multicultural multicultural" competence, a general knowledge of cultural dimensions? While intercultural competence encompasses all these aspects, there is no tool that can to take it all into account.
Assessing intercultural competence raises the same questions as that of individual competence competence in general: it's an abstract concept that can't be observed observed directly. In particular, there are three possible approaches to assessing competence. The first is the performance approach: we then judge the effectivenesś of the person and from this we deduce his or her competence. Thus, we might judge the intercultural competence of an executive by his or her degree of performance in his or her international work. But competence and performance are not the same thing. many other factors influence performance.
The second approach is the verbalization - instantaneous or delayed - of the action, which gives access to the operative schemas constructed by the individual to carry out the action. Verbalizing intercultural competence involves "making the individual talk" about his or her intercultural interactions, his or her vision of the cultural differences he or she encounters, and his or her emotions during these situations. Approaching intercultural competence from this angle enables us to take account of its singularity, its specificity for different people and cultures. On the other hand, such an approach requires a great deal of time, and can only be carried out by researchers who are themselves experts in intercultural relations and the cultures involved. It is not compatible with an epistemological posture that aims for perfect neutrality on the part of the researcher. Finally, competence is measured by the degree to which an activity conforms to specifications or standards. This implies that there are "recipes" for intercultural communication, which is a reductive view. Nevertheless, research based on putting participants into situations, using "critical incidents" or even serious games, also has considerable advantages, which we exploit in our work.