BEYOND CONTEXTUALIZATION : USING CONTEXT THEORIES TO NARROW THE MICRO-MACRO GAP

Amazing how technology can awaken us to the world around us. No, I’m not talking about the latest electronic gadget allowing us to experience, in real time, the sights, sounds (and even smells) of Calcutta from the comfort of our own living rooms or offices. Rather, I’m talking about recent advances in statistical methods and software facilitating the analysis of random coefficient (or multilevel) models and the impact that these advances are beginning to have on management scholars’ interest in and ability to give greater consideration to the role of context—that amorphous concept capturing theory-relevant, surrounding phenomena or temporal conditions—in their research. Such advances are beginning to generate nothing short of a revolution in management theory, one based on the simple notion that context counts and, where possible, should be given theoretical consideration. Because, as Rousseau and Fried (2001) suggested, one researcher’s context is another’s career, this revolution is already beginning to blur the division between “micro” and “macro” work, resulting in more robust theories that better capture the increasing complexity of organizational phenomena and relations and offering greater predictive power and real-world relevance (Hitt, Beamish, Jackson, & Mathieu, 2007). Indeed, though my very cursory search of Academy of Management Journal (AMJ) articles using any of the multilevel methodologies typically applied to examine the role of context identified no more than three or four articles in each of the years from 2000 to 2003, Hitt et al. (2007: 1393) noted that 25 percent of all articles published in AMJ between August 2006 and July 2007 did. Certainly not all studies adopting a multlilevel approach are context-focused, yet it is clear that the number of context-relevant analyses is on the rise. Despite this obvious increase in researcher awareness of how context, at all levels of analysis, may both emerge from and play a role in shaping the phenomena and relationships we study, I believe that two significant challenges remain, namely: (1) the need to accelerate the transition from the contextualization of research findings to the generation and testing of context theories of management, and (2) the need to expand the range of context theories that we explore in our research. I discuss these two challenges in more detail in the sections immediately following. I then turn my attention to (1) the methodological, epistemological, and institutional obstacles slowing the transition to context theorizing, and (2) what we as management scholars are likely to have to do to find a way around these obstacles.