The
2013 issue of Advances in International Management will focus on the theme
Philosophy of Science and Meta-Knowledge in International Business and
Management.
The field of International Business and
Management has now operated as a specific discipline for approximately a
half-century. Over
that period, different theoretical orientations have emerged, with some
standing the test of time while others disappear forever. Some, such as the interest in the role of
government and social politics, have reappeared Lazarus-like when world events
bring the topic back onto corporate and government agendas. After 50+ years of
endeavor we believe it is time to take stock of whether our field has matured
as a discipline.
The
2013 volume of AIM seeks to address this issue with two related
orientations.
First,
we ask the question of the degree to which our field has matured to the point
of having a distinctive philosophy of (social) science. In this first orientation we are interested
in querying whether what we do as IB/IM scholars meets the precepts of
science. In asking this question we are
going back to basic distinctions between inductive versus deductive
investigation, the importance of falsification, the role of critical
experimentation, whether there is such a thing as an IB/IM research program, whether
or not we are science based on realism, and what the role of interpretation is
for IB/IM scholars. This list is most
certainly limited but what we are seeking is a coherent examination of the
philosophical basis of our scholarship from a scientific standpoint.
Second, we seek to provide an opportunity to look at the accumulated knowledge arising from IB/IM research. In this second orientation we seek to build on Volume 23 of AIM, which asked what was the “Past, Present and Future of International Business and Management”. Here we are specifically looking at meta-analytic work that helps us pull together, in a structured empirical manner, the basis of the knowledge and evidence we have been accumulating in the last 50 years. In this we are seeking, on a scientific basis, to ask “what do we really know with any degree of precision?”
For more information please view the attached PDF.