Abstract
Students starting their research into sustainability management are often driven by a normative assumption of wanting “to do something good” or “save the world” from this or that problem. This also holds for many researchers, where the pressure to do research that has an immediate impact on the local business or natural environment is paramount. This often gets into the way of developing sound research that might pass the review process in strong academic journals. Good (empirical) research builds on the interplay of the theoretical foundation, appropriate research method, and a well-justified selection of the empirical field. The discussion paper offers some guidelines and reflections on how to do this. The core point is that academic papers get cited for their theoretical contribution, so this has to be in the foreground of research question and design. If implemented in the wrong manner upfront, this can usually not be corrected later on, preventing the research to be published in top journals. This has to do with the interplay of theory, method, and empirical field. While we would see theory as the winning factor, methods and empirical field-related choices often constitute what might be called qualifying for hygiene factors. Methods and empirical field would hardly sell the paper on their own, but if done wrongly, they will prevent it from having a chance of being accepted. The paper explores some core ideas around theory, methods, and empirical field and offers some related guidelines on how to link them. This is illustrated at some points borrowed from debates in sustainability management.
Highlights
Identifying an excellent piece of research is often quite challenging
Even when a paper is accepted after a sound review process, it is hard to predict how the research community would react and act on it
A kind of overarching picture is presented by Saunders et al (2019), which sums up core decisions on the research methodology in their research onion
Summary
Identifying an excellent piece of research is often quite challenging. In many cases, only the test of time will identify a paper that makes an impact on their field and even be called a seminal paper. Developing Strong Empirical Research hard to change, linking this to typical aspect of the (sustainable) new product development process (Gmelin and Seuring, 2014), where 80% of the decisions have been made, while only 20% of the cost or time have been incurred This links into a further motivation for writing this piece. The typical prediction is that implementing the standards allows overcoming certain problems and leads to improved environmental and social, sometimes even economic, performance These four criteria might be complemented by the classical pieces on theory by Sutton and Staw (1995) on “What theory is not” and the comment to this by Weick (1995) on “What theory is not, theorizing is.”. This emphasizes the aspect of theorizing or moving toward theory, which often does not emerge in one piece, but is crafted by multiple contributors over time (Starbuck, 2004)
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