Letter from the Editor

Abstract

In the age of disruption, affecting the restructuring of industries, social organizations, the organization of work, globalization, international trade, and technological innovations, this issue showcases two disruptions. The Perspective Essay ‘Opportunities and Challenges of Engaged Indigenous Scholarship’, by Andrew H. Van de Ven, Alan D. Meyer, and Runtian T. Jing, followed by the commentary of Anne Tsui, confronts management scholars with the imperative to break out of the straitjacket of testing hypotheses derived from the dominant Western economic, management, and psychological theories with indigenous data. Tsui and Van de Ven, Meyer, and Jing challenge us to rediscover scholarship, which starts with observing actual indigenous phenomena, and employ eye-opening insights and abductive reasoning to arrive at new or different explanatory mechanisms. Data on indigenous phenomena can come from observations of actual phenomena relating to individuals, families, and organizations addressing the limitations of bounded rationality, finding the way, preserving harmony, and so forth, and moderated by indigenous institutional envelopes, history, cultural roots, and national aspirations. Indigenous scholarship welcomes applications of diverse approaches, including qualitative and quantitative data from actual case studies, field surveys, experiments, and ethnographies. This call for indigenous engaged scholarship dovetails with MOR's initiative in favor of the preapproval of research ideas and empirical plans (https://doi.org/10.1017/mor.2017.37), and we hope it will provide scientific legitimacy for indigenous research, which observes actual phenomena and eschews predetermined lenses of Western theories.