Operationalizing interdisciplinary research—a model of co-production in organizational cognitive neuroscience

Abstract

There is a biological turn in order to understand the underlying processes concerning markets and organizations. As part of the biological turn, in 2008, I wrote an article for the Journal of Consumer Behavior about neuromarketing and the perceptions of knowledge (Butler, 2008). The argument put forward in the article is that there are inter-related and potentially competing perspectives which combine to make up the biological turn. In order to conceptualize these varied perspectives I introduced a novel Neuromarketing Research Model. This commentary is concerned with updating the Model and using it to reveal some of the current intersections between society, organizations and the brain. By taking this approach, I want to supplement David Waldman's opinion article in this special issue titled “Interdisciplinary research is the key.” Waldman (2013) argues that organizational sciences are rapidly coming together with neuroscience theory and methods to provide new insights into organizational phenomena, especially the larger problems facing organizations. I add to this argument by identifying specific points of how organizations and neuroscientists are coming together, and operationalize interdisciplinary research by proposing a new Model of Co-Production in Organizational Cognitive Neuroscience (OCN). OCN is defined as the application of neuroscientific methods to analyse and understand human behavior within the applied setting of organizations, which may be at the individual, group, organizational, inter-organizational, and societal levels. OCN draws together all the fields of business and management in order to integrate understanding about human behavior in organizations and to more fully understand social behavior (Butler and Senior, 2007). I will re-introduce the purpose of the original Neuromarketing Research Model and state why it fits with this collection of papers, then I will briefly describe the Model in more detail. This will be followed by revising the Model to capture developments in OCN since 2008, and by using the updated Model to cohere different and fundamental themes and directions at the frontier of human neuroscience.