Constructs can be Big Ideas that help us make sense of our business world
When we think of Big Ideas™, we often think of major theories, conceptual frameworks, equations, or propositions that have galvanized entire areas of research. For example, the two most influential papers in the history of macro and micro areas of management are the Resource-Based View of the firm (Barney, 1991) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991). I’ve also waxed repeatedly in this column about another colossus: Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1978). All of these have over 100,000 citations.
What might get missed in this veneration of theories is the wealth of high-impact scholarship that starts with constructs. Constructs are ideas about the world, but they don’t contain mathematical operations, internal mechanisms, or inherent predictions. Instead, they are often powerful and simple abstractions we stipulate about the properties of the entities or agents we study.
Across the fields represented in business schools, those entities are legion. They might be taxpayers (who have magnitudes of compliance and avoidance), customers (who have strengths of purchase intentions), employees (who are more or less engaged), teams (that vary in their cohesiveness), brands (which carry some level of awareness), information systems (that can be arrayed on their complexity), business ecosystems (ranging from low to high interdependence of members), and markets (which exhibit a continuum of efficiency). The construct examples in parentheses above are adjectives describing the entities that are nouns. Constructs aren’t the things; they are features of the things.
No construct is real per se; each is hypothetical. Yet, all sciences rest on a construct-based architecture. Constructs also follow rules. A construct’s constitutive definition cannot be circular; it must add meaning. For example, firm performance can’t be defined, face-palmingly, as “how well a firm performs.” Rather, it can be defined as the degree to which (a cardinal phrase for many constructs) an organization meets or exceeds the expectations of its stakeholders. Constructs must also avoid jingle and jangle fallacies. They can’t be introduced as describing one property, when the same label has been used elsewhere to describe a different property. They also can’t be a shiny, different label for a previously forwarded, nearly identical property.
One last rule applies specifically to constructs in the social sciences: They can’t have unduly weird or arbitrary names. Physicists can say subatomic quarks have “flavors” or “color charge.” We can’t say boards of directors have “juiciness,” even if we’d like to.
Here’s what’s particularly cool about constructs though. They — themselves — can be Big IdeasTM that help us make sense of our business world. Many of our local McCombs stars have introduced compelling new constructs. Those who unveil them often create high-impact streams of scholarship. Absorptive capacity, anyone? Structural hole-spanning? Sometimes, constructs rule.
Dr. David A. Harrison
Associate Dean for Research