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Letter from the Editor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2018

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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.

Type
Letter from the Editor
Information
Management and Organization Review , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 447 - 448
Copyright
Copyright © The International Association for Chinese Management Research 2018 

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.

The Tesla Forum is featured in the Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion section in this issue. It starts with an explosive proposition by Johann Peter Murmann and Gregg Perkins that Tesla may be the harbinger of incumbent industries disrupted by new entrants with spare capital of a few billion dollars. As Deputy Editor Liisa Välikangas notes, ‘If Tesla, hailing from Silicon Valley, could break in, why not other well-funded [internet] companies with strong digital capabilities in the US and China alike’? However, as the Forum unfolds, John Paul McDaffie points out that disrupting the automotive industry as a small luxury, almost custom, brand is far from creating a mass-assembly vehicle and manufacturer. In his summary essay, David Teece frames the discussion by rethinking the conditions under which automotive incumbents can fend off disruptors on multiple fronts that are simultaneously associated with disruptions originating in advances in electric vehicles (EV), battery technologies, autonomous vehicles, and self-driving technologies. Hovering over the incumbent internal-combustion players is a fundamentally different disruption from China's national aspiration to become a global player in the EV industry, autonomous vehicles, and self-driving technologies based on the internet and artificial intelligence. The potential of countries such as China and India to drive disruptions has the potential to redirect the discourse about industry incumbents and new entrants within a context that pits transforming economies against incumbents in the developed economies. This is a perfect storm that will cause management scholars to shift their attention to indigenous research that combines geopolitical competition and traditional themes within the context of a new dynamic of disruption across technological advances. It's an exciting time to be a management scholar.