The Adolescence of African Management Research — What does “Context” have to do with it?
What does management research in Africa have in common with Marketing as a discipline? A rethink, I dare say! And here’s why.
First, the Marketing discipline, in not so many words, has proven, over the years that the notion of “charity begins at home,” is an expedient proposition. Going by the traditional definition of the concept of “the creation and exchange of value” (however defined), the journey needs to commence from within.
What do I mean? The organisation and its spokespersons need to buy-in to the values the organisation they represent in order to generate the much-anticipated values arising from the definition.
Second, talking about spokespersons, source credibility is of utmost importance. Who is the voice of the service provider? Obviously, the frontline staff, supported by the backoffice staff. If any of these internal stakeholders have an alternative value to that of the organisation, then the popular notion of “dead on arrival” is already in play.
Third, and building on the above points, it is clear that marketers, and marketing in general, need to adopt an inside-out orientation.
I would refrain from boring you with the technical aspects of Marketing and go straight into the consequences of the theory for practice and policy, albeit from the African Management perspective.
While I do not lay any claim to having seen it all, something I have noticed in common among African researchers is the pseudo comparative analysis of “Apples” and “Oranges.”
Does a study on African peculiarity need to be benchmarked against Western models? The answer is yes, and no. Yes, because of either funding or legitimacy-seeking motives, and no due to contextual differences!!!
Let me reflect on the “no” element for now. Does context matter? While there have been numerous studies (e.g., Arnould, Price & Moisio, 2006; Pritchett & Sandefur, 2014; Allen et al., 2015; Kröger, Kuhnimhof & Trommer, 2019; Reuber et al., 2022) debating the importance of context, it is Reuber et al. (2022) that captures my interest. Here’s why. In their article “Something borrowed, something new: Challenges in using qualitative methods to study under-researched international business phenomena,” Reuber et al (2022, p. 2163) surmised:
“…we note that the Methods section is the ‘‘heart’’ of a paper, located in the middle of the manuscript and connecting prior literature (something borrowed) with the findings (something new). We argue that contextualization of qualitative research takes place in this ‘‘heart.’’ It is where the empirical setting is introduced, and where the practices used for data gathering and analysis are explained. In other words, the Methods section is where the theoretical world and the empirical world collide. Reviewers should be comfortable with unexpected collisions and authors should fully explain them.”
References
Reuber, A.R., Alkhaled, S., Barnard, H., Couper, C., & Sasaki, I. (2022) Something borrowed, something new: Challenges in using qualitative methods to study under-researched international business phenomena. Journal of International Business Studies 53, 2147–2166. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41267-022-00555-1
Pritchett, L., & Sandefur, J. (2014). Context matters for size: why external validity claims and development practice do not mix. Journal of Globalization and Development, 4(2), 161–197., https://doi.org/10.1515/jgd-2014-0004
Kröger, L., Kuhnimhof, T., & Trommer, S. (2019). Does context matter? A comparative study modelling autonomous vehicle impact on travel behaviour for Germany and the USA. Transportation research part A: policy and practice, 122, 146–161., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2018.03.033
Allen, T. D., French, K. A., Dumani, S., & Shockley, K. M. (2015). Meta-analysis of work–family conflict mean differences: Does national context matter? Journal of Vocational Behavior, 90, 90–100., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2015.07.006
Arnould, E., Price, L., & Moisio, R. (2006). Making contexts matter: Selecting research contexts for theoretical insights. In Handbook of qualitative research methods in marketing. Edward Elgar Publishing.
