Review Articles as Conversation Changers

by Corinne Post

As General Editor and previously Associate Editor for Journal of Management Studies (JMS), I have thought a lot about the place of review articles in our scholarly outputs and I am constantly assessing how submissions to the journal might inform our debates and understanding. I’m grateful for Sven’s invitation to share my thoughts on this topic in his newsletter.

In this blog, I discuss how authors of literature reviews may position their contributions to be a conversation changer. In so doing, I argue that review articles serve not only as a backward-looking survey of a field, but also can have a forward-thinking and productively disruptive effect on a field.

I organize this blog by revisiting 7 strategies for advancing theory with reviews from the JMS editorial I wrote with my editorial colleagues (Post, Sarala, Gatrell, & Prescott, 2020). I briefly explain how each of these strategies can serve to alter or even divert scholarly conversations, which can involve deepening, clarifying, questioning the conversation, providing a new angle, or even initiating a new direction in the field, as described in a later JMS editorial (Healey, Leroy, Post, & Poto?nik, 2023).

If you are reading this blog, you are “review-curious”! My purpose here is to spark your interest in developing impactful review articles and to provide some ideas on how to approach them. I encourage you to review the two JMS editorials, for a lot more detail and additional tips.

1. Exposing Emerging Perspectives

Review articles can critically assess new developments in a field by identifying and explaining emerging theoretical ideas. For example, Ivanycheva, Schulze, Lundmark, and Chirico (2024), noticing the emerging but disparate literature on lifestyle entrepreneurship, synthesized that body of work, provided conceptual definitions for it and proposed a framework for studying lifestyle entrepreneurship in relation to existing entrepreneurship theory.

By critically making sense of new developments in the field, review articles can clarify the scholarly conversation (e.g., by reorganizing the new knowledge and positioning it in relation to previous work). To do so, however, they must also provide a generative synthesis; new ideas and theories that could take the form of a new framework, a set of propositions, a research agenda, or a meta-synthesis, for example.

Tips:

• Identify emerging theoretical perspectives in your research area.
• Compare these new perspectives with established theories to highlight fresh insights.
• Use historical and contextual analysis to explain the development of emerging perspectives.
• Explain what previous reviews and summaries on the topic have done, and what is wrong, insufficient, problematic, or outdated with those reviews.
• Compare your review with other recent reviews to isolate the specific contributions of your work

2. Examining Underlying Assumptions

Assumptions form the foundation of any theory and influence every part of the research process. Review articles can contribute to theory by examining and reflecting on these assumptions. For example, Wright, Irving, Zafar, and Reay (2023) examined and organized assumptions around the role of space and place in the research on organizational and institutional change to guide future research.

By critically analyzing assumptions, review articles can question the scholarly conversation: they can interrogate the limitations of established paradigm in a field, for example. An improved understanding and organization of assumptions may also explain contradictory findings, clarifying the conversation. Or it may initiate a new direction in the conversation by revealing a need to expand the range of actors and stakeholders in the research conversation. Such reviews also hold great potential to advance scholarly knowledge about societal grand challenges (Kunisch et al., 2023).

Tips:

• Identify and analyze the assumptions underlying the literature in your field.
• Reflect on how these assumptions influence research outcomes.
• Use this analysis to uncover biases and suggest new research directions.

3. Clarifying Key Concepts

Clear and precise concepts are crucial for building new theory and developing reliable measures. Review articles can advance theory by clarifying ambiguous concepts. Busch (2024) defined boundaries around the concept of serendipity by identifying three necessary conditions that differentiate serendipity from related constructs like luck. Defining the boundaries around the construct enabled Busch to develop a multi-level theory of serendipity. This helped create a clear framework for future research

By challenging and demarcating key concepts, review articles can clarify the scholarly conversation: they can make a topic more understandable, facilitate discussions that are more productive, resolve inconsistencies, and ensure researchers are on the same page. They can also question the prevailing understanding and open up new areas for research.

Tips:

• Identify concepts in the literature that lack clarity or have inconsistent definitions.
• Propose clear, precise definitions and frameworks for these concepts.
• Use typologies or taxonomies to organize and clarify the concept dimensions.

4. (Re)Defining Field Boundaries

Theorizing about the limits or changing boundaries of existing theories can provide new insights. Review articles can explore how extending or shifting these boundaries can answer contemporary questions. For example, Wright, Tartari, Huang, Di Lorenzo, and Bercovitz (2018) expanded the boundaries of knowledge worker mobility by developing a new framework. Reviews that integrate interdisciplinary perspectives can break down disciplinary barriers and offer new interpretations.

By shifting or extending theoretical boundaries, review articles can help initiate new directions in scholarly conversations, especially when they borrow from other fields or introduce new phenomenon into the conversation.

Tips:

• Identify and theorize the boundaries of existing theories in your field.
• Explore how changing these boundaries can provide new insights.
• Use interdisciplinary approaches to integrate different perspectives.

5. Testing New Ideas

Review articles can advance theory by creating new frameworks and testing new ideas. For example, Kim, Vaulont, Zhang and Byron (in press) propose that creativity is not only an agentic effort (a long-standing assumption in the literature), but also emerges through a communal pathway. They test this idea meta-analytically, with a sample of over 700 studies, finding evidence for their idea of a dual pathway to creativity. Their meta-analysis additionally reveals that the strength of these pathways can vary based on how creativity is assessed; particularly highlighting conditions under which women’s creativity can be enhanced.

By testing new ideas and elaborating on existing relationships, review articles can deepen the scholarly conversation: they can provide new insights and fresh perspectives on a familiar problem, which can encourage more detailed discussions and new directions for conversations.

Tips:

• Synthesize existing research to identify overlaps, inconsistencies, and new insights.
• Determine whether a meta-analysis might help test a new theory you have developed.
• Identify and test conditions that influence key relationships in your field.
• Explain why a review (e.g., meta-analysis) is the best research design for your research question.

6. Using Systems Theory

Systems theory provides a way to analyze a body of work, by looking at how its different components (e.g., constructs, processes) interact. This approach can help develop new theories by accounting for organizational complexity. Schleicher, Baumann, Sullivan, Levy, Hargrove, and Barrow-Rivera (2018) used systems theory to analyze performance management, creating a taxonomy of system components.

By using systems theory, review articles can provide new angles to a scholarly conversation: they can uncover complex interrelationships within a field, identify gaps in current understanding, and propose new directions for research that account for the interconnected nature of system components.

Tips:

• Use a systems perspective to analyze complex phenomena in your field.
• Identify the key elements, relationships, and boundaries of the system.
• Develop comprehensive models and frameworks using systems theory.

7. Exploring Mechanisms

Theorizing with mechanisms involves explaining how and why specific processes happen. Review articles can identify and test these mechanisms. Foss, Husted, and Michailova (2010) used this approach to analyze knowledge governance, creating a taxonomy of mechanisms at different levels.

By exploring mechanisms, review articles can deepen the scholarly conversation: they can provide insights into the various mechanisms underpinning key relationships add new layers of understanding.

Tips:

• Identify the mechanisms underlying key processes in your field.
• Develop and test models that explain these mechanisms.
• Use both qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the mechanisms.

Advancing theory with review articles requires an integrative and generative approach, combining critical analysis with creative synthesis. By exploring emerging perspectives, analyzing assumptions, clarifying constructs, establishing boundary conditions, testing new theory, theorizing with systems theory, and theorizing with mechanisms, researchers can make significant theoretical contributions and inspire innovative, high-quality scholarship.

I hope this summary has provided you with valuable insights and sparked your enthusiasm for developing review articles that not only summarize existing knowledge but also have the potential to reshape and advance scholarly conversations in meaningful ways.

References

Busch, C. (2024). Towards a theory of serendipity: A systematic review and conceptualization. Journal of Management Studies, 61(3), 1110-1151. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12890

Foss, N. J., Husted, K., & Michailova, S. (2010). Governing knowledge sharing in organizations: Levels of analysis, governance mechanisms, and research directions. Journal of Management Studies, 47(3), 455-482. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2009.00870.x

Healey, M. P., Leroy, H., Post, C., & Poto?nik, K. (2023). Changing the scholarly conversation: What it means, why it matters, and how to approach it in micro research. Journal of Management Studies, 60(6), 1633-1656. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12924

Ivanycheva, D., Schulze, W. S., Lundmark, E., & Chirico, F. (2024). Lifestyle entrepreneurship: Literature review and future research agenda. Journal of Management Studies, 61(5), 2251-2286. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13000

Kim, J. J., Vaulont, M. J., Zhang, Z., & Byron, K. (in press). Looking inside the black box of gender differences in creativity: A dual-process model and meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001205

Kunisch, S., zu Knyphausen-Aufsess, D., Bapuji, H., Aguinis, H., Bansal, T., Tsui, A. S., & Pinto, J. (2023). Using review articles to address societal grand challenges. International Journal of Management Reviews, 25(2), 240-250. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12335

Post, C., Sarala, R., Gatrell, C., & Prescott, J. E. (2020). Advancing theory with review articles. Journal of Management Studies, 57(2), 351-376. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12549

Schleicher, D. J., Baumann, H. M., Sullivan, D. W., Levy, P. E., Hargrove, D. C., & Barros-Rivera, B. A. (2018). Putting the system into performance management systems: A review and agenda for performance management research. Journal of Management, 44(6), 2209-2245. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206318755303

Wright, A. L., Irving, G., Zafar, A., & Reay, T. (2023). The role of space and place in organizational and institutional change: A systematic review of the literature. Journal of Management Studies, 60(4), 991-1026. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12868

Wright, M., Tartari, V., Huang, K. G., Di Lorenzo, F., & Bercovitz, J. (2018). Knowledge worker mobility in context: Pushing the boundaries of theory and methods. Journal of Management Studies, 55(1), 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12316

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