' Academy ol Management Beview
1999, Vol. 24, No. 2, 167-190,
1998 Presidential Address
OUR SHRINKING EARTH
WILUAM H. STARBUCK
New York University
THE ACADEMY'S CHANGING MEMBERSHIP
The Academy's membership has been changing. Perhaps the most significant change has
been the increase in members who live outside
the United States. Non-U.S. membership has
been increasing more rapidly than U.S. membership since at least 1980.
Figure 1 shows the numbers of U.S. and nonU.S. members since 1980. Throughout the 1980s,
U.S. membership was increasing about 5 percent per year, while non-U.S. membership was
increasing about 8 percent per year. The increase in U.S. membership decelerated in 1990,
and since 1994, the average rate of change has
been slightly negative. At the same time, the
increase in non-U.S. members rose to 15 percent
in 1990 and 1991, and it has averaged over 11
percent since 1991.
Obviously, no one knows what the future
holds. As the great physicist Niels Bohr is said to
have observed, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." However, by amplifying the recent trends, an extrapolation into the
future can help us to appreciate their character.
Figure 2 extrapolates the last 5 years. If recent
trends continue for only a few more years, more
than half of the Academy's members will be
living outside the United States. The Academy is
becoming an international organization.
Growth in non-U.S. membership has not been
a result of explicit strategies. It has occurred
spontaneously, and not until recently did it even
come to the attention of the Academy's Board of
Governors. Non-U.S. membership seems to be
what Andrew Grove has labeled "Segment
0"—a new market that rises unnoticed until it
grows rather significant.
Basically, the earth is shrinking, and this
shrinkage is causing the Academy's world to expand. One cause of this shrinkage has been the
development of management schools around the
world; over the last two decades, many more nations have come to view management as a topic
worthy of distinct study. A second cause of shrinkage has been a decline in air fares; it has become
cheaper and cheaper to cross oceans. A third
cause is the Internet; our domains for professional
interaction have expanded from the colleagues in
HGURE 1
Academy Membership
10000 -1
5000
I
1
1
1
1
1
1
s^
Du-s.
Non-U.S.
187
1
1
s^
April
Academy of Management Review
188
HGURE 2
Extrapolated Membership
12000
8000-
u.s.
our immediate schools to scholars around the
earth. Here is one example of the Internet's effects—a statement by Hamid Bouchikhi, who
works at ESSEC in France:
The Internet is a blessing for those of us who live
and work far from the U.S. and were not socialized in the American academic tribe before beginning their careers. For me, the Internet provides the feeling of belonging to the international
academic community and gives me instant access to any colleague anywhere in the world.
Many collaborations with colleagues J never
knew or met before would not have been possible
without the Internet: organization of workshops
and Academy of Management symposia. Working for months with people you don't know before
meeting them is an interesting experience. It's
not an exaggeration to say that the Internet has
changed my professional life.
The extrapolation in Figure 2 likely underestimates the future growth in non-U.S. membership.
For one thing, the Internet is incredibly new and
quite primitive. Only 3 years ago. even Microsoft
was saying that the Internet would not play an
important role in its future. Internet II. which is
now being tested, will speed up interactions by a
factor of 100. enabling a range of applications that
are impractical today. For another thing, the pool
of potential Academy members is multiplying.
During its first phase, the Academy's non-U.S.
members were mainly people who had earned
doctorates in the United States before moving
abroad. However, a second phase started during
recent years. Now. many of the new Academy
members do not hold U.S. doctorates; they are
Non-U.S.
colleagues and students of those who joined in the
first phase. Perhaps a few more years will bring
us to phase three.
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ACADEMY
Like other professional societies, the Academy
is becoming more electronic. New software in
the Academy's office will soon allow members
to join, renew, and change addresses on-line.
Thanks to the efforts of David Whetten. some of
the management of the annual meeting was online this year and more will be on-line next year.
Placement services are now mostly on-line, although some placement activities are going to
remain face-to-face forever.
I am elated to be able to report that Nancy
Urbanowicz has negotiated an agreement with
University Microfilms that places our journals
on-line. This is a 1-year trial that both organizations will reassess next year. For now. Academy
members have access to the full text of articles
since 1991 and to abstracts going back to 1970.
The URL for this service is www.aom.pace.edu/
umi.html. To obtain access, you must enter the
following:
UserlD: member
Password: aom
These generic passwords eventually will be replaced by individual passwords for different
members.
1999
Starbuck
Changes in membership are raising issues
about the Academy's governance. The composition of the Board of Governors does not reflect
the Academy's membership; the board includes
only one person who lives outside the United
States, and it includes no doctoral students. I do
not believe the Academy should organize itself
according to ethnicity or social status, but we
should develop ways to hear more diverse viewpoints. The Board of Governors endorsed this
notion last April, and Michael Hitt is chairing a
task force that is seeking ways to broaden participation in governance.
The Editors of the Academy's journals have
been broadening participation in editorial processes as well.
Finally, the family of associations with whom
the Academy has close links is expanding. During 1997, two new academies began to form. The
Asia Academy of Management held its first
meeting in Hong Kong in December 1998. Organizers of the Iberoamerican Academy of Management held an initial meeting in San Diego and
will meet again in Chicago. The Iberoamerican
Academy will hold its first full-scale meeting in
Madrid in December 1999.
During the spring of 1998, David Wilson.
Chairman of the British Academy of Management, proposed that our societies cooperate. He
and I subsequently turned this into a formal
agreement. The discussions with David
prompted me to contact Lessey Sooklal, President of the Administrative Sciences Association
of Canada, and we too developed and signed a
formal cooperation agreement. Of course, what
these agreements really mean will have to be
worked out over time by our successors. I do
hope, however, that these agreements lead to
joint conferences and joint publications. We can
accomplish more for our profession by working
in concert with others who share our goals.
IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR PROFESSIONAL
LIVES
Telecommunications Make Global
Collaboration Possible
Although the shrinking earth is inducing
changes in the Academy of Management, more
interesting and profound changes are occurring
in our visions of ourselves and in our research
and teaching. Allow me to offer two practical
189
examples of global collaboration. In an e-mail
message, Michael Dobbs of the University of
Texas at Dallas explained:
Richard Harrison, Suzanne Stout and I have been
working on a paper for a couple of years now that
may have died if it weren't for electronic communication. Suzanne accepted a position at INSEAD
before data analysis was close to being complete, but through e-mail we've been able to keep
each other up to date on progress. We've also
been able to have lively debate—even though it
takes several days for the debate to take place.
Sure, it would have been easier to work on the
paper if we had all been at one school, but movement happens and e-mail can help us deal with
it. A paper that might have died is alive and well,
thanks in part to electronic innovation.
Parthiban David of Nanyang University in
Singapore reported in another e-mail message:
J was revising a paper with two U.S. colleagues
for AMJ. Needless to mention, we had tough reviewers, and our revision involved substantial
additional data collection as well as new analyses. The paper was for a special issue so we had
to meet tight deadlines. Financial constraints
made it prohibitive to have long chats. Instead
we turned to Internet chat when we needed interactivity. Most of the time, though, interactive communication was not necessary, and e-mail
worked just fine. Interestingly, the 12-hour time
difference worked in our favor. When I finished
work at the end of the day, J would e-mail my
results to my colleague. He would receive the
e-mail at the start of the day, and while J slept,
he'd work tiJl evening and e-mail the results,
which I would receive at the start of my day....
Effectively, we were able to leverage the time
difference into a 24-hour day and after several
such sessions found we could actually get our
paper completed even faster than if I'd been in
the U.S.!
Although the great majority of collaborative
teams form through face-to-face interaction, I
have found several instances in which teams
incorporated members who barely knew each
other. For instance. Joe Daly and Boris Kabanoff
met casually when Kabanoff. from Queensland
University of Technologry. gave a talk at the
school where Daly was a doctoral student. After
Joe moved to Appalachian State University, he
responded to an ad that Boris placed in the
Academy of Management News. They got together at an Academy meeting to discuss a joint
project and communicated thereafter via e-mail.
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Academy oi Management Review
Contrasts Stimulate Reflection
I am impressed by the importance of dialectic
processes for intellectual development. Someone advocates an idea. Someone else puts forth
an opposing idea. Initially, people line up on
one side or the other. But eventually, someone
finds a way to integrate the apparent opposites
into an encompassing framework.
For example, early in the twentieth century,
many leadership theorists argued that effective
leaders had the ability to issue commands so
compellingly that followers were eager to obey.
An alternative view, espoused by the Western
Electric Company, held that leaders should behave so that workers would see them as friendly
and willing to listen. A good deal of writing
during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, including the
Hawthorne studies, supported one or the other of
these contending views. Then the Ohio State
Leadership Studies identified "Consideration"
and "Initiating Structure" as statistically independent dimensions of the ways subordinates
describe leaders. The former contenders became
independent and mutually consistent aspects of
a complex phenomenon.
Another such process has been occurring in
psychology. Psychological research began in
the late nineteenth century with a focus on cognition and the use of introspective evidence.
Shortly after 1900, a behaviorist revolution challenged the existing methods. Behaviorists argued that introspection produces very unreliable data and that cognitive processes are
consequences of behavior rather than causes of
it. Although debate continued, psychological research focused on behaviors and largely ignored cognition during the 1930s and i940s. The
results of these behavioral studies were generally disappointing, however. In the 1950s Allan
Newell, Herbert Simon, and others began to use
computer programs as models of cognitive processes, and this initiated a revitalized interest in
cognition. During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s,
cognitive studies dominated the flagship journals and the doctoral dissertations in psychologyIdeological differences contribute to intellectual development by helping us to expand the
April
intellectual boxes in which we confine our
thinking. What we see depends strongly on
what we want or expect to see. A baseball anecdote illustrates this point humorously. Hack
Wilson, an outfielder and record-holding batter,
drank too much. The manager of his team. Max
Carey, decided to confront Wilson about his
drinking. Carey summoned the whole team to
the locker room. On a table. Carey had placed a
plate of earthworms, a glass of water, and a
glass of gin. He dropped a worm into the glass of
water, where it wiggled contentedly. Then he
dropped a worm into the glass of gin. It wiggled
only briefly and then died. Carey looked directly
at Wilson and demanded, "That mean anything
to you Wilson?" Wilson replied, "It proves if you
drink gin you'll never have no worms."
The scholars in different nations evolve semiindependent intellectual traditions. For instance, population ecology is popular in the
United States, structuration in Britain, postmodern deconstruction in France, and longitudinal
case studies in Scandinavia. These differences
often nurture claims of superiority and allegations of irrelevance. In my experience, however,
the existence of sharply contrasting views has
always turned out to be a sign that neither side
is wrong and that both sides have validity. We
gain more, I think, if we regard each intellectual
tradition as having value to contribute and as
deserving of respect.
Of course, when different ideas are both valid,
there is a way to integrate the ideas into an
encompassing framework that shows how the
ideas can be consistent. But it is important that
we not integrate contrasting intellectual traditions too rapidly. We need contrasts as much as
we need consistency. Contrasts help us to clarify concepts and warn us to avoid integrating
concepts too easily. Juxtaposition and specialization foster new theories. In the long run, we
make progress by framing issues as conflicts
and then convincing ourselves, gradually, that
the conflicts do not exist.
Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing (Oscar
Wilde, The importance oi Being Earnest, Act II, 1895).