Walking with a Giant: In Memory of My Enshi James G. March

• Published in: Management and organization review 2019-12, Vol.15 (4), p.891-894
• Main Author: Sullivan, Bilian Ni
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Decision making; Learning; Organization studies; Organizational learning; Rationality; Researchers; Strategic management; Students
• ISSN: 1740-8776; 1740-8784
• DOI: 10.1017/mor.2019.46

First of all, I became a full believer in bounded rationality under Jim's tutelage. Usually, Jim was not a big fan of complicated quantitative (statistic) analysis (he preferred simulation experiments), but he was quite intrigued by the ideas and findings in our paper and provided valuable comments to our paper on learning from the complexity that was later published in Administrative Science Quarterly. Consistent to the theories of bounded rationality, March and Sutton (1997) stated that ‘identifying the true causal structure of organizational performance phenomena on the basis of the incomplete information generated by historical experience is problematic’ (p. 699). [...]later in my career, as a business school researcher and a teacher of strategic management, I experienced exactly what March and Sutton (1997) described (and, often verbally conveyed by Jim in conversations) about how researchers in professional schools encounter the tension between knowledge deliveries on firm performance and serious academic research where performance is much less emphasized. [...]I became more motivated to dive deeper into a particular context where the datasets were generated and to integrate different methodologies (e.g. a combination of big data analysis and in-depth interviews) in order to have a better understanding of certain underlying mechanisms.