The Emergence of Resource-Based Theory: A Personal Journey

I have recently been encouraged to share my personal reflections on the emergence of resource-based theory. In many ways, I have been reluctant to do so, at least in print, since any such effort would necessarily reflect my idiosyncratic view of this history. A complete discussion of both the people involved in the development of resource-based theory and the context within which this theory developed in the field of management would, I suspect, require the objective eye of a third party. In this way, I certainly do not qualify to write such a history. However, when the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Special Theory Forum on Resource-Based Theory in the Journal of Management came around, I thought it might be time to put down on paper—a quaintly old-fashioned phrase—my own recollections of this history. In doing so, I decided to make no pretense that this is an objective or rigorous historical effort. Rather, these are the reflections of a strategic management scholar, coming toward the end of his career, about a time, now over 30 years ago, when resource-based theory did not yet exist. I have not tried to verify my reflections by appeal to historical documents, except for any papers I and others have published. I did pass this essay by many of the people mentioned in it—to see if my memories were consistent with their memories—but that is as far as I have gone in verifying the “facts” I share in this essay.

A Portrait of Douglas G. Pearce

<p>I am very pleased to be offered the opportunity to write a portrait of Professor Douglas G. Pearce for Anatolia. Although an autobiographic account of Doug’s evolution from ‘Geographer to Tourism Geographer to Tourism Management scholar’ was published in Stephen Smith’s 2010 book <i>The Discovery of Tourism</i>, a comprehensive account of a four decade long contribution to our field is arguably not adequately established without insights on the breadth and depth of a pioneering scholar’s contributions by his colleagues and peers. In this context I wholeheartedly embrace this opportunity to share the views of several (indeed I hope most) of Doug’s colleagues, peers and mentees about his numerous, long-standing and enduring contributions to our field. My own position is best described by stating that I reside in both the colleague and mentee cohorts. I have had the pleasure of being Doug’s colleague in the Tourism Management Group at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand, and co-authored of several of Doug’s publications. But at the same time I have benefitted greatly from Doug’s advice, guidance and overall leadership of the VUW Tourism Management Group and as such regard him as a longstanding mentor. </p>

A Portrait of Douglas G. Pearce

<p>I am very pleased to be offered the opportunity to write a portrait of Professor Douglas G. Pearce for Anatolia. Although an autobiographic account of Doug’s evolution from ‘Geographer to Tourism Geographer to Tourism Management scholar’ was published in Stephen Smith’s 2010 book <i>The Discovery of Tourism</i>, a comprehensive account of a four decade long contribution to our field is arguably not adequately established without insights on the breadth and depth of a pioneering scholar’s contributions by his colleagues and peers. In this context I wholeheartedly embrace this opportunity to share the views of several (indeed I hope most) of Doug’s colleagues, peers and mentees about his numerous, long-standing and enduring contributions to our field. My own position is best described by stating that I reside in both the colleague and mentee cohorts. I have had the pleasure of being Doug’s colleague in the Tourism Management Group at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand, and co-authored of several of Doug’s publications. But at the same time I have benefitted greatly from Doug’s advice, guidance and overall leadership of the VUW Tourism Management Group and as such regard him as a longstanding mentor. </p>

Fitting in, Standing Out, and Doing Both: Supporting the Development of a Scholarly Voice

What scholars call “writing” actually involves writing, reading, talking, thinking, and engaging. Yet how academic writing develops through this recursive, social process, is imperfectly understood. Although participating in academic gatherings like colloquia and international conferences can help researchers find a scholarly voice, not all new scholars have the opportunity to participate in such gatherings and the learnings they offer. Especially for those scholars, their academic writing must be consciously developed. We examine the process by which a new South African management scholar, supported by his writing coach, developed an academic voice. Analyzing their 15-month long communication (emails and summaries of conversations), we find three interweaving processes. Coaching guides the new scholar first to learn to fit in by becoming aware of genre conventions through practical writing-to-learn and show-and-tell coaching tactics. Then the challenge is to stand out by forcing tough trade-offs and intensifying the focus on novelty. Ultimately the scholar must do both, negotiating the tension between them. Our article provides evidence of how the emergence of self-reliant scholarly writing can be supported. This process is especially salient in developing country contexts with few enculturating opportunities, but we suggest that it applies more broadly, opening avenues for future theorizing.

Writing as skin: Negotiating the body in(to) learning about the managed self

We draw on the notion of ‘skin’ to discuss the ways in which writing in management and organisation studies wrestles with two drives in its endeavour to represent the reality of our ‘organised’ lives: the drive to share internal lived experience, and the drive to externalise and abstract. Through exploring skin as a metaphor for a negotiating interface between these forces in our writing, we (a) argue that both are critical parts of writing, needed in order to learn about management and organisation and (b) explore different ways in which they might be brought into contact. Reviewing, synthesising and building on critiques of ‘scientific’ writing that have been made from within management and organisation studies, and on creative commentary from the arts, we think reflexively about the ways in which writing mediates learning by being both representative of experience and an experience in itself. A collaboration between management scholar and creative writer, the text of this article is a critical-creative experiment that outlines the experiential ‘skin-text’ while simultaneously producing an example of such a text.

Assessing the Correlation of Culture With Business Ethics of Company Managers in the United States and Mexico

Observable harm has been inflicted upon business by unethical decisions and misconduct. Much of this phenomenon can be traced to impoverished ethical attitudes. Among the various reasons for this problem is that of a manager's culture, which has a distinct influence on attitudes and behaviors. The purpose of this chapter was to determine, through empirical data, whether differences rooted in culture significantly contribute to differences in ethical attitudes. Management scholar Geert Hofstede's classification of cultural elements for understanding and explaining aspects of national culture was correlated with the ethical attitudes of business managers in the two national cultures of the United States and Mexico. Results indicated a significant positive relationship between national culture and ethical attitudes and the dultural dimensions of uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long-term orientation. A significant difference in ethical attitudes between managers from the United States and Mexico was also found.