The Role of Dialectical Interrogation in Review Studies: Theorizing from What We See Rather Than What We Have Already Seen

• Author: Alina M. Baluch,Christina Hoon
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12543

© 2019 The Authors. Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management

Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Role of Dialectical Interrogation in Review

Studies: Theorizing from What We See Rather Than

What We Have Already Seen

Christina Hoona and Alina M. Baluchb

aBielefeld University; bUniversity of St Andrews

ABSTRACT Review-centric works receive increasing attention for generating insightful contribu-

tions to management and organization studies. Despite this, the literature on theory building has

taken little note of their place in the theorizing process. This deserves attention, however, given the

challenges reviews face in theorizing in the absence of new empirical observations. Accordingly,

these works run the risk of merely summarizing ‘what we have already seen’, instead of ‘maximiz-

ing what we see’. Drawing on the strategies of theorizing from similarities and theorizing from

anomalies, we propose dialectical interrogation as a critical step in theorizing through which review

scholars imaginatively engage in a back and forth inquiry between the phenomenal world of a

given field and existing theory. By analysing selected review studies from top management journals,

we reveal that theorizing outcomes occur through two ways of dialectical interrogation (consolida-

tive and disruptive). We contribute by demonstrating that review scholars can enter into powerful

theorizing through the consolidative or disruptive interrogation of the review data with extant

theory to detect emergence and novelty alongside puzzles, conflicts and paradoxes. Dialectical

interrogation can address the shortcomings of cur rent theorizing in review-centric works and bears

potential for advancing theories of management and organization studies.

Keywords: meta-analysis, meta-synthesis, review study, synthesis of knowledge, systematic

review, theorizing

INTRODUCTION

Joining up the interim struggles of theorizing is central for theory building (Shepherd

and Suddaby, 2017). In the process of theorizing, single theorizing outcomes represent

Journal of Man agement Studi es 57:6 September 2020

doi:10. 1111/j oms .12 54 3

Address for reprints: Christina Hoon, Department of Business Administration and Economics, Bielefeld

University, P.O. Box 100131. 33501 Bielefeld, Germany (christina.hoon@uni-bielefeld.de).

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial

License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is

properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

The Role of Dialectical Interrogation in Review Studies 1247

© 2019 The Authors. Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management

Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

the struggles that are part of an emerging story and/or are a stimulus to further theo-

rizing (Langley, 1999; Weick, 1989). Review studies play an increasingly important and

more vocal part in this story, providing ‘scholars with the problems and puzzles by which

the seeds of new theory are sown’ (LePine and Wilcox-King, 2010, p. 507). A review-

centric study constitutes a primary research activity in itself in which the state of ac-

ademic research in a given field is drawn upon to make sense of existing scholarship

(Booth et al., 2016; LePine and Wilcox-King, 2010; Rousseau et al., 2008). Review-

centric works therefore denote studies that synthesize extant conceptual and empirical

research, embracing a specific set of analytical methods in order to theorize from the

literature relevant to a field of research. Complementing the repertoire of more tradi-

tional empirical or conceptual pieces, review works stem against the tendency to create

and reinforce isolated silos of knowledge that reflect specialization (Kilduff et al., 2011;

Okhuysen and Bonardi, 2011; Shepherd and Suddaby, 2017; Thompson, 2011).

Despite the apparent agreement that review-centric works contribute to theory devel-

opment, the literature on theory building in management has taken little note of their

place in theorizing (Langley, 1999; Shepherd and Sutcliffe, 2015; Suddaby et al., 2011;

Weick, 1989). We understand theorizing as interim struggles to be the process of the-

ory building in which activities of conceiving and constructing lead to novel theoretical

insights or new or refined explanations of a management phenomenon (She pherd and

Suddaby, 2017; Shepherd and Sutcliffe, 2015). This literature has generated substantive

insights into building theory from empirical evidence (Shepherd and Suddaby, 2017;

Weick, 2014), addressing what makes for interesting and impactful theory (Alvesson and

Kärreman, 2007; Alvesson and Sandberg, 2013); however, the role of reviews in the the-

orizing process is glaringly absent. We seek to address this shortcoming in the theorizing

literature in the field of management and organization studies.

The discussion about theorizing from reviews is mostly dominated by the voices of

editors, both of review outlets and annual journal issues dedicated to publishing review

articles. In the International Journal of Management Reviews, Jones and Gatrell (2014, p. 4)

provide their editorial perspective that synthesizing a given body of knowledge aids in

‘breaking down interdisciplinary silos and offering alternative outlooks’. Rather than

reiterating the state of the art, review studies ‘make significant conceptual contributions,

offering a strategic platform for new directions in research and making a difference to

how scholars might conceptualise research in their respective fields’ (Gatrell and Breslin,

2017, p. 3). The Academy of Management Review’s editorial marking the shift towards invit-

ing review articles alongside traditional conceptual pieces understands reviews as ‘vehi-

cles for theory development’ (LePine and Wilcox-King, 2010, p. 506). Reflecting on the

Journal of Management’s quarter of a century of bi-annual review issues, Bauer’s (2009)

editorial notes these high-impact scholarly surveys move at an astonishing pace and con-

stitute a major resource for advancing new scientific knowledge.

At the same time, these arguments highlighting the benefits acknowledge the chal-

lenges of theorizing in review studies by pointing to inherent tensions in that they must

‘advance original thinking that builds on an integration of the literature reviewed’ (van

Knippenberg, 2012, p. 186). We define theorizing from reviews as activities of conceiving

and constructing out of the phenomenal world – as represented in the review data – with