Is Japan falling behind in management research? This paper compares the strategy taken respectively by management scholars in Japan and the United States to argue for a clear answer ‘No’. It is found that Japanese scholars have taken a ‘vertical integration’ strategy – they attempt to establish a new field and devote their whole career to make it prosper, where they first build concepts of their own, then derive hypotheses through case study to test them empirically, and revitalize the theory after it becomes mature.
On the contrary, American scholars have adopted a ‘horizontal expansion’ strategy – they seldom start from building concepts of their own, but instead continuously search for conceptually well-established fields, where measurement is clearly agreed upon and quantitative attempts are therefore made feasible.
Business model research, as a result, has made larger progress in Japan than in U.S., because lack of consensus in its definition has greatly hampered the hypothesis-testing attempts in this field but hardly posed any obstacles to researchers starting from building concepts of their own. Business model researchers in Japan has advanced the field by developing their original definitions to address the problems faced by industrial policy makers and business owners.
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