Decline of Conceptual Articles in the Marketing Discipline
Manjit Yadav’s article (“The Decline of Conceptual Articles and Implications for Knowledge Development”) in the January 2010 issue of JM alerts readers about the value of conceptual articles to the marketing discipline. It also notes the alarming decline in the share of conceptual articles over the total number of articles published. The author reports that this decline is especially sharp for JM (relative to other top marketing journals) and that much of this decline has occurred in the last decade.
The analysis suggests that repeated exhortations of the importance of conceptual articles within the marketing discipline have not been effective; one hopes that Yadav’s somewhat disturbing and thought-provoking results stimulate more conceptual journal articles in the future.
The author proposes several steps to alleviate the problem, including greater involvement from senior leaders in the discipline, resurrecting/revitalizing seminars in theory construction within doctoral programs in marketing, creating a special section devoted to conceptual articles, and putting greater emphasis on theoretical contributions in promotion/tenure and other reward systems for marketing educators.
Overall, Yadav’s contributions have significant implications for (1) the future growth of the marketing discipline relative to other disciplines and (2) the ability of the former to influence the latter. Specifically, I hope that Yadav’s article stimulates attention to the following research questions:
(a) This article indicates that conceptual articles tend to generate more citations than other articles. Let me raise a related question: Do conceptual articles have a greater impact on other (nonmarketing) disciplines than empirical articles (as assessed by citation analyses of publications in nonmarketing journals)? This appears important given the widely shared view among scholars that a discipline’s ability to impact/lead other disciplines is primarily through citation impact.
(b) If the answer to (a) is “yes,” what additional insights can be generated on systematically linking Yadav’s demonstration of the declining share of conceptual articles in marketing to the general decline in marketing’s clout suggested in recent JM articles (see Reibstein, Day, and Wind 2009 for a candid assessment of the relative impact of marketing on other academic disciplines, and Verhoef and Leeflang 2009 for an assessment of the impact of the marketing function within firms)?
(c) It will be helpful to estimate the real/perceived differences in the effort/reward ratio between authoring conceptually oriented and empirically oriented publications within the marketing discipline. A survey approach targeted at scholars who have published both types of articles may offer fruitful additional insights.
(d) Yadav notes that conceptual articles have received a disproportionate share of awards. What additional steps can the discipline take to incent authors to devote more of their time to conceptual articles? For example, is there a need to substantially increase the number and scope of awards that specifically recognize conceptual contributions?
As always, the views of JM readers on this featured article and this blog are most welcome. Your contributions will help us advance this important discussion for the benefit of our discipline.
Siva K. Balasubramanian, Web Editor, Journal of Marketing
Comments
One of the issues noted but not examined by the original article was the categorisation of "descriptive articles" and "data-driven articles". The authors condemned the descriptive as unworthy of status in a journal, and retained a tacit endorsement of the "empirical analyses that are done in the absence of any compelling conceptual content."
Which is a neat summary of the fundamental flaw in the marketing journal paper process - empty data-filled articles will find publication because data analysis for the sake of analysis is a respectable outcome.
We're not going to break the back of the effort/reward ratio for conceptual papers when you're always going to be on a safer bet trying to publish a maths heavy, meaning light paper in a journal.
Plus, whilst I appreciate proof is important, it's a sad sign that it took a quant paper to say that we're short on conceptual papers. We noticed, but until the editors instruct the reviews to reject the empty shell stats papers and make way for concept building, we're not going anywhere in a hurry.
Posted by: Dr Stephen Dann | February 11, 2010 4:29 AM
Kuddos to Manjit for an excellent and thought-provoking paper...my key concern is with the definition of 'conceptual paper' as not touching any data.
A key conceptual paper in my area is Dekimpe and Hanssens (1999) JMR piece on scenarios for long-term marketing effectiveness. This paper not only builds theory - as defined by Manjit, but also offers approporiate (modeling) tools and applies them to data. However, it is not a conceptual paper in Manjit's definition. Interestingly - as pointed out by Stephen - Manjit's own paper would not be classified as conceptual for the same reason.
Personally, I am more impressed with papers which, like D&H (1999) and Manjit (2010) both offer a conceptual model and demonstrate its value empirically. In a recent article with a strategy professor, I aimed to do the same by building theory but also illustrating it with empirics. The reviewer feedback taught us that this was confusing for the paper's positioning, so we are now considering leaving out the empirics. Maybe it was just our execution, but the argument seemed to be that any one paper should either be conceptual or empirical. In other words, each step in the Theory-Empirics-Theory-... sequence of Bass (1995) or Empirics-Theory-Empirics sequence of Ehrenberg (1995) should play out in different papers (and maybe even by different authors?).
which brings us back to my questions for this forum:
Do you agree that it is better to seperate conceptual development and empirical validation?
Do you believe only papers which have no empirical analysis in them can be classified as 'conceptual'?
And if you disagree, can you please, like me, share your favorite conceptual+empirical paper?
Posted by: koen pauwels | February 11, 2010 11:16 PM
@koen
I'm going to go for the separation of conceptual development from the empirical validation on two grounds.
First, conceptual development itself could use the extra leg room in the paper that would otherwise be devoted to method, stats and outcomes. Vargo and Lusch's SDL would look considerably different if it had to sacrifice the historical development in favour of a pair of LISREL and an AMOS diagram.
Second, work that maps a definitive slice of conceptual terrain needs extra eyes, extra thoughts and external validation by people removed from a vested interest in its survival. We're human, we're going to want to see the Amazing New Concept(TM) into publication, ground breaking revolution, a text book and a few courses, and a track stream at AMA Summer Educators named after it. As objective as we are as trained academics, we're subjective about our own works - hence why we have editors, peer review and "Give this to a colleague before submission" guidelines. Having the external validation by subsequent authors through the Bass or Ehrenberg approaches will strengthen the core conceptual advance.
Not to mention that it won't hurt for the citation count if you're using a multi-step Theory-Empirics-Theory across multiple papers, multiple authors and dedicated special issues (Hoffman and Novak; Vargo and Lusch; Zeithmal, Bitner and Parasuraman; Kotler and Levy).
Finally, if we're going to move towards a priority listing for conceptual papers, the parallel demand for the testing of these conceptual papers creates a marketspace for "data with meaning" articles.
Mind you, that'll require someone to accept replication studies for publication.
Posted by: Dr Stephen Dann | February 19, 2010 1:40 AM