David Denyer

Cranfield University · Strategy, People and Leadership

Scholars have long debated the merits of advocacy-based research versus research considered from the quest for objective truth. Building upon reflections from multiple sources, a set of 11 brief reflections on three posed questions are presented. Tsang concludes our discussion with additional insights on how moving beyond the “interestingness” advo...

This article and the related Feature Topic at Organizational Research Methods upcoming were motivated by the concern that despite the bourgeoning number and diversity of review articles, there was a lack of guidance on how to produce rigorous and impactful literature reviews. In this article, we introduce review research as a class of research inqu...

Outsourcing generates risks for client firms but these vary according to the contracted task. This systematic literature review reports on 50 empirical studies that investigate the safety risk factors associated with outsourcing aligning them with the three categories of safety risk factors identified by Underhill and Quinlan in their PDR-Model. By...

System‐wide change is often challenging to achieve due to complex and fragmented institutions, dispersed and diffused power structures, confidence‐sapping histories of failure and the influence of multiple and overlapping fields. This study examines how a large complex system‐wide problem such as the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace Process was...

The proposed panel symposium aims at turning spotlight on the role of literature reviews in management research. With an ever-growing body of knowledge, literature reviews have become increasingly important and influential. Yet, there is little scholarly discussion and advice related to literature reviews. Therefore, we aim at discussing various ty...

The explanation for what safety interventions work in any particular circumstance remains elusive, resulting in many work-related fatalities and injuries every year. We propose a shift in perspective from a preoccupation with safety interventions and their effects to an elucidation of the generative mechanisms underpinning safety and its contiguous...

Call for Papers for a Feature Topic at Organizational Research Methods

A wide range of different safety practices exist. However, they have been developed for production-oriented high-hazard environments. We know relatively little about safety practices in low-hazard service sector environments where most people in the U.K work and which differ from production-oriented industries in their organization, working practic...

Safety leadership is asserted to positively influence safety compliance amongst employees. We examine this assertion by conducting a systematic literature review of the available academic literature on safety leadership practices and observed safety outcomes. We identified 25 empirical studies, the majority of which measured leadership through gene...

Learning from safety incidents has typically been investigated amongst front-line workers in high hazard contexts. In contrast this study collected safety incident data using audio-recorders from 21 respondents across the organizational hierarchy in two retail and one logistics company in the UK. The diary data highlight the propensity for problem-...

The purpose and nature of management scholarship is contested, evidenced by debates about the ‘academic–practitioner divide’ and attendant remedies for addressing it, including mode 2 and mode 3 research, engaged scholarship, evidence‐based management and design science. In this paper the authors argue that, without a culture of dialogical encounte...

This paper is intended as a contribution to the ongoing conceptual development of sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI) and provides initial guidance on becoming and being sustainable. The authors organize and integrate the diverse body of empirical literature relating to SOI and, in doing so, develop a synthesized conceptual framework onto whic...

The purpose and nature of management scholarship is contested, evidenced by debates about the ‘academic-practitioner divide’ and attendant remedies for addressing it, including mode 2 and mode 3 research, engaged scholarship, evidence-based management, and design science. In this paper we argue that, without a culture of dialogical encounter, manag...

The dissemination of safety procedures and guidelines is perceived as pivotal to keep organizations managing high-risk technologies incident free. The role of clear communication is seen as essential in transferring these procedures and guidelines. However, previous research in these types of organizations suggests that transmitting information thr...

Effective risk management within environmental policy making requires knowledge on natural, economic and social systems to be integrated; knowledge characterised by complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. We describe a case study in a (UK) central government department exploring how risk governance supports and hinders this challenging integration o...

In recent years, concerns over social injustice and environmental degradation have come only second to economic recession as amongst the ills besetting society. In 1994, assigning equivalence to each of these foci – People, Planet, Profit – John Elkington coined the term the ‘Triple Bottom Line’ to promote a greater organisational awareness of and...

Risk management and ‘routine-based reliability’ is considered fundamental to project performance. Existing theories of project risk management do not fully explain why project managers stop practicing risk management information systems (IS); however, constructs drawn from organisation theory offer insights into how and why such disengagement occur...

The role of experience has been shown to be critical for risk management. Yet, few studies have conceptualised and explained the organisational processes that determine how experience informs risk management. We present a case study examining how experience informs the risk-based decisions of employees in a safety critical industry. Data were gathe...

Communication is often recognized as pivotal for organizations managing high-risk technologies. Such communication is generally informed by industry and government regulations, which are then translated into procedures, guidelines, and the like. These are disseminated, discussed and trained among staff by the executive team members, with the aim to...

Communication is often recognized as pivotal for organizations managing high-risk technologies. Such communication is generally informed by industry and government regulations, which are then translated into procedures, guidelines, and the like. These are disseminated, discussed and trained among staff by the executive team members, with the aim to...

The incidence and impact of crises, disasters and other extreme events appears to be increasing, thus heightening the significance of crisis research. The nature of such events – sudden, inconceivable, damaging, sensitive, unique – has encouraged unconventional methodological perspectives and practices. A review of these developments is timely. Thi...

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to test the utility of a taxonomy of innovation based on perceived characteristics in the context of healthcare by exploring the extent to which discrete innovation types could be distinguished from each other in terms of process antecedents. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative approach was adopted to...

Reviews of existing research evidence have the potential to inform both practice and scholarship. This opportunity is currently not being fully realized in management and organization studies due to the limitations of traditional methods of review, which fail to identify clearly what is known and not known about a given topic. For practitioners, sy...

This article addresses how knowing and practising unfolds in collaborative research amongst practitioners from a large consulting and business services group and academics from a UK School of Management. Dialogue enabled actors to cross between theory and practice by providing a ‘space’ for support, challenge, exchange and experimentation. However,...

UK higher education policy relating to doctoral-level education assumes that student networks provide the basis for informal learning and the acquisition of necessary skills and information. Through semi-structured interviews with 17 doctoral students from a UK management school, this study investigated the value of these networks to students, the...

Organisations are increasingly adopting Web2.0 technologies such as web-based communities, social networking sites, wikis and blogs to enable users to interact, share information and alter web-based content. In a business/commercial context, the use of such technologies has been termed Enterprise2.0. This paper explores organisational actors’ exper...

Scholars hold different perspectives about leadership which are not limited to a formally appointed leader. Of the abundance of terms used to describe this phenomenon, shared and distributed are the most prevalent. These terms are often used interchangeably, resulting in confusion in the way that shared and distributed leadership is conceptualized...

The recent epidemic of information systems (ISs) programme failures worldwide suggests that the effective management of programmes to cope with uncertainty and achieve mission in the medium term remains a key challenge. Research into high reliability organisations (HROs) has shown that it is possible to avoid, trap and mitigate the risks inherent i...

In spite of the continued importance of an innovation's attributes to research methodologies, and the increasing tendency toward multidimensional conceptualizations, the lack of a theoretically derived and empirically developed classification of innovations, conceived in terms of these perceived characteristics, continues to deter substantive resea...

Background: Innovation is a priority in the NHS. Yet innovations differ one from another. They can mean different things for different individuals and so adoption and diffusion present a series of challenges. Innovations in healthcare are complex phenomena and warrant a suitably sensitive conceptualisation to promote the generation of new insights...

Implementing risk management remains a significant challenge for many organisations. In order to help address this issue, risk management maturity models have become an important tool for improving and assessing organisational risk capability. In this paper, we present a critical review of the existing literature on risk management maturity models....

The term evidence-based management (EBMgt) is relatively new, though the idea of using research evidence to help make managerial decisions is not. In this paper we identify and clarify a number of common misconceptions about EBMgt. Rather than a single rigid method, EBMgt is a family of approaches that support decision making. It is something done...

This article explores the development of Management Learning from nascent publication for a trade association focusing on applied research to an esteemed international and learned journal. Since the mid 1970s editors and contributors have dedicated themselves to the publication of scholarly, theoretical and critical approaches. They have achieved c...

Doctoral education in the UK embraces both independent self‐directed study and collective shared learning. The extent to which individual doctoral students remain isolated, or become integrated into a network of doctoral students, is a function of the attributes of the individual and the nature of the doctorate and its mode of delivery. Using the t...

This chapter advocates the good scientific practice of systematic research syntheses in Management and Organizational Science (MOS). A research synthesis is the systematic accumulation, analysis and reflective interpretation of the full body of relevant empirical evidence related to a question. It is the critical first step in effective use of scie...

The field of organization and management studies has a significant and ever increasing published research base, often criticized as fragmented and of limited relevance for practice. A design science approach to management has argued that more room for the development of solution-oriented or prescriptive knowledge would increase its relevance. In th...

English This article addresses the synthesis and use of research evidence to inform policy and practice. Reviews of the evidence base in many fields have formed a crucial bridge between research, policy making and practice. Systematic review, in conjunction with meta-analysis, has become an established methodology for locating, selecting, appraisin...

In spite of the continued importance of an innovation's attributes to research methodologies, and the increasing tendency toward multidimensional conceptualizations, the lack of a theoretically derived and empirically developed classification of innovations, conceived in terms of these perceived characteristics, continues to deter substantive resea...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the qualitative synthesis and use of existing management research to inform management practice. Design/methodology/approach – Three methods of qualitative synthesis, each with contrasting methodologies, are presented and their potential contribution in the management field explored. Findings – Prof...

Background The productivity gap between the UK and its major competitor nations ‐ the US, France and Germany ‐ has been a major concern and fixture in the UK’s domestic economic policy agenda through the 1990s (and before). Successive governments have explored various ways in which this productivity gap might be

This paper presents the results of a systematic literature review about the adoption of promising practices by organizations. The objective of the study was to gather empirical evidence to explain why the UK rate of promising practices adoption is poor compared with that of its competitors. The paper illustrates how a vastly dispersed collection of...

Recent work on competitiveness has emphasized the importance of business networking for innovativeness. Until recently, insights into the dynamics of this relationship have been fragmented. This paper presents a systematic review of research linking the networking behaviour of firms with their innovative capacity. We find that the principal benefit...

There is much to be done to meet the challenge of undertaking high quality research, rigorously produced yet in a form and manner that makes it accessible and utilisable by practitioners. In our view, healing the division between theory and practice constitutes a 'grand challenge' for everyone involved in the management field. Ignoring such a divid...

The division between academic knowledge and its relevance for practice is an enduring problem across many fields. Nowhere is this division more pronounced, and resolution of its negative features more required, than in academic management research and its relationship to management practice, for the advent of the knowledge revolution requires that...

Managing long-term infrastructural assets, such as real estate, buildings and equipment, is becoming more topical at the strategic level. Such assets are reported to comprise 25 per cent or more of corporate assets and occupancy costs represent 40-50 per cent of net operating incomes and are often the third most expensive item (behind labour costs...

Undertaking a review of the literature is an important part of any research project. The researcher both maps and assesses the relevant intellectual territory in order to specify a research question which will further develop the knowledge base. However, traditional 'narrative' reviews frequently lack thoroughness, and in many cases are not underta...

Tranfield, D., Denyer, D., & Smart, P. (2003). Towards a Methodology for Developing Evidence-Informed Management Knowledge Means of Systematic Review. British Journal of Management, 14(3), 207–222.

This paper presents empirical work on the impact of the executive doctorate (DBA) on managerial decision-making and practice. We examine the extent to which DBA graduates can be viewed as evidence-based managers who, through doctorate level study become more critical in thought and action, and successfully 'develop into experts who make organizatio...

A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University.