From August 3 to 7, the Academy of Management Annual Meetings took place in Boston (US). Generally regarded as the premier conference in the field of management science, it attracted thousands of management scholars to flock to Boston and present their work, attend professional development workshops, and network with their peers. Among the many thousands were ACE representatives Prof Per Davidsson, Dr Judy Matthews, Dr Henri Burgers, secret that Australian Dr Rene Bakker, and Julienne Senyard. In this blog entry, Rene Bakker will list some of his experiences (with thanks to Julienne Senyard for contributing photos).
It is no academics tend to travel long distances to attend academic conferences – often held in Europe and the US. The Academy of Management (AoM) is, unfortunately, no exception and included almost 24 hours of travel from Brisbane, through Los Angeles, to Boston. The amount of hours one thus spends sitting in an airplane allows for some serious thinking time. On the way back, this allowed to summarize and structure some of the AoM experience and takeaways.
The AoM experience can be daunting. It’s so big, and so diverse, that one can run a risk of drowning in the experience. Many academics seem to remember their first AoM with a weird mix of anxiety (that one felt at the time), nostalgia (because obviously everything was better then), and pride (for having come out alive). However, while one might not anticipate an American talent for organization from the chaos in the customs areas of their airports, AoM can take pride in being among the best organized conferences around. In Boston, AoM again managed to let most things at the organizational side of the conference “make sense”, from the submission system, to registration, program, and locations. This allowed the conference participant to shop around for, and engage with, a personalized and diverse program of discussions and events.
From the perspective of entrepreneurship research, one of the more prominent discussions that emerged from the many sessions concerned the nature and ontological status of the entrepreneurial opportunity concept. From a number of well attended sessions emerged two camps. One camp seems to fundamentally believe that entrepreneurial opportunities “exist” (either by discovery or through creation, or coming into being in some other way) and that as entrepreneurship researchers we should continue to try and study opportunities – despite the empirical challenges that this presents (like capturing undiscovered or unexploited opportunities, variation in opportunities, etc.). Bill Gartner (Clemson University) took the position that the field of entrepreneurship needs to continue to study opportunities. If not, it runs the risk of (paraphrasing Flanenery O’Conner’s novel Wise Blood), becoming like “a Church Without Christ”, where “the deaf don’t hear, the blind don’t see, the lame don’t walk, the dumb don’t talk, and the dead stay that way”.
Countering this position were a number of influential scholars who challenged the usefulness of the opportunity construct in empirical research particularly. In this camp was Per Davidsson who asked: what would we really miss if we did not have the concept of opportunity? Although the question is simple, it turned out deceivingly hard to answer this question.
In true scholarly fashion, no definitive solution was reached during the conference that would make everyone happy, but ACE is currently developing two major research initiatives to empirically and conceptually take these issues further (to which more soon).
Conventional wisdom has it that it’s not just important what you know, but also whom you know, and AoM is always keen to support networking among peers. Two particularly noteworthy occasions to network were the Entrepreneurship Social and the ANZAM Dessert Function (where, as an aside, the desserts were cleaned out by a large mob of hungry participants in the first 10 minutes). During these events, a number of exciting new projects were born, and others further developed, that will be pursued by ACE in joint cooperation with international collaborators. These pertain to projects being started around the CAUSEE database, and a nascent project that will study entrepreneurship in the Australian mining industry – with a particular emphasis on entrepreneurial opportunities. The latter project is also being developed into an ARC Linkage application that will involve both ACE-based researchers and international collaborators from the US and Europe.
And in the end, those international connections are what makes it all worthwhile. Next year’s AoM will be in Orlando, Florida. And yes, that will again involve a good 20 hours of flying….
Rene Bakker is Post Doctoral Research Fellow at The Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship, QUT Business School