مدیریت تکنولوژی: رویه ها، مفاهیم و روابط

In this paper, bibliometric (co-citation analysis) and social network analysis techniques are used to investigate the intellectual pillars of the technology management literature as reported in Technovation. Network analysis tools are also used to show that the research agenda of scholars from different parts of the world differ substantially from each other, and it is argued that such differences may have exacerbated the delays experienced in developing technology management as a respected academic discipline.

Over the last two decades technology management (TM) has gradually established itself as an academic discipline. For example, Drejer (1997) identifies four schools of thought as the discipline evolved from R&D Management, through Innovation Management and Technology Planning before developing as Strategic Management of Technology (MOT). Under this classification, MOT is distinct from economics and public policy and is solidly located within the management field. This establishment of a discipline has been a slow process probably as TM researchers prefer to publish their best work in more established journals—such as ASQ, Management Science, the Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and Strategic Management Journal—typically associated with competing fields ( Cheng et al., 1999). The importance of publishing in established and respected journals only partially explains why career conscious academics hesitate to submit their ideas to TM-specific journals. Ambiguity on discipline location and roots relate back to its very early development. For example, Brockhoff (2003) plots the roots of TM back to the philosophical writings of Francis Bacon's 17th century ideas concerning the organization of inquiry and also discusses the significance of the engineering perspective and its associated investigations which followed the establishment of industrial research and development laboratories about a century ago. However, in common with ideas assigned to most other philosophical or physical science perspectives, these view invention as an art with technical progress dependent upon the ingenuity of single persons. Brockhoff continues by discussing the influence of the Schumpeterian view of the innovator as entrepreneur, which represents a perspective often viewed as a contribution form management planning (Solow, 1957). Exploring more recent developments also show a similar contradiction in discipline location for TM. The focus before the mid 1970s was largely in the hands of practitioners and governmental authors (Allen and Sosa, 2004) with business schools taking over in the 1980s when managing technology became considered as a competitive advantage (US National Research Council, 1987) and the management of technology educational programmes finally emerged ‘to mainstream business management during the 1990s’ (Nambisan and Wilemon, 2003). As such, the major obstacle to the development of a TM tradition lies in the subject's unusually high degree of interaction with other disciplines. This overlap blurs the boundaries of TM and as a result its distinct theoretical models and analytical tools are unjustly attributed to competing fields. The review by Garcia and Calantone (2002) shows this rather graphically in their analysis of innovation terminology. This confusion, we argue, will be further exacerbated if there are substantial differences in interests and approaches by TM scholars in different parts of the globe. Without cross-fertilisation of ideas between authors on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere, recognition of what the discipline stands for will be that much more difficult to obtain. This paper empirically investigates the issues arising from the struggle to establish TM by examining its literature using citation and co-citation data obtained from Technovation. A brief review of similar bibliometric studies is presented to introduce the approach, along with a description of the data. The principal investigation was a factor analysis which was performed to determine the latent structure underlying the TM literature. The view of the TM literature which this analysis produces is discussed and a simple non-parametric technique is used to test the geographic dichotomy.

This paper has investigated technology management using citation and co-citation data published in Technovation between 1996 and 2004. A factor analysis of the co-citations suggested that the field is organized along seven different concentrations of interest: strategy and technology, national systems and differences, sources of competitive strategies, manufacturing/operations/NPD, knowledge management and inventors, patents, and life-cycles/change/discontinuity. We have argued that TM has failed to create its own literature and that this has undermined its reputation as a legitimate academic field. One of the most apparent symptoms of this confidence crisis is the relatively low contribution of TM scholars to the field's own publication outlets—few of the most cited items in our data-set were to TM dedicated journals, with only Research Policy making a slight showing in the most cited articles. More concretely, TM researchers submit their best work to general management or other discipline specific journals. Admittedly, academic pressure to publish in established places has much to do with this phenomenon but this is also true of any new discipline. Another contributing factor to his apparent confidence crisis is a lack of consensus regarding the extent of TM and how it differs from other disciplines such as the sub-fields of economics and public policy. Without a clear understanding of the field's intellectual boundaries, it will be difficult for TM to gain recognition. More evidence of the problems with establishing TM as a discipline came from our investigation whether there were geographical differences in the research agendas of scholars. We argue that such discrepancies may have hindered the establishment of TM as a legitimate discipline by further blurring the boundaries of its literature. A repeat of the tests above indicated that there are significant differences in the intellectual interests of authors from different regions and was interpreted as an indication of underlying differences in their respective research agendas. Although these issues represent substantial obstacles to overcome, the TM field is still relatively young and our analysis has shown that it does have an emerging structure. Perhaps if we learn more about the factors in this structure, how they relate, and what they stand for, TM conferences and publication outlets will gain the popularity and prestige that is required to establish a serious academic discipline.