What Constitutes a Theoretical Contribution in Family Business?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Academy of Management Review article "What Constitutes a Theoretical Contribution?" as a way to help them understand reviewers' concerns about a "lack of contribution" in their submitted manuscript.When FBR Editor, Pramodita Sharma, suggested that I team up with Dave to write an editorial about how to make a theoretical contribution in family business, it seemed like a great idea.Our joint comments and suggestions appear below.It is difficult for authors when reviewers (and editors) tell them that "your article doesn't make a contribution to theory" or that it "doesn't make a strong enough contribution to theory."This message may not make much sense.What does it take to make a theoretical contribution?And what distinguishes a strong contribution from a weak one?While those seeking a broad treatment of the subject will find the recent Academy of Management Review article by Corley and Gioia (2011) informative, our focus is on family business scholarship.Every FBR issue carries the following message: "Family Business Review (FBR) provides a scholarly forum to publish conceptual, theoretical and empirical research aimed to advance the understanding of family enterprise around the world."This statement of purpose clearly indicates the goal to "advance understanding;" and to do that, articles published in FBR must make a theoretical contribution to the literature on family business.But what does it mean to make such a contribution, and how can authors write articles that succeed in this respect?In this editorial, although many of our comments and suggestions apply to all areas of organizational studies, we focus on how authors can make a theoretical contribution to family business.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".