Conceptual translation (CT) is a metatheoretical approach for translating one theory into another. It works by creating and applying a dictionary of translation equivalents between a source and target domain. The authors develop the process of CT and discuss how it addresses three core problems of organizational science: (1) the need to generate new theory (insights, relationships, propositions), (2) the need to critique existing theory, and (3) the need to overcome the increasing fragmentation of knowledge that characterizes social science. The article illustrates the potential contribution of CT by presenting three specific examples drawn from a translation of Michael Porter’s (1980) Competitive Strategy, in which statements about competitive strategy become, in translation, statements about organizational change. Due to the convergence of two historical trends, the authors believe that CT represents a program of research that is particularly timely and represents a significant new direction in how theories will be constructed in the 21st century.
Argote, L. ( 1999). Organizational learning: Creating, retaining, and transferring knowledge. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic .
3.
Argyres, N., & McGahan, A.M. ( 2002). Introduction: Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy . Academy of Management Executive, 16, 41-42.
4.
Brodbeck, M. ( 1959). Models, meanings, and theories. In L. Gross (Ed.), Symposium on sociological theory (pp. 373-403). New York: Harper & Row.
5.
Burt, R. S. (1992). Structural holes: The social structure of competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
6.
Campbell-Hunt, C. (2000). What have we learned about generic competitive strategy? A meta-analysis. Strategic Management Journal, 21, 127-154.
7.
Cannella, A.A., & Paetzold, R.L. (1994). Pfeffer’s barriers to the advance of organizational science: A rejoinder. Academy of Management Review, 19, 331-341.
8.
Carlile, P.R. ( 2004). Transferring, translating, and transforming: An integrative framework for managing knowledge across boundaries. Organization Science, 15, 555-568.
9.
Chomsky, N.A. ( 1957). Syntactic structures. New York: Mouton.
10.
Cohen, I.B. ( 1994). Interactions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
11.
Cornelissen, J.P. ( 2005). Beyond compare: Metaphor in organization theory. Academy of Management Review, 30, 751-764.
12.
Cornelissen, J.P. ( 2006). Making sense of theory construction: Metaphor and disciplined imagination. Organization Studies, 27, 1579-1597.
13.
Cornelissen, J.P., Kafouros, M., & Lock, A.R. ( 2005). Metaphorical images of organization: How organizational researchers develop and select organizational metaphors. Journal of Management Studies, 58, 1545-1578.
Czarniawska, B. ( 1997). Narrating the organization. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
16.
Davis, M.S. ( 1971). That’s interesting: Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology. Philosophy of Social Science, 1, 309-344.
17.
Fararo, T.J. ( 1989). The spirit of unification in sociological theory. Sociological Theory, 7, 175-190.
18.
Festinger, L. ( 1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7, 117-140.
19.
Foucault, M. ( 1977). The archaeology of knowledge. London : Tavistock.
20.
Hambrick, D.C. ( 2004). The disintegration of strategic management: it’s time to consolidate our gains. Strategic Organization, 2, 91-98.
21.
Hambrick, D.C. ( 2007). The field of management’s devotion to theory: Too much of a good thing? Academy of Management Review, 50, 1346-1352.
22.
Hargadon, A., & Sutton, R.I. ( 1997). Technological brokering and innovation in a product development firm. Administrative Science Quarterly, 42, 716-749.
23.
Heath, C., & Sitkin, S.B. ( 2001). Big-B versus Big-O: What is organizational about organizational behavior? Journal of Organizational Behavior, 22, 43-58.
24.
Holton, G. ( 1978). The scientific imagination. Cambridge , England: Cambridge University Press.
25.
Katzko, M.W. ( 2002). The rhetoric of psychological research and the problem of unification in psychology. American Psychologist, 57, 262-270.
26.
Kelly, K. ( 2006, May). Scan this book! New York Times Magazine, 14, 42-71.
27.
Kristeva, J. ( 1996). Time and sense. New York: Columbia University Press.
28.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. ( 1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
29.
Lakoff, G., & Turner, M. ( 1989). More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
30.
Lawrence, P.R., & Lorsch, J.W. ( 1967). Organization and environment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration .
31.
Lemert, G.C. ( 1979). Sociology and the twilight of man. Carbon-dale: Southern Illinois University Press.
32.
Leonard-Barton, D. ( 1995). Wellsprings of knowledge: Building and sustaining the sources of innovation. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
33.
March, J.G. ( 1996). Continuity and change in theories of organizational action . Administrative Science Quarterly, 41, 278-287.
34.
Maxwell, J.C. ( 1890). On Faraday’s lines of force. Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. In W. D. Niven (Ed.), The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell (Vol. X, part I). Cambridge , UK: Cambridge University Press.
35.
McFarland, C., & Alvaro, C. ( 2000). The impact of motivation on temporal comparisons: Coping with traumatic events by perceiving personal growth. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 327-343.
Miller, A., & Dess, G.G. ( 1993). Assessing Porter’s (1980) model in terms of its generalizability, accuracy, and simplicity. Journal of Management Studies, 30, 553-585.
38.
Miller, D. ( 2007). Paradigm prison, or in praise of atheoretic research . Strategic Organization, 5, 177-184.
39.
Morgan, G. ( 1980). Paradigms, metaphors and puzzle solving in organization theory. Administrative Science Quarterly, 25, 605-622.
40.
Morgan, G. ( 1997). Images of organization (2nd ed.). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage .
41.
Morgeson, F.P., & Hofmann, D.A. ( 1999). The structure and function of collective constructs: Implications for multilevel research and theory development. Academy of Management Review, 24, 249-265.
42.
Newman, J.R. ( 1961). Science and sensibility. New York : Simon and Schuster.
43.
Oswick, C., Keenoy, T., & Grant, D. ( 2002). Metaphor and analogical reasoning in organization theory: Beyond orthodoxy. Academy of Management Review, 27, 294-303.
44.
Pfeffer, J. ( 1993). Barriers to the advance of organization science: Paradigm development as a dependent variable. Academy of Management Review, 18, 599-620.
45.
Pfeffer, J. ( 1995). Mortality, reproducibility, and the persistence of styles of theory. Organization Science, 6, 681-686.
46.
Pfeffer, J., & Salancik, G.R. (1978). The external control of organizations. New York: Harper & Row.
47.
Pinder, C.C., & Bourgeois, V.W. (1982). Controlling tropes in administrative science. Administrative Science Quarterly, 27, 641-652.
48.
Porter, M.E. ( 1980). Competitive strategy. New York: Free Press.
49.
Pronin, E., & Ross, L. ( 2006). Temporal differences in trait self-ascription: When the self is seen as an other. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 197-209.
50.
Ritzer, G. ( 1991). Metatheorizing in sociology. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
51.
Russell, B. ( 1938). On the importance of logical form. In O. Neurath, R. Carnap, & C. Morris (Eds.), International encyclopedia of unified science (pp. 39-41). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
52.
Snowhouse, G., & Snowdon, B. ( 2007). Competitive advantage revisited: Michael Porter on strategy and competitiveness. Journal of Management Inquiry, 16, 256-273.
53.
Spell, C.S. ( 2001). Management fashions: Where do they come from, and are they old wine in new bottles? Journal of Management Inquiry , 10, 358-373.
54.
Staw, B.M. ( 1991). Dressing up like an organization: When psychological theories can explain organizational action. Journal of Management , 17, 805-819.
55.
Thompson, J.D. ( 1967). Organizations in action. New York : McGraw-Hill.
56.
Thorngate, W. ( 1976). "In general" vs. "It depends": Some comments on the Gergen-Schlenker debate. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2, 404-410.
57.
Tsoukas, H. ( 1991). The missing link: A transformational view of metaphors in organizational science. Academy of Management Review, 16, 566-585.
58.
Tsoukas, H. ( 1993). Analogical reasoning and knowledge generation in organization theory. Organization Studies, 14, 323-346.
59.
Tsoukas, H. ( 2005). Complex knowledge: Studies in organizational epistemology . Oxford: Oxford University Press .
60.
Tsoukas, H., & Hatch, M.J. ( 2001). Complex thinking, complex practice: The case for a narrative approach to organizational complexity. Human Relations, 54, 979-1013.
61.
Van Maanen, J. ( 1995). Style as theory. Organization Science , 6, 133-143.
62.
von Hippel, E. ( 1994). The impact of sticky data on innovation and problem solving . Management Science, 40, 429-439.
Weick, K.E. ( 1976). Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems . Administrative Science Quarterly, 21, 1-19.
65.
Weick, K.E. ( 1979). The social psychology of organizing (2nd ed). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley .
66.
Weick, K.E. ( 1985). The significance of corporate culture. In P. Frost, L. F. Moore , M. R. Louis, C. C. Lundberg, & J. Martin (Eds.), Organizational culture (pp. 381-389). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
67.
Weick, K.E. ( 1989). Theory construction as disciplined imagination. Academy of Management Review, 14, 516-531.
68.
Weick, K.E. ( 1998). Improvisation as a mindset for organizational analysis . Organization Science, 9, 543-555.
69.
Whetten, D.A., Felin, T., & King, B.G. ( 2009). The practice of theory-borrowing in organizational studies: Current problems and future directions. Journal of Management , 35, 537-563.
70.
Whitelock, P., & Kilby, K. ( 1995). Linguistic and computational techniques in machine translation (2nd ed.). London: Rout-ledge.
71.
Wilson, A.E., & Ross, M. ( 2000). The frequency of temporal-self and social comparisons in people’s personal appraisals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 928-942.
72.
Wilson, A.E., & Ross, M. ( 2001). From chump to champ: People’s appraisals of their earlier and present selves. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 572-584.
73.
Zajac, E.J., & Bazerman, M.H. (1991). Blind spots in industry and competitor analysis: Implications of interfirm (mis)perceptions for strategic decisions. Academy of Management Review, 16, 37-56.
74.
Zald, M.N. ( 1996). More fragmentation? Unfinished business in linking the social sciences and the humanities. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41, 251-261.
