On September 27, 2018, we learned that Professor James Gardner March passed away, one month after his wife, Jayne Mary Dohr, passed away on August 28, 2018. Being a first-year PhD student in Jim's (he liked to be called Jim by his students and friends) Organization and Social seminar made my head swim, in spite of having studied his seminal book Organizations, co-authored with Herbert Simon, which served as the basis for my MSc thesis at UCLA. I have often reflected on how fortunate I was to be a PhD student at The Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) at the peak of the golden era between 1963 and 1966. Yet I feel at a loss for words, and quite inadequate, when I think of Jim's deep intellectual legacy that opened up such an enormous canvas of scholarship in thinking about organizations, ambiguity and choice, decision-making, leadership, the Behavioral Theory of the Firm, and organizational learning. To me, Jim was a scholar's scholar, a prince of a fellow, a poet, and never prone to self-aggrandizing. His lifelong exploration of ambiguity was behind his interest in China and the antecedents of ambiguity in the teaching of Daoism and the mechanisms of ‘finding the way’ (trial and error) for coping with ambiguity.
Professor March contributed to the inaugural issue of Management and Organization Review with the essay ‘Parochialism in the evolution of a research community: The case of organization studies’ (March, 2005). The essay gave voice to a comparable concern that Professor West Churchman expressed when he founded Management Science (1953) and his vision of a journal with many autonomous Departmental Editors, who would serve as multiple gate-keepers and thus hopefully counter the tendency toward parochialism. Not unlike the Biblical prophets in the Old Testament, Jim's essay directs our attention to how creeping parochialism could self-destruct social science scholarship and he may have anticipated the current replication crisis and criticism of empirical social science and its failure to satisfy the basic criteria of falsifiability, transparency, and replication. Jim's inaugural essay in Management and Organization Review underlies the editorial structure and philosophy of MOR and uniquely argues for the importance of contextual and indigenous Chinese management studies as necessary for developing both contextualized and universal knowledge.
The IACMR and MOR are forever indebted to Professor March for his inspiration and vision of indigenous management scholarship. His legacy is part of the intellectual foundation of Chinese management research. The IACMR and MOR wish to celebrate, honor, and advance Professor March's intellectual legacy by organizing a conference at University of Nottingham Ningbo and a subsequent MOR special issue. The conference is scheduled at Nottingham University Ningbo June 17–19, 2019. I wish to thank Mooweon Rhee ([email protected]), Bilian N. Sullivan ([email protected]), and Peter Ping Li ([email protected]) for leading this effort and for joining me as guest editors of the Special Issue. Please review the Call for Papers announcement at the end of this issue and on this website.
