(Small, 2004, p. 76). This ‘‘empirical heart’’ is what Small himself named
‘‘citation context analysis’’ over two decades ago (Small, 1982) and which is only now enjoying a revival in popularity among researchers (e.g.,Hargens, 2000).
This study focused on what Small terms the ‘‘theory-use’’ aspect of ci- tation context analysis (Small, 1982, p. 288). The study’s first phase utilized citation context analysis on the entire corpus to determine citation correct- ness and the presence or absence of additional text related to the theory in each individual paper. In the second phase, citation context analysis was employed on the corpus of citing papers to develop the ‘‘theory-use’’ cat- egories, and content analysis was used to develop and delimit the specific categories that comprised the final typology. The methodology for the analysis of the corpus of citing papers is shown in Fig. 4.
map the uses of theory. The typology shown in Fig. 5, although bearing some resemblance to classic (e.g., Chubin & Moitra, 1975; Moravcsik &
Murugesan, 1975;Murugesan & Moravcsik, 1978) and contemporary (e.g., Budd, 1999; Rice & Crawford, 1993) categorizations of cited references, is unique in its focus on theories-in-use. Particularly important in the devel- opment of this typology was the process of iterative analysis of the citing documents in the corpus. This process attempted to identify commonalities among the various functions of theory use while simultaneously considering their specificity in the context of actual citation use. This iterative analysis is a development of what Susan Leigh Star has named ‘‘grounded classifica- tion’’ (Star, 1998).
One problem endemic to citation context research efforts is that of cat- egory ‘‘fuzziness,’’ as this type of research by definition considers papers in their entirety rather than by simply analyzing the individual sentence or paragraph in which a particular citation is located. The primary cause of
‘‘fuzziness’’ in the current study was the common case in which a paper analyzed empirical data as an integral part of a theoretical discussion. This
‘‘fuzziness’’ was handled by the following rule: to move beyond assignment to the preliminary category of ‘‘acknowledgement,’’ the citing paper was analyzed to see if it further assessed the theory in either empirical or the- oretical terms. Any empirical work was placed in the ‘‘application’’ category if it made use of the theory to explain existing empirical data, or in the
‘‘analysis-empirical’’ category if empirical or simulated data were collected or constructed to test the theory or any of its hypotheses. Any paper without such empirical elements were placed in the ‘‘assimilation’’ category if it attempted to locate the theory in a new or existing theoretical framework, or
Theory Acknowledgement
Theory Analysis
Theory Application
Theory Assimilation Positive
(57%) Neutral (39%) Negative ( 4%) 46% of all cites
Empirical (71%) Theoretical (29%)
32% of all cites
Explanatory (94%) Proposed ( 6%)
16% of all cites
Existing Framework (76%) Novel Framework (24%)
6% of all cites Fig. 5. Typology of Citation Functions for Theories.
in the ‘‘analysis-theoretical’’ category if it discussed the theory without at- tempting such location.
This purely pragmatic rule was formulated in full awareness that ‘‘one could argue that citers do not think in mutually exclusive categories and that such an interpretation does violence to the cognitive processes that generate different types of references’’ (Chubin & Moitra, 1975, p. 439). However, since this project was intended to study the actual use of theories in specific contexts rather than to add to the extensive literature on ‘‘citation behavior’’
(seeCase & Higgins, 2000for a review), such simplification appeared to be warranted. The four major categories constructed from the iterative analysis of theory citations are those of theory acknowledgement, theory applica- tion, theory analysis, and theory assimilation.Figure 5presents the typology of citation functions for theories.
Functions of Acknowledgement
The category of ‘‘theory acknowledgement’’ occurred with the greatest fre- quency, comprising 46 percent of all citations in the corpus. This category has often been dismissed as ‘‘perfunctory’’ or ‘‘ritual’’ citation, or perhaps a combination of both (e.g., Paul, 2000), but a closer examination of the specific contents of each citation indicates that ‘‘acknowledgement’’ may be further categorized as ‘‘positive,’’ ‘‘negative,’’ and ‘‘neutral,’’ which indi- cates that even perfunctory citations can be evaluated thus exhaustively (see Hyland, 2004, p. 28 for a somewhat similar categorization). Among these three subcategories, ‘‘positive’’ was the largest, accounting for 57 percent of all ‘‘acknowledgement’’ citations, while ‘‘neutral’’ accounted for 39 percent, and ‘‘negative’’ accounted for only 4 percent. It should be noted that the very small percentage of negative citations is consistent with Chubin and Moitra’s (1975) findings. However, it should also be noted that the ‘‘neg- ative’’ acknowledgement category in this study does not include papers that analyze the theory in detail. Those papers are found under the ‘‘analysis- empirical’’ category.
The following describes and gives examples of each category of acknowl- edgement.
Acknowledgement-Neutral
The citing paper acknowledges the original paper as previous research but does not positively accept its conclusions, discuss, or analyze the theory.
Example fromCarley (1997, p. 25): ‘‘Literature on organizational adaption suggests that organizations change over time (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983).’’
BETSY VAN DER VEER MARTENS 28
Acknowledgement-Positive
The citing paper accepts the original theory’s conclusions as applicable but does not discuss or analyze the theory further. Example from Crow (1998, p. 257): ‘‘Organizations tend to imitate others considered similar, but more successful (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983).’’
Acknowledgement-Negative
The citing paper rejects the original theory’s thesis as applicable, but does not discuss or analyze the theory further. Example from Argyris and Lie- beskind (1999, p. 53): ‘‘Institutional theory also implies that certain types of contractual arrangements can becomeymimicked in a search for various types of ‘legitimacy’ (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983).yHabits, pressures for legitimacy and mimicry do not play a role in our argument.’’
Functions of Analysis
The analytic category is the second most frequent, comprising 32 percent of the total citations in the corpus. The two subcategories (‘‘analysis-empirical’’
and ‘‘analysis-theoretical’’) are roughly equivalent to Chubin and Moitra’s categories of ‘‘experimental’’ and ‘‘theoretical,’’ with the difference that this study, involving theories in the social sciences, expands the ‘‘experimental’’
category to include empirical non-experimental work such as surveys, case studies, trend analysis, and statistical analysis, and collapses the ‘‘theoret- ical’’ category to exclude work whose primary purpose is to situate the theory within a particular framework or typology, which is categorized be- low under the ‘‘functions of assimilation.’’ Seventy-one percent of the an- alytic category was empirical, while the remaining twenty-nine percent were theoretical. The following examples from the corpus show the distinction between the two subcategories.
Analysis-Empirical
The primary goal of the citing paper is to test the original theory with data gathered for that purpose. Example:Bruderer and Singh’s (1996)simulation study of the success of imitative strategies versus adaptive strategies by organizational agents. ‘‘The mimetic or DiMaggio and Powell routine var- iation modelydoes not adapt as well to the environment as the Schumpeterian transmission model (Bruderer & Singh, 1996, p. 1337).’’
This category is not subdivided further into confirming or disconfirming subcategories, however, as due to the diversity of the nature of the theories
and the analytic methods employed, such an assessment could not be per- formed consistently across all papers within the time limitations of this study. However, in principle, such an assessment could be performed in the future.
Analysis-Theoretical
The primary purpose of the citing paper is to critique the original theory without the use of additional empirical data. Example: Paul Hirsch’s essay on reconciling ‘‘old’’ and ‘‘new’’ institutional theory. ‘‘Institutional expla- nations that involve the building up of structures by individual actorsyare at odds with explanations that rely on action as determined by institutional structures (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Certainly, the former are related more to the old institutional attention to agency, whereas the latter is how the founders of this field would like to frame all future institutional dis- course.yApproaches to the study of institutions should not be arbitrarily limited to some structurally determined paradigm or restricted to the study of action. What is needed instead is attention to ongoing sociological de- bates regarding the construction of more complex and complete forms of explanation that make lines from the micro to the macro and account for the ways in which various levels of explanation interpenetrate (Hirsch &
Lounsbury, 1997, p. 415).’’
Functions of Application
The application category includes both actual and suggested fields of ap- plication for the theory. This category comprises 16 percent of the total, with 94 percent of the category purporting to explain existing data and the remaining 6 percent offering proposed explanations of data that had not been collected. As noted earlier, the primary difference between the ‘‘ap- plication-explanatory’’ and ‘‘analysis-empirical’’ categories is that data were not collected to test the theory: the theory was used to explain existing data.
‘‘Application-proposed,’’ therefore, bridges the gap between the two other categorizations. There is no equivalent for this type of subcategorization in previous citation context analytic studies. The following examples show the distinction between the two.
Application-Explanatory
The citing paper uses the theory to explain existing empirical evidence.
Example: Sutton’s use of DiMaggio and Powell’s theory of institutional BETSY VAN DER VEER MARTENS 30
isomorphism to explain the diffusion of the juvenile court system in the United States at the turn of the century. ‘‘The juvenile court is an insti- tutional organization whose formal structure (or lack thereof) derives more from the need to enact a legitimacy myth than from the technical require- ments of judging and disposing of delinquents.ySocieties of charity or- ganizations helped standardize the normative structure of the court and propagated it nationwide, and states adopted it through a process of in- stitutional modeling or ‘mimesis’ (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983)’’ (Sutton, 1985, p. 109).
Application-Proposed
The citing paper suggests that the theory be used to explore or explain a particular phenomenon, but does not introduce specific empirical evidence.
Example: Iyer’s suggestion that institutional isomorphism be used to study comparative marketing systems. ‘‘Some impact of the institutional environ- ment on marketing systems may be coercive, normative, or mimetic (Di- Maggio & Powell, 1983).ySuccessful patterns of structure, functions, and processes will be replicated within the marketing system and innovation- imitating activities may contribute to wider patterns of organization and interactions within the marketing system’’ (Iyer, 1997, p. 550).
Functions of Assimilation
The assimilation category is the smallest of the four primary categories, representing only 6 percent of the total citations within the corpus. Again, there is no comparable category in previous citation context studies. The two assimilation categories are distinguished by whether or not the theo- retical framework had been constructed previously to the publication of the current paper.
Assimilation-Existing
The primary purpose of the citing paper is to incorporate the theory into an existing theoretical framework. Example: Barley and Tolbert’s presentation of a model of institutional isomorphism as a structuration process.
‘‘Structuration theory and institutional theoryyshare the premise that ac- tion is largely organized by institutions, widely held definitions of the be- havior and relationships appropriate for a set of actors. Both acknowledge that institutions are created, maintained and changed through action.
Structuration theory, however, explicitly focuses on the dynamics by which
institutions are reproduced and altered, an issue that has been largely ne- glected by institutional theorists. Our aim has been to develop the impli- cations of structuration theory for the interplay between actions and institutions and to address the practical problem of how to study institu- tional maintenance and change in organizations’’ (Barley & Tolbert, 1997, pp. 112–113).
Assimilation-Novel
The primary purpose of the citing paper is to incorporate the theory into a new theoretical framework. Example: Deephouse’s development of an
‘‘integrative theory of strategic balance’’ that incorporates both DiMaggio and Powell’s institutional isomorphism and Porter’s conceptualization of competitive advantage through the development of attractive niches.
‘‘This paperybegan developing a theory of strategic balance by integrating strategic management and organizational theories. Strategic management and organizational ecology contributed the idea that competition reduces the benefits of institutional isomorphism. Institutional and resource de- pendence theories contribute the idea that legitimacy activates the flow of resources that energizes a firm. The theory of strategic balance directs our attention to intermediate levels of differentiation where a firm benefits from reduced competition while maintaining its legitimacy’’ (Deephouse, 1999, p. 162).