Theory Building at the Intersection: Recipe for Impact or Road to Nowhere?

Zahra and Newey (2009) argue for the importance of creative theory building in management research and suggest that this is best to be done via interdisciplinary research. We argue that the more management research goes down the road of pursuing interdisciplinary research for generating novel theories, the more likely it will compromise another worthwhile goal, which is to establish the discipline of management as a legitimate academic discipline that is distinguishable from other academic disciplines in its subject matter and its theoretical and methodological approach. We also argue against the implicit premise that the focus of management discipline should be on developing new theories.