This article explores “doubting with” in collaborative management research. Extending methodological reflections on collaboration between researchers and practitioners, this article, drawing on the foundations of the pragmatist inquiry, stresses the central role of doubt and the doubtful situation in overcoming difficulties that are encountered in problem-oriented approaches. We propose guidelines for “doubting with” in collaborative research, highlighting how it transforms modes of researcher–practitioner collaboration and the opportunities it provides to restore possibilities of action with a broader social dimension. We emphasize how “doubting with” addresses the challenges of collaboration and the key implications for management research regarding the importance of keeping doubt alive in our inquiries and of doubting with practitioners.
Family owners monitor managers, attenuating principal–agent conflicts and improving firm performance. However, family owners also appropriate resources, creating principal–principal conflicts that harm firm performance. Although these effects occur simultaneously, research does not explain when one outweighs the other. We theorize that agency costs are minimized when the family's involvement on the board of directors is proportional to its ownership; too little board involvement fuels principal–agent conflicts, and too much fuels principal–principal conflicts. Consistent with our theorizing, evidence from French panel data shows firm performance increases as family board involvement and family ownership jointly increase, and performance is maximized when family board involvement and family ownership are proportional.
Given the influence of agency theory, corporate governance is tightly associated with the idea of monitoring. But what happens when the decision-maker must act in an uncertain, open-ended world? In this article, we propose a typology of firms' projects drawing on two parameters stemming from recent advancements in creativity theory: opacity and unlikelihood. This results in a matrix with four types of projects that display different qualities of entrepreneurialness: replicative projects, incubation projects, insightful projects, and innovative projects. We draw on the knowledge governance literature to suggest mechanisms and strategies of governance based on the prevailing type of project that the organization pursues. Our framework contributes to the theoretical understanding of the interplay between governance, creativity, and entrepreneurship literature while offering practical insights for designing better-tailored governance mechanisms that align with a firm's prevailing project type.