Comparative Cause Mapping of Organizational Cognitions
Authors: Laukkanen Mauri 
Published: October 2008

Increasingly, thoughtful managers recognize the role of knowledge and learning in corporate action and performance. Concurrently, a new field, management and organization cognition (MOC), has emerged producing useful insights and findings. Thus far, empirical studies have largely focused on single cases or actors, using often archival data and sometimes ambiguous methods. To advance the field will require pragmatic tools for eliciting data on thinking in real organizations and for conducting rigorous and more comparative studies of management and organization cognitions.

This paper describes a method for comparatively studying real-life managerial thinking, defined here as the respective manager's beliefs about key phenomena and their efficacy links in their strategic and operative situation. The applicability of such a definition will depend on the requirements of research at hand. The payoff is that, thus defined, key elements in managerial and organizational cognitions can be usefully captured by cognitive mapping, an established approach in MOC research.

The approach contains, first, a method for eliciting comparison-enabling interview data of several subjects. Then, using researcher-based, interpretive standardization of the individual natural discourses, databases of standard concepts and causal links, constituting the cause map elements, are distilled. This facilitates a text-oriented description of the thinking patterns of single actors like managers or organizational groups, which can be used in traditional-type mapping studies, which typically assume unitary or quasi-unitary actors. However, the method is intended for comparative analyses, e.g., for pinpointing the cognitive differences or similarities across organizational actors or for constructing and comparing groups, assumed cognitively homogenous. Also, it is applicable for longitudinal studies or aggregated, e.g., industry-level, descriptions of MOC. A PC application is available for the technique, although many of the processing tasks are amenable to general-purpose relational database software.

The paper presents a study case comparing the cognitive structures of managers in two interrelated industries in terms of their concept bases and causal beliefs. The objective was to understand the substance of management thinking, as well as the formative logic behind how managers come to think in the shared ways. It is shown that patterns of industry-typical core causal thinking, manifestations of a dominant logic or recipe, can be located, operationalized and comparatively analyzed with this method. Substantively, the contents of management thinking are typically products of complex long-term mechanisms. These consist, first, of organizational problem-solving, recurrently facing a specific, adequately stable constellation of strategic tasks and environment elements, similar within industries and systematically different across them, and, second, of various social processes, which directly transfer and influence management thinking. The paper concludes with discussing the cause mapping method and suggests some options for further studies.