Developing media management scholarship: a commentary to Picard and Lowe's essay
As eminences of the field of media management which exists as a scholarly field not least thanks to their very efforts in the essay "Questioning Media Management Research" Robert G. Picard and Gregory F. Lowe (2016) provide their thoughts about the state of the field in a fun, yet provocative way. Making use of "parables" they discuss four different, but interrelated areas for improvement of the field. All of these four areas are variations of the same theme namely, the assessment that media management scholarship should improve in quality. As much as I agree with this assessment at large, I believe that there is a need to further elaborate on how we could actually go about to further develop media management as an academic field. Therefore, the aim with this commentary to Picard and Lowe's essay is to critically discuss their analyses and provide some hands on suggestions for what we, jointly, could do to develop media management scholarship. The findings derived from Picard and Lowe's critical assessment of the media management field are not novel per se similar results have been presented for example by Achtenhagen Mierzejewska (2015) Krumsvik Ots (2016) Kung (2007) and Ots, Nyilasy, Rohn, and Wikstrom (2015) However, this is positive, as only if such assessment is shared and voiced by many scholars, change might happen and the novel approach chosen by Picard and Lowe to present their results in form of parables might certainly trigger attention and reflection. Picard and Lowe applaud that the media management field recently has seen an increase in number of different theories used, while criticising that these theories are merely applied to empirical phenomena, but neither expanded based on the empirical insights gained nor modified to fit the media management context. Interestingly, several of the theories mentioned have actually been (co )developed by general management scholars drawing on empirical examples or studies from the media industries, but being published in general management, rather than media management, journals. For example, Coser, Kadushin and Powell (1982) studied the evolution of American college textbook publishing, tracking it through a period of initial diversity to the hegemony of only two models, the large bureaucratic generalist and the small specialist. Thereby, they advanced our understanding of an important question within institutional theory, namely, why many organisations in the same industry tend to be homogeneous. Similarly, Alvarez, Mazza, Strandgaard Pedersen, and Svejenova (2005) advanced