Editorial: Plenary on replication in management and entrepreneurship research (2024)

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Editor's Note:In this special section, we publish the proceedings of the plenary session of the entrepreneurship division of Academy of Management at the 2024 Conference in Chicago (Illinois, USA). The plenary brought together a distinguished panel of scholars to converse about the importance of replication in management and entrepreneurship research and respond to audience comments and questions. Many senior scholars, including journal editors, were part of the audience.Vishal K. Gupta and Christina Theodoraki, then Program Chair and Professional Development Workshop (PDW) Chair respectively for the Entrepreneurship (ENT) Division, moderated the plenary discussion with the following panelists:Per Davidsson, Recipient of 2023 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, and Talbot Family Foundation Chair in Entrepreneurship at the Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research (ACE) in the QUT Business School (Management) in QUT Business School (Australia)Constance (Connie) Helfat, J. Brian Quinn Professor in Technology and Strategy, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College (USA)Herman Aguinis, Avram Tucker Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Management at George Washington University School of Business (USA)Jeffrey McMullen, David H. Jacobs Chair in Strategic Entrepreneurship and Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University (USA)The following report of the plenary session was prepared by Athina Skiadopoulou and Majid Rahimi, PhD students at Manderson Graduate School of Business at The University of Alabama, with support from Vishal Gupta. The authors of this report are grateful to JSBED Editor-in-Chief and Entrepreneurship Division Historian Patrick J. Murphy for feedback and support.The video recording of the plenary session is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AY4DcsqcAY.12 August 2024, Academy of Management Conference, Chicago, IllinoisVishal K Gupta, 2024 Program Chair of the ENT Division, opened the plenary session by welcoming the audience and introducing the panelists. He started by emphasizing the practical importance and interest in the topic of replication.VKG: Before we start, let me emphasize the practical importance and interest in this topic. All major media in the U.S. and overseas are paying attention to the crisis of research credibility in our scientific enterprise. Here are some examples from major newspapers in the U.S.:Concerns about the research credibility of the scientific enterprise are expanding, growing and becoming more and more vocal. Having said that, I will now invite each of our panelists to introduce themselves and share some opening remarks focused on their position on this topic. We will start with Dr Per Davidsson.PD: I am very passionate about meaningful cumulative knowledge. We are not in this game to produce papers just to enhance our careers. We are part of an extremely important societal institution – research – which needs to sustain its credibility.Personally, if I had a medical condition, I would not seek advice from an individual empirical study. I would want to see results repeated before I trust anything. But I see replication as one element in a package that leads to meaningful cumulative research. We also need theory with shared, well-defined concepts – not a lot of different concepts for the same thing, and not the same concept for a lot of different things. We need shared, validated operationalizations. It's a bit pointless to do an exact replication of a study using measures we don't trust in the first place, right? 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