Research Note: Asterix in Disneyland. Management Scholars from France on the World Stage

Organization Studies, Winter, 1998 by Lars Engwall

The French Contributions

The database described above contains contributions from a total of 9,574 authors. Of these, less than 1 percent had any affiliation with a French institution. This is obviously not very impressive. However, it should be noted that only North America, the United Kingdom, Israel and Australia show an authorship share above 1 percent (Table 2). France is thus on the same level as the four Nordic countries and the Netherlands. The North American authors alone account for 86.4 percent of the authorships, and together with the United Kingdom and Australia they clock up a joint share of 92.5 percent. The data thus justifies our calling the international publication market in the management area a 'Disneyland'.

A natural reaction to these figures is to assume that the North American domination is an effect of differences in population size. However, this cannot be said to be valid. Even in terms of authorships per million inhabitants, North America dominates with a score of 28.8, closely followed by Israel with 28.0 (see Table 2). Among the Europeans, France comes after the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries.

The number of articles with at least one author based in France was 73, which means a median value of six articles per year with a certain variation over time. An extreme value of 11 occurred in the first year of the period (1981), while three articles in 1985 constitute the minimum value.

Publication has occurred in ten of the 15 journals. The missing ones are the Academy of Management Journal, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Journal of Accounting & Economics, Journal of Accounting Research and the Journal of Management. However, even among the remaining ten journals, there is a skew representation, since almost three-quarters of the articles are published in three journals: Management Science (26), Organization Studies (10) and Strategic Management Journal (16). This pattern alone points to the orientation of business researchers in France: operations research, organization studies and strategy. It should also be noted that the marketing area is relatively well represented by publications in several of the journals in the field (JCR = 2; JM = 4 and JMR = 5; Total = 11), while French accounting articles in the population are almost non-existent (AOS = 0; AR = 2 and JAE = 0). In relation to the information provided in Table 1 (impact factors and half-time citations), we can observe that the weighted impact factor for the French authors is 1.322, i.e. below the average 1.544. The weighted cited half-time is above average (7.5 as against 7.1).

The Geographical Bases of the Authorships

The 73 articles published by authors located in France represent twice as many authorships (146) and 104 individuals. This means that the average article has two authors and that the average author has published 1.4 articles in the period. Twenty-seven of the 73 articles have one author and 13 have more than two. In studying the authorships further, we have taken this co-operation into account and have weighted each author with his or her part of each article. We then find that only two-thirds of the authorships emanate from a French institution (Table 3). Apart from France, individuals from 11 other countries have contributed to the population of articles. Second to France come the United States and Canada with about one-quarter of the authorships. Five European countries account for about 6 percent and non-European countries for 2 percent.