Associate Professor of Marketing Dr. Edward Chung and Associate Professor of Business Dr. Cristina Ciocirlan research paper, “Embeddedness: An Exploratory Investigation of the Role of Ties in Social Venture Formation,” was accepted for publication in January in the peer-reviewed journal Metamorphosis: A Journal of Management Research. The paper was also co-authored with Paul Ngo, associate professor of psychology at St. Norbet College. They worked on this research paper for about three years.
Chung and Ciocirlan found this peer-reviewed journal and thought their article would fit well with the other content that is published by the journal. They submitted their paper to the editor, who forwarded it to other reviewers for a blind review. Chung said the review process took four months before they made necessary revisions. The paper went through many revisions and received feedback at conferences before it was accepted as a high-quality journal entry. Chung also added that a top-end journal in business typically has a five percent acceptance rate.
“In business research, at least, academic articles published in peer-reviewed journals are the pinnacle of research output, so I think [our published paper] represents the College in a positive light to the outside world,” Chung said. “If nothing else, it’s a demonstration that what we do is actually seen as useful and meaningful by external reviewers who are Ph.D.-qualified.”
The paper looks at how a group of individuals band together to explore starting a social venture to preserve printed books. Chung and Ciocirlan’s findings reveal that social connections are the main motivation for this enterprise and help to explain how strategies emerge and are managed.
“Research is how one keeps abreast of recent development in the field. It also prevents an academician from becoming ‘stale’,” Chung said. Chung believes that interpretive research offers more in-depth analysis of a subject matter and reveals themes and nuances typically masked by statistical analysis.
“The paper’s topic is social embeddedness. We simply used a social enterprise venture to illustrate our research angle. In business, many of us have realized that the atomistic view of organizational activities based on individual actions is not adequate. Thus, employing a social network analysis is fruitful and is rather common among business researchers who have been exposed to research literature since the 1980s,” Chung said. According to Chung, the topic of social embeddedness is discussed in many business courses here at the College.
Chung and Ciocirlan both have very active research lifestyles and may be interested in doing a follow-up study on their recent research findings in the near future.
