What happened to the literature review? In most doctoral programs in economics, business, or social sciences, students take several courses in research design and statistics.
However, the intricacies of preparing a literature review are rarely addressed during the PhD. At best, this topic is covered with a trip to the library and an overview of database searching.
The limitations of this approach have become clear to me over the years, especially since I began reviewing for top journals: Many authors, especially younger ones, struggle to develop strong literature reviews.
What is the evidence for my argument?
Looking at Daft’s (1995) list of common problems in manuscripts, one sees several dimensions in which the literature review plays a key role, e.g., inadequate definition of key concepts or concepts and operationalizations that do not match.
While this is a 1995 assessment, more recent research has come to the same conclusion: many articles leave the reader without a clear definition of key constructs or a clear idea of the originality of the work.
Source: Daft, R. L. (1995). Why I recommended that your manuscript be rejected. Publishing in the organizational sciences, 1, 164
What seems equally puzzling to me, given how much the craft of literature review impacts the quality of research, is the lack of good sources for thinking about the literature review. While there are some exceptions, much of what is written about the literature review reads more like a recipe book with a series of steps (e.g., identify a research topic; conduct a database search, etc.).
Although this type of resource can assist doctoral students in understanding the basic steps involved in creating a literature review, it eschews a fundamental question: What are the differences between an effective and a subpar literature review?
My argument is that a good literature review should be less like a map and more like a piece of art.
Art and the literature review
Similar to art, interesting theory always involves seeing the world anew. For example, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality reshaped how we comprehend social inequalities by highlighting how various social categories such as race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect to create unique experiences of oppression.
Similarly, from Duchamp’s controversial “Fountain” to Banksy’s stencil paintings, modern artists want to change the way we think about the world. People now say that Duchamp’s Fountain changed art forever.
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, Tate Modern
Aside from this similar quest to change the way people think, it is important to remember that both artists and researchers are always caught between what has already been done and the originality of what they want to do, between the past and their own voice.
When I think about this tension between tradition and originality, I draw inspiration from Paul Cézanne. I grew up on the same street where Cézanne’s father had his hat store, a business that made him rich and enabled his son to paint.
Louis Auguste Cézanne‘s former hat shop in Aix en Provence. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Cezanne was obsessed with one particular motif: the Sainte Victoire in Aix en Provence. Before he met Pissarro, who encouraged him to go outdoors, Cézanne was mainly a studio painter. However, some of his best works came from painting the mountain that towers over Aix en Provence.
One of my favorites is called “Mont Sainte-Victoire avec grand pin,” an oil painting that hangs in the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. If you look at the painting carefully, you quickly realize that Cézanne’s intention was never to faithfully replicate the mountain. Instead, he wanted to share his own experience of the mountain.
Cézanne’s technique is particularly striking in his depiction of the pine tree. The blurred and indistinct brushstrokes he uses here are more than just an artistic style; they illustrate Cézanne’s interaction with the mistral wind that often sweeps across the landscape of Provence. By wielding the brush, Cézanne lets us participate in his own sensory experience of nature, inviting us to perceive the scene through his senses.
Cezanne was very original. So original that he spent most of his life in complete anonymity. But Cézanne is also considered the father of modern art. Picasso considered Cézanne as a major influence.
Today Picasso is buried in the house he last occupied, at the foot of Montagne Sainte Victoire.
Chateau Vauvenargues, where Pablo Picasso is buried
“Cézanne was my one and only master! Of course I looked at his paintings . . . I spent years studying them.” Pablo Picasso
What does Cezanne have to do with literature reviews?
Researchers and artists are more similar than one might think. It is true that most academic articles pale compared to Cezanne’s elegance, or the provocative power of Duchamp’s urinals.
However, literature reviews also exist in this tension between tradition and innovation, between the way others have looked at a research question, and the author’s own perspective in addressing the research question.
A good literature review is not a representation of what has been done, but the creation of new knowledge that builds upon what others have done. This push for originality is consistent with the way Boote and Beile (2005) describe the literature review:
“As the foundation of any research project, a literature review should accomplish several important objectives. It sets the broad context of the study, clearly demarcates what is and what is not within the scope of the investigation, and justifies those decisions. It also situates an existing literature in a broader scholarly and historical context. It should not only report the claims made in the existing literature but also critically examine the research methods used to better understand whether the claims are warranted. Such an examination of the literature enables the author to distinguish what has been learned and accomplished in the area of study and what still needs to be learned and accomplished. Moreover, this type of review allows the author not only to summarize the existing literature but also to synthesize it in a way that permits a new perspective.”
Hence, the literature review starts with a series of decisions about “what is and is not within the scope of the investigation”. It should also include a critical examination of what has been done. Through this critique, a new way of looking at the world emerges, a “new perspective.”
Examples of good literature reviews
Consider, for example, a recent study on flexible consumer lifestyles. The central concept addressed in this study’s literature review is the concept of liminality. Liminality refers to a transitional state in which individuals or groups are neither here nor there, at a threshold between two distinct phases or states. This concept is particularly relevant when thinking about digital nomads, because they are always on the move professionally or physically. One question, however, is how people manage this state of being constantly in-between, which the authors call chronic liminality.
A challenge for the authors, however, is that the concept of liminality has been extensively covered in past research, from the origins of the term in anthropology to organizational theorists talking about how flexible work arrangements have become ubiquitous.
A strength of the authors’ literature review is not only in its coverage, since they look at scholarship in various fields evoking liminality, but also in using the literature review to articulate a particular point of view.
In a table (see below) and in the text, the authors highlight how their own concept of liminality — chronic liminality — contrasts with previous work in anthropology, organization theory, and consumer research. The literature review here is not structured merely to examine what has been done, but to let a new concept emerge through contrast.
Source: Mimoun, L., & Bardhi, F. (2022)
Or take Caleb Warren and Meg Campbell’s award-winning paper “what makes things cool?”
Their literature review begins with an effective rhetorical device to grab the reader’s attention, namely, the question, “What is cool?” Then, instead of laboriously going through all the possible definitions of coolness, the authors outline four defining characteristics of coolness: 1) Coolness is not an innate characteristic, it is socially constructed; 2) Coolness is subjective and dynamic. What one person finds cool, another may not. What is considered cool is not fixed, but can change and evolve over time; 3) Coolness is a positive trait; 4) There is a hard-to-define quality that makes things cool.
Why is this a superb way to address previous work? By focusing on themes, the authors go beyond citing specific empirical results. In addition, they begin to build an original argument. Indeed, the fourth point is to highlight the “baggage” that coolness brings, baggage that the authors are trying to unpack. The authors are not just trying to fill a gap. They are creating a new puzzle: what is this ineffable quality that makes objects and people cool?
In the next section of this paper, the authors attempt to distinguish coolness from likability. They emphasize that likability is primarily based on interpersonal dynamics, whereas coolness appears to reflect a degree of indifference to social norms.
With this organization of their literature review, the authors have done two important things. To start with, they have begun elaborating a conceptual framework, if by framework we mean a construction of relationships between concepts. For instance, they have successfully delineated coolness from sympathy.
Moreover, the authors have led the reader to a new way of looking at coolness by introducing the question of autonomy as a way to solve the puzzle they started with (i.e., what makes things cool?)
They conclude their literature review with a summary of their main argument: “coolness stems from appropriate autonomy.” They clearly lay out how they are trying to advance theory on this topic by showing that “the relationship between autonomy and perceived coolness is more nuanced than previously discussed.”
In this sentence, there is both the promise of a contribution (that we will learn something new about coolness and autonomy) and a good hook for the study. Throughout the literature review section, the authors have worked hard to show that there is no real consensus on what coolness is, and they are trying to create that consensus. Their positioning is what we might call consensus building (as opposed to consensus shifting) (Hollenbeck 2008).
The authors have conducted a literature review that does not just list what previous researchers have done. This is a literature review written with expertise because it is designed from the beginning to develop a particular point of view on the subject at hand.
Conclusion
Academic writing may not always resemble art. However, there is much to be learned from following the lead of artists.
Artists, like researchers, never work in a vacuum. They are always trying to extend an ongoing conversation. They may, like Cezanne or Picasso, be intimately familiar with the past. Yet they are always concerned with the question of what art might be.
I hope some graduate students and academics will be inspired here and make their literature reviews more like art.
References
Boote, David N., and Penny Beile. “Scholars before researchers: On the centrality of the dissertation literature review in research preparation.” Educational researcher 34, no. 6 (2005): 3–15.
Daft, R. L. (1995). Why I recommended that your manuscript be rejected. Publishing in the organizational sciences, 1, 164.
Gardner, W. L. (2020). Why I rejected your R&R submission and what you could have done to secure an acceptance. Journal of Management Inquiry, 29(4), 378–384.
Hollenbeck, J. R. (2008). The role of editing in knowledge development: Consensus shifting and consensus creation. In Opening the black box of editorship (pp. 16–26). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Mimoun, L., & Bardhi, F. (2022). Chronic consumer liminality: being flexible in precarious times. Journal of Consumer Research, 49(3), 496–519.
Sparrowe, R. T., & Mayer, K. J. (2011). Publishing in AMJ — part 4: Grounding hypotheses. Academy of Management Journal, 54(6), 1098–1102.
Warren, C., & Campbell, M. C. (2014). What makes things cool? How autonomy influences perceived coolness. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(2), 543–563.