Africa Journal of Management

ISSN: 2332-2373 (Print) 2332-2381 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rajm20

Opportunities and challenges for empirical

strategy research in Africa

Ronald Klingebiel & Christian Stadler

To cite this article: Ronald Klingebiel & Christian Stadler (2015) Opportunities and challenges
for empirical strategy research in Africa, Africa Journal of Management, 1:2, 194-200, DOI:
10.1080/23322373.2015.1026758

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23322373.2015.1026758

Published online: 11 May 2015.

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 Africa Journal of Management, 2015
Vol. 1, No. 2, 194–200, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23322373.2015.1026758

DIALOGUE
Opportunities and challenges for empirical strategy research in Africa
Ronald Klingebiela* and Christian Stadlerb
a
Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Frankfurt, Germany; bWarwick Business School,
Coventry, UK

This editorial complements Michael Mol and Kamel Mellahi’s commentary on

promising research directions by taking a look at opportunities and pitfalls in
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empirical research in and about Africa. It highlights some interesting examples of data
sources that carry the potential to further theory of strategic management in general, an
objective central to the proliferation of African empirics in mainstream theory
journals. The Africa researcher has to, at least initially, jump through a number of
extra hoops. To this end, ways are suggested in which the fascinating context of
African business can make inroads into the international conversation on strategy.
Keywords: strategy in africa; data sources

INTRODUCTION
The founding of the Africa Journal of Management is a consequence of the dearth of
Africa papers in leading management journals. AJoM is meant to bridge the gap between
so-called regional journals and the international theory journals. This endeavor starts with
good empirics that allow scholars to explore intriguing contradictions to existing theories,
find contextual parameters not available elsewhere, and remove blind spots in the
literature. Many of the existing theories in management were tested in Europe and North
America, since such data are more readily available and international scholars more
accustomed to them. It is fair to assume that context shapes theory even in conceptual
papers, with the cognition of scholars influenced by their experience, so broadening the
empirical base is crucial.
As strategy scholars, we have a direct interest in African empirics. We would like to
see papers with data from Africa that can extend and challenge existing theory. We are
not nearly as interested if nothing new can be learned from such data even if the setting is
novel. Fortunately, however, new contexts typically offer plenty of opportunity for theory
enhancement. Previous forays into empirical blind spots elsewhere have revealed
phenomena that altered theory. For example, studies of business groups in Chile and
India (Khanna & Palepu, 2000a, 2000b) have rendered important qualifications to the
conventional understanding of the relationship between diversification and performance.
Coverage of the African continent suggests that there are plenty of phenomena we
cannot yet explain easily using extant theory. We do not, for instance, fully understand
why M-PESA (M for mobile, pesa is Swahili for money) took off phenomenally in Kenya
but not in Eastern European markets, and we are only just beginning to explore the
ecosystem dynamics that led to its rise (Adner, 2012) and the ripple effects mobile

*Corresponding author. Email: r.klingebiel@fs.de

© 2015 Africa Academy of Management
 Opportunities and Challenges for Empirical Strategy Research in Africa 195

technology has throughout the entrepreneurship and venturing scene in Africa (Klingebiel
& Stadler, 2014). We are enthralled by the frugal innovations coming out of Africa (e.g.
Kamkwamba & Mealer, 2010), but have yet to get a handle on the mechanisms of their
emergence (Radjou, Prabhu, & Ahuja, 2012). We do not know why the rate of portfolio
entrepreneurship in Africa is higher than research suggests is optimal (Economist, 2012),
how local champions span multiple institutional voids (Berman, 2013), and how outside
capital helps and hinders business growth (French, 2007), just to name a few (see Mol &
Mellahi’s commentary for further pointers).
Despite the great opportunity offered by Africa as a research setting, there have not
been a great deal of African empirics published in top-tier journals. Several studies that
include data from Africa (Dutt et al. 2015; Khanna & Rivkin 2001; Vaaler 2011) use the
African context as just one of many interchangeable settings, rather than as a conscious
choice to go after theoretically interesting phenomena. Others, like Elbanna and Child
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(2007) go a step further and use the uniqueness of the setting, in this case Egypt, as a
selling point. But more could be done to elucidate the idiosyncrasies of their choice of
data. The attraction of doing this is evident from recent work by Uzo and Mair (2014)
who provide a detailed account of the evolution of Nollywood, the world’s second largest
film industry. By doing so, they are able to contribute to the literature on informal
economic activity, revealing mechanisms of how firms get by on informal rules.
Research that truly embraces the uniqueness of Africa and makes this the starting
point of a theoretical pursuit is in our opinion the most promising. We are aware of a
number of scholars who are in the middle of interesting projects of this kind, including
some exciting field experiments, archival work, and also secondary databases. We
highlight some of these in this editorial. We concentrate on promising areas for near-
future inquiry with examples primarily from innovation and strategy. We then suggest
some basic dos and don’ts for publishing such novel and interesting data sources. Perhaps
it can offer some ideas for aspiring Africa researchers.

DATA SOURCES
Secondary Data
The number of large secondary datasets in Africa is rather limited. For most firms
financials are not easily accessible in a way that US and European data can be
downloaded from Compustat, Datastream, or Orbis. Other data, for instance patent data,
are less relevant in an environment with a weaker enforcement of intellectual property
(IP). The dearth of easily accessible and reliable data creates opportunities for those who
collect primary data but also increases the value of the few existing datasets.
One source of datasets is the World Bank. Dutt et al. (2015) use data from Worldbank
infoDev to show how intermediaries – in their case business incubators – emerge to
address institutional failures. Alternatives for cross-country research projects are typically
census data but they are hard to access and compare. A second cross-country data source
made available by the World Bank is the Doing Business database in the World
Development Indicator program. It includes variables such as access to capital, opening
up possibilities to study, for example, the impact of remittances on entrepreneurial
activities (Vaaler, 2011). A third source from the World Bank is their Enterprise Surveys,
previously called Regional Program on Enterprise Development Data. It covers firm-
level data on variables such as capital stock, employment, sales, property rights, labor
skills, and product innovation (Sleuwaegen & Goedhuys, 2002). The advantage of the
 196 Africa Journal of Management

World Bank surveys is that the data are collected in a harmonized way, so that they can be
pooled across countries.
Other secondary sources increasingly include data on Africa, too. Those interested in
investment behavior will find that the Venture Capital & Private Equity Country
Attractiveness Index now includes statistics for most African countries (Groh, Liechten-
stein, & Lieser, 2013). Those familiar with the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (Kelley,
Singer, & Herrington, 2015) will similarly have seen more data on entrepreneurial
activity, attitudes, and aspirations become available for African countries, including some
at the level of individual entrepreneurs. This is important, since, although country-level
data can provide important parameters for strategy research, scholars would ideally have
access to information on organizational heterogeneity.
One of the few larger-scale datasets offering such firm-level data is the African
Innovation Outlook (AIO), which mirrors the European Community Innovation Survey
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(NEPAD, 2014). To date AIO includes data from Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho,
Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. The data collection is
still work in progress and not all of it is representative but it is an invaluable start to establish
a dataset that mirrors the European one used in several studies on strategy and innovation
(cf. Klingebiel & Adner, 2015). AIO permits scholar to ask how the relationship between
innovation inputs and outputs might differ in contexts across Africa. This could, for
example, facilitate a better understanding of how firms appropriate value from innovation
when legal IP protection might be weaker, how firms ought to vertically integrate, explore,
and exploit knowledge, or how distributed scale might influence innovation efficacy.
Finally, Africa also sees the emergence of new big data sources. For example,
cellphone traffic data captured in countries like Ivory Coast and Senegal (cf. de Montjoye,
Smoreda, Trinquart, Ziemlicki, & Blondel, 2014) allows researchers to ascertain to which
extent social structures influence business activity (e.g. Bucicovschi, Douglass, Meyer,
Ram, Rideout, & Song, 2013). Social media and sensor data are also becoming increasingly
available across the continent (Letouzé, 2014).

Randomized Controlled Trials

Numerous punctuated development-aid initiatives offer quasi-randomized controlled trials
(RCTs), often viewed as the gold standard in empirical research. For example, the Girls
Empowered by Micro (GEM) franchise project in Nairobi randomly chose eligible female
entrepreneurs and could thus establish the treatment effect of training vis-à-vis a random
control group (http://pedl.cepr.org/content/impacts-microfranchising-young-women-nai
robi-1). Similarly, another study exposes 500 Egyptian traders exposed to marketing
training, allowing for measurement of the impact of marketing capabilities (http://pedl.
cepr.org/content /why-do-some-micro-entrepreneurs-do-better-others-role-innovation-mar
keting-practices-drivi-1). A randomized controlled trial in Malawi explored the impact of
pricing on product usage (Jones Christensen, Siemsen, & Balasubramanian, 2014), in
that case water filters. Its careful design and relevance to business theory helped it be
published by the Strategic Management Journal.
One obvious question in all of these projects is whether the greater ease with which
such RCTs can be conducted in Africa than elsewhere has anything to do with reduced
ethical scrutiny, a frequent hurdle elsewhere. Fully cleared projects, however, stand to
benefit from some of Africa’s unique features, including the near-total separation of some
regions and local economies from others, facilitating cleaner field experiments. The lower
 Opportunities and Challenges for Empirical Strategy Research in Africa 197

costs of conducting RCTs are also worth mentioning. Particularly thorny empirical
problems such as the efficacy of different managerial incentive systems, for example,
might thus be cracked in the unique setting that Africa provides.

Other Field Studies

Many African countries run large informal economies. Often, a single dominant player is
the only formalized large firm in an industry. And many firms are weary of information
disclosure due to risk of rent seeking and expropriation. So traditional survey approaches
are tricky.
However, the vibrancy of small-scale businesses makes it possible to conduct decent
sample-size inquiries into frugal innovation (http://pedl.cepr.org/content/tinkering-incen-
tives-innovate-lic-manufacturing-firms-1), for example, or entrepreneurship more gener-
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ally. We are ourselves engaged in one such effort, probing the phenomenon of portfolio
entrepreneurship by sampling from four different countries. The smaller the organization,
the easier it is to contact (though not necessarily to measure).
In-depth studies of decidedly African phenomena often hold greater promise than
traditional surveys, at least as an initial step towards understanding contexts better.
A prescient example is a recent investigation into the Nigerian film industry that was able
to explore strategic behavior where market norms are frequently controverted and many
agreements informally enforced (Uzo & Mair, 2014). That setting then also lends itself to
follow-on quantitative analysis, collecting such data as those available through iRoko, a
Nigerian version of Netflix with a catalogue of more than 5000 movies. Although the
data are not as comprehensive as those used in previous Hollywood-based studies (e.g.
Miller & Shamsie, 1996; 2001; Shamsie, Martin, & Miller, 2009), they offer the
opportunity to analyze the world’s second-largest movie industry and its challenges in the
African context. Additional data are available from Nollywood’s equivalent to the Oscar
(http://www.nollywoodmoviesawards.tv/). The awards identify stars and hence enable
scholars to explore questions related to the role of stars in product development
(Groysberg, Polzer, & Elfenbein, 2011; Groysberg & Lee, 2009).
The nascent venture culture in Kenya has similarly inspired new researchers to go
after questions of value creation and capture in highly uncertain environments. A doctoral
thesis at Cambridge currently pursues these through ethnographic embedding in the
research context, in this case iHub, a Kenyan venture program (De La Chaux, 2015).
Another dissertation on Kenya uses interviews to illuminate the transfer of entrepreneurial
templates to the burgeoning ICT sector in Kenya (Weiss, 2015).
Another aspect that received attention in the past is the role of politicians and
bureaucrats. Acquaah (2012) for example shows that family firms benefit more from
relationships with bureaucrats while non-family firms benefit more from relationships with
community leaders. And Vaaler (2008) shows that foreign firms increase investments
before elections if it looks likely that the Right will beat the Left. As institutional
frameworks keep shifting, tracking their impact on business decisions and outcomes
remains a promising avenue of inquiry.
The data sources we have outlined offer a great many opportunities to exploit the
uniqueness of Africa to challenge established findings and develop new theory. Upon
completion of such an undertaking, the final hurdle that awaits African empiricists is that
of publishing the results in top-tier strategy journals.
 198 Africa Journal of Management

PUBLISHING AFRICAN EMPIRICS

Africa is the final research-context frontier. Its exploration will take time. Editorial
suspicion of empirical data from Africa, often justified, mirrors the suspicion previously
held towards other regional data sources, since overcome (Lewin, 2014). In this final part of
our brief statement, we would like to offer some pedestrian suggestions for what
prospective Africa researchers should and should not do to increase their chances of
acceptance into the strategy mainstream and, ultimately, publication in key journal outlets.
An obvious method to prevent the effective placement of theoretical research based on
African empirics is to pretend that the data are as any other. The approach might work if
Africa constitutes only a subset of a broader international database (e.g. Dutt et al., 2015;
Vaaler, 2011), but it runs into trouble when African data are the main and only component
of the analysis. In such situations, readers ask themselves why it was necessary to use data
from Tanzania, for example, rather than more familiar datasets from Western economies. Is
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it simply a matter of convenience?

Few such articles make it past the editor’s desk. Exceptions include a study of decision-
making effectiveness (Elbanna & Child, 2007), for which the choice of an Egyptian setting
is not directly articulated, and an analysis of family versus non-family-run firms (Acquaah,
2012), in which it is not entirely obvious as to why the chosen context is Ghana and not, say,
Hungary or Korea. Typically, authors need to make a strong theoretical case for using an
African research context to convince editors and reviewers to undergo the trouble of
gauging the quality of uncustomary data.
The good news is that there are plenty of phenomena that warrant empirical analysis in
Africa to further general theories of strategy. Extant theoretical conceptions of the boundary
of the firm, risk, or diversification, for example, seem to fly in the face of certain observable
realities in African economies. Pursuing these seeming contradictions is likely to enhance
our knowledge of strategy. Additionally, even a perhaps more mundane approach of
replicating studies in uniquely constrained contexts is a valuable first step towards bringing
African empirics into the wider strategy discourse, as Acquaah (2007) has done in a study
of social capital’s performance effects. Replication studies of this kind have a clearer raison
d’être and stand to find a kinder reception with leading journals than studies pretending
their African data sources would be interchangeable with comparable Western ones.
The Africa empiricist ought to go the extra mile to convince editors and reviewers of
data validity and reliability. Not tackling suspicions about data quality head on signals an
insufficient degree of reflectiveness on part of the researcher. Take the African Innovation
Outlook. Reviewers at leading journals may already be versed in judging how shortcomings
in representativeness and collection methods can impact inferences from European CIS
data, but they will need to be enlightened about the strengths and weaknesses of the African
equivalent. Some country samples of innovating firms can be exceedingly small, as in the
case of Senegal, for example, but perhaps they are still reflective of the population they are
meant to represent. Some countries such as Nigeria use trained researchers at dedicated
centers and statistics agencies to gather data reliably, whereas in others government
ministries or private agencies run the survey with sometimes non-transparent procedures.
Some stratify and extrapolate, others do not.
Demonstrating a thorough understanding of the limitations of rare (often precious)
African data sources is thus par for the course. Many reviewers acknowledge that novel
data-generating theoretical insights come with caveats, but before they assent to this
tradeoff, they typically want to understand it clearly and see if the authors have addressed it
 Opportunities and Challenges for Empirical Strategy Research in Africa 199

as best possible. One may expect the data section of papers on Africa to be much longer
than that of papers based on Compustat.
Finally, it is good practice to acknowledge and address natural prejudices international
editors, reviewers, and readers may have concerning African data. Many expect poor data
quality and collection methods. They might even wonder about the appropriateness of the
research effort, given that, as popular myth has it, African businesses are mostly concerned
with navigating corruption and violence, leaving little room for the kind of deliberate
competitive strategizing found in the West. While these notions are clearly misconceived,
they ought to be tackled proactively to prize open the route towards publication in
international theory journals. They can be avoided only if the publication target is a field
journal such as Journal of African Business or South African Journal of Business
Management, where such prejudices are a smaller issue. Unfortunately, field journals are
seldom attended to in the debates going on in theory journals.
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The Africa Journal of Management, to our understanding, was partly founded to

provide a bridge between the narrow confines of field journals and supposedly context-
agnostic theory journals, offering a stepping-stone for aspiring researchers of Africa,
especially from Africa, to join the international conversation on strategy and manage-
ment. They have been sorely missed for all too long.

CONCLUSION
We are excited about the many new initiatives aimed at increasing coverage of the last
empirical blind spot in management research. The Africa Journal of Management is a
case in point. Beyond data generated through private local connections, we have seen
little empirical research that has made it into top-tier journals. Our editorial provides some
pointers as to where one can find interesting data even in the absence of local contacts.
We also offer our 10 cents’ worth of advice on how best to publish such research.
Focusing on phenomena unique to Africa stands to provide invaluable theoretical
contributions in the field of strategy and beyond.

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