2018 Interview: Best Paper Award
Interview with Matthew Metzger (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs) and Jennifer Howard-Grenville (University of Cambridge, Judge Business School), winners of the 2018 OMT Best Paper Award.
Interviewed by Hovig Tchalian (Drucker School of Management, Claremont Graduate Unviersity).
Congratulations on winning the OMT Best Paper Award! Can you briefly highlight what your paper is about?
In this paper, we use qualitative data and analytic methods to explore the persistence of U.S.-based independent travel agencies in the face of repeated disruptions triggered by airline actions, the rise of the Internet, and the 9/11 attacks. We find that the travel agent category persisted because its members pragmatically altered their roles and strategies in a largely uncoordinated manner to survive these disruptions. This led to a collective regeneration of roles underpinning the category and its ultimate and unlikely persistence.
How did you become engaged with the idea of this wonderful project?
The Academy of Management Conference is actually indirectly responsible for the genesis of this project. Several years back, one of this paper’s coauthors was a new doctoral student and had to arrange transportation to that year’s conference in Anaheim. Upon learning that using a travel agent was one option to book airline travel to the conference, this coauthor responded “Wow, I didn’t know travel agents still existed!” This common misconception sparked initial inquiries into the current category, and unlikely survival, of U.S.-based travel agents.
What did you find most surprising during your data-gathering process
In addition to discovering travel agents’ paradoxically uncoordinated means of weathering decades of seemingly ‘unsurvivable’ disruptions, we were surprised at the overwhelmingly positive emotions expressed by our interviewees. Agents’ loss of approximately 80% of their category’s revenues from the obviation of airline ticket sales throughout the 1990s and 2000s would probably lead a casual observer to expect interviewees to be, at best, apathetic and, most likely, fatalistic about the future of their category. Our interviewees, however, expressed a profound gratitude for the loss of these airline tickets and a collective opportunity to resurrect their historic role repertoire. As one noted, “Most of us didn’t get into the business to be airline ticket takers, we wanted to be vacation specialists. So maybe it’s good that this has forced us to go back to doing what we love.”
Would you like to share any challenges you faced during the research process? If so, how did you overcome them?
Qualitative projects, and specifically interviewing people, always entails their fair share of challenges. We had some help recruiting interviewees from the agents’ professional association, but many of the interviewees were obtained through snowballing out and essentially “cold calling” based on past interviewee’s professional networks. It’s always a trick to get people to give up their time for an interview, especially when you’re just a faceless name on an email, but persistence and “casting a wide net” ultimately resulted in enough interviewees.
Again, congratulations for winning the award! Are there any comments about the paper and its development that you would like to share?
Thanks! Only that we are glad we persisted with this interesting dataset and analysis and are very honored to have won the award!