In the preceding article, Barker and Mone raised questions about the m
ethodological adequacy of an article that we published in 1992 in this
journal. After careful consideration of their 'replication' and reass
essment of our work, we reached surprising conclusions. First, Barker
and Mone failed to accurately represent many major elements of our stu
dy. Second, viewed independently, their conclusions can be attributed
to unusual and selectively applied operational definitions, disregard
for company-specific and industry contexts, and exclusive reliance on
secondary data. Nevertheless, their results also add strong support fo
r the emerging theory of a two-stage turnaround process involving retr
enchment and recovery, as modeled by Robbins and Pearce (1992).