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The formal study of management continues to expand worldwide. It is also expanding academically as relatively newer subfields (such as Entrepreneurship, Knowledge Management and Cognitive Neuroscience) are being added to its already rich panoply and pertinent academic societies continue to form. The extant plethora of schemes, principles, models and theories has become baffling. Scholars and practitioner jokingly remark: “It’s a jungle out there!” At various times, academic societies have prodded research aimed at taking stock of the knowledge already acquired in its several domains and assessing their respective contributions. This conceptual inquiry aims at taking a critical look at the way theory evaluation and development issues are usually approached.
While the domains of management are becoming more sophisticated, they do exhibit different shades of scientific rigor. According to the degree of multi-dimensional complexity of the respective domains, they can still be grouped into the two clusters described by Snow’s (1959) fabled contrast of the two cultures, the mathematically oriented one and the more holistically driven generalist one. This differentiation of the subfields of management is not contested; yet management theory evaluators very often succumb to the fallacy of treating the field as homogeneous – and as an integral part of the pure scientific domain. Thus, flattering themselves as formal scientists, management authors often turn for guidance to big-S science’s logician Popper rather than more pragmatic philosophers (e.g., Ackoff, 1962; Churchman, 1979).
Another concern is that, beside editorial advice, most of what budding authors find in the extant literature are dated evaluations of the impact of past intellectual contributions (e.g., Miner, 2003; Colquitt & Zapata-Phelan, 2007). This certainly is a worthwhile part of the beginners’ panoply of knowledge elements; but more in line with their present needs would be some indication of how to initiate theory building, as well as the prerequisites for being able to venture into it from a beneficial angle. So, our second concern is the common tendency to provide, for what is basically an ex ante or real-time decision process, guidelines fitting mostly ex post evaluation. The more beneficial question to pose should rather be: Can sensible methodological advice be provided to help the budding management researcher in his or her quest to devise “good and lasting” theories?
In the first two parts of the following development, we will elaborate on the ideal definitional requirements of theory and ways to appraise it, contrasting the hard and softer sciences, and emphasizing the important role of consistency with a clear axiomatic foundation or, at least, an explicit assumptional basis. In its third part, we will discuss the methodological differences between assessing an extant theory and developing a new one. This will lead us to proposing, in its fourth part, three criteria that would embody adaptive framing as a conceptual device that can guide the process of theory building in real time, as opposed to being mainly useful in hindsight appraisals of past theoretical work (e.g., as in Bacharach, 1989; or Miner, 1984, 2003).