From Fields to Science: Can Organization Studies make the Transition?

It is no secret that the body of research about organizations is multiparadigmatic (Pfeffer, 1993; Donaldson, 1995). Kuhn (1962) characterizes such a body of research as prescientific. Two questions arise. First, does it matter if a discipline is a multiparadigmatic collection of what Kuhn calls “fields”? It is clear from Pfeffer’s (1993) analysis that multiparadigmatic disciplines are held in low status by members of other sciences in universities when it comes to funding and salaries (proxies for external legitimacy) – as I will detail later on. The answer to the first raises the second. How does a multifield community of scholars become a science? A debate now rages in organization studies, as it has in the philosophy of science for decades, as scholars search for an answer. At its heart, the debate is about epistemology – the rules used to determine whether statements about real-world phenomena are to be believed as true or not. This, in turn, raises questions such as “Do real-world phenomena really exist?” “What are the important research questions?” “What is truth?” “When do we recognize one statement as more truthful than another?” “Who decides what the rules are?” “Is there just one agreed-upon body of rules or can/does each scholar simply adhere to his/her own personal rules?” On one side are so-called normal science philosophers (Suppe, 1977; Putnam, 1981; Nola, 1988; Holton, 1993, Koertge, 1989; Sokal and Bricmont, 1998), along with Pfeffer (1982), Sutton and Staw (1995) and Donaldson (1996) in organization studies – and most authors in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Management Science, and Strategic Management Journal. This side believes that it is desirable and possible to have one body of rules – one epistemology – that guides scholars toward a more or less truthful set of statements about real-world phenomena. Normal science epistemology now rests in the hands of scientific realists who believe in a probabilistic truth (de Regt, 1994; Aronson et al., 1994; Hooker, 1995; Azevedo, 1997; McKelvey, 1999b). Putnam sees realism as a search for “‘intrinsic’ property, a property something has ‘in itself’, apart from any contribution made by language or the mind” (1987: 8). Chia views normal science as “a search for transcendental truths” (1996: 15), as does Bhaskar (1975). 1