Umbrella Advocates Versus Validity Police: A Life-Cycle Model

The rise and fall of organizational effectiveness, an “umbrella construct” once at the forefront of organizational theory, is traced through four life-cycle stages: emerging excitement, the validity challenge, “tidying up with typologies,” and construct collapse. Although the study of effectiveness has declined, research on its component elements continues to thrive. Using the effectiveness story as an exemplar, we develop a more general model of this process for all umbrella constructs, defined here as broad concepts used to encompass and account for a diverse set of phenomena. This life-cycle model—driven largely by a dialectic between researchers with a broad perspective (“umbrella advocates”) and those with a narrower one (“validity police”)—leaves open the possibility that some umbrella constructs may ultimately be made coherent or remain permanently controversial rather than collapse, as effectiveness has done. We propose that umbrella constructs will arise most frequently in academic fields without a theoretical consensus, will inevitably have their validity seriously challenged, will have a shorter life than their constituent elements, and will be more vulnerable to validity challenges when they lack support from practitioners. This model’s implications for the future direction of such current umbrella constructs as organizational learning, culture, strategy, and performance are also explored and elaborated. Ironically, some evidence suggests that studies around the construct of organizational “performance” have arisen to replace the nearly identical, but fallen umbrella construct of organizational effectiveness. (Sociology of Organization Science; Paradigms; Theory Development; Organization Theory; Umbrella Constructs) The question for organizational science is whether the field can strike an appropriate balance between theoretical tyranny and an anything-goes attitude. (Pfeffer 1993, p. 616) Organizational science is characterized by its attention to successive concepts, with different (but often related) terminologies, that conform to a life-cycle of: emerging excitement, followed by critique, and either transformation or decline. While some maintain that the resulting field is little more than theoretical labeling and relabeling, that organizational behavior is a language game (Astley 1985), we argue that these “labels” follow regular, nonrandom, and nontrivial patterns based on a dialectic that ultimately strengthens the field, even though this may appear highly disruptive at times. To bring order to this variety and multiplicity of frameworks, the field could select a single perspective to organize around (Pfeffer 1993). That approach attempts to transcend the standard life cycles of theoretical formulations, documented by sociologists of science (Mullins 1973, Zuckerman 1988, Abrahamson 1999). While a single framework could bring the field more in line with its self-image as a linear and cumulative science, we propose that a more evolutionary life-cycle pattern of concepts, encompassing their birth, maturity, and decline, provides a scholarly PAUL M. HIRSCH AND DANIEL Z. LEVIN Umbrella Advocates Versus Validity Police: A Life-Cycle Model 200 ORGANIZATION SCIENCE/Vol. 10, No. 2, March–April 1999 dynamic, or dialectic, that is both descriptively accurate and intellectually valuable. This dynamic, which sets our life-cycle model in motion, takes place between two forces within the field. On one side are those who argue that broad (umbrella) perspectives are necessary to keep the field relevant and in touch with the larger, albeit messier, world. We call this first group umbrella advocates and believe that without them our field risks becoming disconnected and irrelevant. On the other side are more methodologically oriented researchers who call for narrower perspectives that conform to more rigorous standards of validity and reliability. We call this second group the validity police, and without them, we argue, our field risks becoming too sloppy and scattered. Note that this debate over the fate of umbrella constructs—the topic of this paper—is in many ways analogous to other ongoing battles within the field of organizational behavior: between, for example, processual and structural (Meyer 1991), interpretive and functionalist (Barley et al. 1988), the tension between external and internal validity (Cook and Campbell 1979), exploration versus exploitation (March 1996), and between relevance and rigor. Rather than argue the merits of only one side, however, we believe the field needs the two types of problem framing to remain both relevant and scientific. That is, this dialectic, between “an anything goes attitude” and “theoretical tyranny” (Pfeffer 1993, p. 616) is a useful—even necessary—part of our field, where each side’s contribution includes preventing the other from going too far for too long. It facilitates what March (1996, p. 278) calls the “rough balance between openness and discipline.” Moreover, this dynamic between umbrella advocates and validity police plays out in a number of predictable and interesting ways, particularly in the case of the umbrella construct. We define an umbrella construct as a broad concept or idea used loosely to encompass and account for a set of diverse phenomena. Umbrella constructs used in organizational behavior include organizational effectiveness, learning, performance, strategy, and culture. As we shall see, consensus on how to operationalize an umbrella construct is rarely achieved. After documenting the rise and fall of organizational effectiveness as an exemplar, we will derive a more general model of the life-cycle of umbrella constructs and offer several propositions about their fate. Finally, we elaborate on the implications of this model for the future of several current umbrella constructs in organizational behavior. The Case of Organizational Effectiveness: An Exemplar Agreeing that the meaning of organizational effectiveness is hard to pin down and difficult to measure does not diminish in any way its central place in macro organizational behavior. . . . (Miles 1980, p. 359) The construct of organizational effectiveness is the ultimate dependent variable in organizational research. (Cameron and