Suchergebnisse

We propose a more explicit role for abductive reasoning, or the development of initial explanation, in hypothetico-deductive (H-D) inquiry. We begin by describing the roots of abduction in pragmatism and its role in exploration and discovery. Recognizing that pragmatism treats abductive reasoning as inevitable, we argue that it can also be a deliberate form of reasoning in scientific inquiry, articulating the unique place it can have in hypothetico-deductive theorizing. We explain the opportunities from surfacing abductive reasoning in H-D where it already exists; from explicitly acknowledging abductive reasoning as a complement in building logical chains in H-D; and from using abductive reasoning as a substitute for H-D logic when a body of knowledge exhibits inconsistent, contradictory, or discrepant results. We elaborate strategies for data search and selection, data production and compilation, and analytical corroboration. Our overall argument is that the deliberate use of abductive reasoning in hypothetico-deductive projects has distinct advantages stemming from an explicitly tight connection between data and theory. We end by explaining the benefits of actively recognizing the role of abductive reasoning in organizational and management theorizing.The article was written and prepared by the U.S. goverenment employee(s) on official time and is therefore in the public domain.

We examine how organizations that suffer core stigma—disapproval for their core attributes—survive. We explain how men's bathhouses avoid negative attention and minimize the transfer of stigma to their network partners, including customers, suppliers, and regulators, through careful management of their business activities. Using observational, archival, and interview data across different institutional environments, we find that, in response to suffering core stigma, men's bathhouses use a variety of strategies to shield their partners depending, in part, on the level of hostility that they face in their environment. Our work contributes to the emerging literature on organization-level stigma, especially by focusing on how core-stigmatized organizations are able to survive and by drawing attention to the special problem of stigma transfer. Our findings also focus attention on the use of legitimacy in organization studies and call for further examinations of core-stigmatized and other illegitimate organizations to expand our theoretical domain to the fullest range of organizational processes and outcomes.

Recent perspectives have focused on the role of the firm in the generation and use of knowledge. These perspectives suggest that, while knowledge is "owned" at the individual level, the integration of this knowledge to a collective level is necessary. This integration of knowledge typically takes place in groups. In our experimental study, we examine how individuals in groups engage in micro-level interactions to effectively integrate knowledge by examining the effects of using three formal interventions: Information Sharing, Questioning Others, and Managing Time. In particular, we observe that simple formal interventions can improve knowledge integration when they lead to "windows of opportunity" for group members to consider ways to improve their work process that go beyond the formal intervention instructions. The most effective groups used these formal interventions to focus their attention into organized clusters of activity, during which they significantly changed their work process and improved their subsequent knowledge integration. In particular, groups in the Questioning Others and Managing Time conditions exhibited greater knowledge integration than groups in the Information Sharing and Control conditions. Groups with high-knowledge integration paced their attention to both adaptive improvements to their process and task execution. Overall, this study identifies simple structures, interruptions, and time pacing as central to the emerging concept of group flexibility by which members enhance their performance on novel and/or ambiguous tasks. We note links to complexity theory and knowledge-based thinking as well.

Despite the recognized importance of groups' external contexts to their functioning, there is little research that fully explicates the relationship between groups and their environments. Instead, much extant research treats groups as closed systems. To advance the field's understanding, we explore the treatment of the relationship between groups and their environments in existing literature by reviewing research that incorporates groups in naturally varying environments. We identify three predominant characterizations in the literature: the environment as a resource pool, as an impetus for change, and as a target. We offer a summary of the assumptions in these characterizations, a critical examination of each characterization, and develop a future research agenda that extends each characterization and challenges its key assumptions in an effort to explore the relationship between groups and their external environments.