In our 1983 paper, McKelvey and I took the field of “organization science” to task for not
paying sufficient attention to the scope conditions under which research findings are …

During the last ten years, efforts have been made to improve the breadth and quality of
empirical approaches to the study of organizations (eg Burrell and Morgan 1979; Van …

Over the past thirty years, the number of approaches to studying organizations has grown
rapidly. We have moved from a time characterized by competing theories to one filled with …

A major bar to the cumulation of knowledge about organizations, to effective theory
construction, and to the accumulation of data collected by different research teams lies in the …

Comparative organizational analysis once dominated American organizational sociology,
grounded in rich case studies about organizational processes and outcomes. The Columbia …

This article analyzes the prospects for cumulative theory development in organization
theory. Organization theory generally takes organizations (business corporations, nonprofits …

Purpose Organizational research is a purposeful human activity. These purposes can be
described broadly by Habermas's (1971) typology of human interests. OS researchers may …

Research methods similar to those used in the natural sciences have long been the norm in
organizational behavior and organization theory. However, several writers have recently …

In recent years, increasing attention has been devoted to understanding how the
assumptions which scientists bring to their subject of investigation guide and influence what …

This paper proposes that organizational science could be applied more widely if the field
were more concerned with the conditions under which research findings are valid. Papers in …