Structural Correspondence Between Organizational Theories

Herman Aksom,Svitlana Firsova

doi:10.1007/s40926-021-00163-3

Abstract

Organizational research constitutes a differentiated, complex and fragmented field with multiple contradicting and incommensurable theories that make fundamentally different claims about the social and organizational reality. In contrast to natural sciences, the progress in this field can’t be attributed to the principle of truthlikeness where theories compete against each other and only best theories survive and prove they are closer to the truth and thus demonstrate scientific knowledge accumulation. We defend the structural realist view on the nature of organizational theories in order to demonstrate that despite the multiplicity of isolated and competing explanations of organization-environment relations these theories are still logically compatible and mutually consistent which, in turn, assures theoretical progress in the field. Although postulating different and incompatible ontologies, three most successful organization-environments theories, namely, contingency theory, new institutionalism and population ecology share the same explanations of the relations between organizations and environments at the structural level. Without this principle one would say that what occurs in the field of organization theory is a change rather than a progress.

Highlights

Our attitudes toward scientific theories and the logic of their emergence, development and disappearance constitute major questions for the philosophy of science (Popper 1963; Laudan et al 1986; Psillos 1999; Niiniluoto 1984)
Structural realism maintains that scientists develop the picture of the world which increasingly becomes more and more accurate, even though these theories accomplish this task by discovering the structural feature of the world, not the nature: “Theories talk about all sorts of entities and processes with which we are not acquainted...we can know about them by description, that is we can know about them via their structural properties” (Ladyman 1998). We argue that this structural correspondence is present between existing organizational theories, we defend the view that the shift from contingency theory towards institutional theory and population ecology has maintained basis assumptions and structures of contingency theory
While structural relations between phenomena is all we can know this level is still enough for concluding that contingency theory, new institutionalism and population ecology share the same view on the logical features of organization-environment world

Summary

Introduction

Our attitudes toward scientific theories and the logic of their emergence, development and disappearance constitute major questions for the philosophy of science (Popper 1963; Laudan et al 1986; Psillos 1999; Niiniluoto 1984). New theory retains All theories Cumulative shift at the realism cumulative shift structural should describe and structural level correspondence explain the same ensures the with its predecessor reality and being structural continuity about different between subsequent aspects of the same theories across world theory change deny the possibility of knowing and discovering the truth picture of the world and reject this virtue of scientific theories. In contrast to realists who mobilize the notion of truth and accept that mature successful theories are capable of being true and being correct about the unobservable entities they postulate (Musgrave 1988; Psillos 1999; Chakravartty 2007), constructive empiricism is an instrumentalist view which considers theories as nothing but useful tool for classifying, explaining and predicting observable phenomena, that is, “saving the phenomena” (Van Fraassen 1977; Bogen and Woodward 1988; Bogen 2011; Massimi 2007). It can be seen that all three theories maintain the transition from diversity to isomorphic tendencies, explaining how over time organizational fields tend to converge towards similarity and organizations tend to become similar to each other

A Survival of the Fittest

Conclusion