Toward a Campbellian Realist Organization Science

Abstract

Campbell’s search for resolution drove him to become a “critical, hypothetical, corrigible scientific realist” (1988b, p. 444−445). And as he himself admitted many times and as his work suggests so clearly, he also became an avowed evolutionary epistemologist. Scientific realism resolved the first dilemma. Evolutionary epistemology abrogated the third one and Campbell’s later conflation of evolutionary epistemology with hermeneutics nullified the fourth. In all of his writing, however, Campbell seems not have returned to the second one. One purpose of this chapter is to resolve the second dilemma. Assuming Campbell’s dilemmas are resolved and his epistemology at least preliminarily completed—realizing that no epistemology is ever finished—Campbell offers a useful message for organization science. His Campbellian realism provides the foundation for an objective organization science that does not deny the epistemological dynamics uncovered by historical relativists such as Hanson (1958), Kuhn (1962), and Feyerabend (1975) nor the sociology of knowledge developed by interpretists and social constructionists (Bloor 1976, Burrell and Morgan 1979, Brannigan, 1981, Shapin and Schaffer 1985, Latour and Woolgar 1986, Nickles 1989). Campbell’s epistemology and the broader scientific realist and evolutionary epistemologies upon which he draws suggest that the current paradigm war between organizational positivists (Pfeffer 1982, 1993, 1995; Donaldson 1985, 1996, Bacharach 1989), and relativists (Lincoln 1985, Lincoln and Guba 1985, Reed and Hughes 1992, Perrow, 1994, Van Maanen 1995a,b, Alvesson and Deetz 1996, Burrell 1996, Chia 1996) is philosophically uninformed, archaic, and dysfunctional. Does it matter that organization scientists are philosophically archaic? Indeed it does. Pfeffer (1993) presents data showing that multiparadigm disciplines are given low status in the broader scientific community, with a variety of negative consequences. Donaldson (1995) counts fifteen paradigms already and Prahalad and Hamel (1994) call for even more, as do Clegg, Hardy, and Nord (1996). As Campbell (1995) notes, the physical and biological sciences are held in high esteem because they hold to the goal of objectivity in science—the use of an objective external reality serves as the ultimate criterion variable for winnowing out inferior theories and paradigms. Relativist programs, on the other hand, in principle tolerate as many paradigms as there are socially constructed perspectives and interpretations. Hughes (1992, p. 297) says, “The naivety of reasoned certainties and reified objectivity, upon which organization theory built its positivist monuments to modernism, is unceremoniously jettisoned...[and] these articles of faith are unlikely to form the axioms of any rethinking or new theoretical directions....” If he is correct organization science is destined to proliferate even more paradigms and sink to even lower status—surely an unattractive outcome. Campbellian realism provides a way out of this downward spiral. A dynamic objectivist organization science that does not deny a social constructionist sociology of knowledge is possible. Surely this is a message that would delight many organization scientists. Campbell’s intense interest in scientific realism and evolutionary epistemology makes little sense absent a realization that he was well aware that philosophers had abandoned both the Received View and historical relativism by 1970. The epitaph appeared as Suppe’s The Structure of Scientific Theories in 1977. I begin with a painfully brief review of the essential arguments causing the abandoning. Then I turn to a discussion of some aspects of