Postmodernism vs. Truth in Management Theory

Those of us who study organizations and are professors of management work on the front lines, so to speak, where the beliefs we have about how to improve managerial performance get passed directly on to practitioners. The question is, What right do we have to put our beliefs in a privileged position? Beliefs, by definition, are supposed to be true. According to Webster’s (1996) a belief is a conviction about the truth of some statement and/or reality of some phenomenon, especially when based on examination of evidence. Are all of our lectures based on consensually agreed upon evidentiary standards? What are these standards and who should maintain them? No one states the dilemma facing management scholars more clearly than March and Sutton. They conclude their analysis by observing that the questionable status of organizational research and its underlying methodology is no secret, but it persists in the form of journal-based legitimacy expectations anyway. Why so? They point to “research context” or institutional structure that serves to create barriers against “...the kind of richly detailed, multiple-site, long historical studies using in-depth scholarly analysis and complex models that might yield data more appropriate to the task” (p. 702). They imply that the narrative and text analysis methods of postmodernists are better (see Calás and Smircich, 1999; and Langley, 1999; for example). Unfortunately, this could be no better than pitting the shaky 20 century modernist, normal science research standards against the anti-science rhetoric of the postmodernists. March and Sutton suggest that “...scholarship is probably better served by maintaining a tension...” (p. 704). Well, ok, but tension can lead to strokes and heart attacks. I think there is a better way. Philosophy of science examines when a researcher has the right to claim a belief is true. In the 60+ years since Reichenbach’s (1938) distinction between “justification” and “discovery” logics, the record of science shows that there is no shortage of discoveries. The problem is not lack of insight, innovation, new theories, and so forth. The problem lies with justification logic. We live in a world where Gary Hamel makes the front cover of Fortune magazine by trumpeting his “discovery” of ten simple rules to make billions of dollars. But it is not just Fortune’s problem. I have a colleague who has served on several of my dissertation advisory committees. To him, theory sections are irrelevant. All a student needs to do is build a rich enough data set such that some number of statistical findings at the p < 0.05 will appear and, Voila, the minimum standard for publication has been met—American dustbowl empiricism at its best. Surely there is more to good science than this! The question becomes, “What is an appropriate justification logic for management scholars? As one indication of the importance and relevance of this question, most of the authors