Three strategies for scientific research in management are examined: advocacy, induction, and multiple hypotheses. Advocacy of a single dominant hypothesis is efficient, but biased. Induction is not biased, but it is inefficient. The multiple hypotheses strategy seems to be both efficient and unbiased. Despite its apparent lack of objectivity, most management scientists use advocacy. For exampl...

Although critiques of objectivity have been vast, and experimental, postmodern approaches have been important and inspiring, the author argues that the pursuit of objectivity per se is not the biggest roadblock to producing critical knowledge. Rather, problems of objectivity are rooted in the larger issue of emotional detachment, which is facilitated by academic armor. Emotional detachment is i...

Between 1958 and 1962, with the publication of Polanyi's Personal Knowledge and Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, objectivity carne to be recognized as a problem of fundamental, not to say ultimate, importance. The problem is of ultimate importance for the pursuit of all forms of knowledge and of fundamental importance to the natural and social sciences. Polanyi and Kuhn are two o...

My original 2003 paper highlighted that there is a lot of marketing going on by BOTH “passive pundits” and “active advocates” instead of objective research. That paper demonstrated how it isn’t objective science if the so called “research” uses essentially the same data (as the Wermers and Howard pieces on Advisor Perspectives, 2008 did) yet comes to opposite conclusions. True objectivity and s...

Subjective Bayesianism is a major school of uncertain reasoning and statistical inference. Yet, it is often criticized for an apparent lack of objectivity. By and large, these criticisms come in three different forms. First, the lack of constraints on prior probabilities, second, the entanglement of statistical evidence and degree of belief, third, the apparent blindness to bias in experimental...

Subjective Bayesianism is a major school of uncertain reasoning and statistical inference. Yet, it is often criticized for an apparent lack of objectivity. By and large, these criticisms come in three different forms. First, the lack of constraints on prior probabilities, second, the entanglement of statistical evidence and degree of belief, third, the apparent blindness to bias in experimental...

The concepts of objectivity, truth, and the authority of empirical standards have comeunder serious challenge by some critics of the social sciences in the past several decades. Feminist critics charge that the concepts and methods of the social sciences reflect an essentialpatriarchalism that discredits the objectivity of social science knowledge. Marxist criticssometimes contend t...

The emphasis on the limitations of objectivity, in specific guises and networks, has been a continuing theme of contemporary analytic philosophy for the past few decades. The popular sport of baiting feminist philosophers into pointing to what's left out of objective knowledge, or into describing what methods, exactly, they would offer to replace the powerful "objective" methods grounding scien...