Science, Writing and Existence

Before the break, I promised I would say something about the difference between the logical and the existential conceptions of science. Heidegger makes this distinction in Being and Time, where he distinguishes between approaching science as "an interconnection of true propositions" and a "mode of Being-in-the-world" that discovers truths (H. 357). Heidegger is interested in the ontological conditions of "the theoretical attitude".

He emphasizes, however, that it is not merely the opposite of a "practical" attitude. Science ("theoretical exploration") is not a matter of "hold[ing] back from any kind of manipulation". On the contrary, Heidegger says, science requires a great deal of practical activity: setting up experiments in physics, preparing slides for observation through the microscope, digging up artifacts for archaeological research. Here, already in 1927, Heidegger is heralding the emergence of what we today call "science studies", i.e., the interdisciplinary study of science as variety of social and material practices. Playing on one sense of the German word "Betrieb", I have previously called this conception "science as hustle and bustle" (here and here).

Writing plays an important role in this regard. "Even the 'most abstract' way of working out problems and establishing what has been obtained, one manipulates equipment for writing, for example" (H. 358, my emphasis). In fact, Heidegger has earlier defined human existence by rereading Aristotle's famous characterization of human beings as "rational animals" as "that living thing whose Being is essentially determined by the potentiality for discourse" (H. 25). In this sense, then, Foucault's early work on "discursive formations" can be considered an "existential" analysis of science. It is also, of course, an important part of the transition from the philosophy of science in the traditional sense to contemporary "science studies". While writing is not the only practical aspect of modern research, it may be the most straightforwardly "existential", as the slogan "publish or perish" reminds us.

Philosophy of Science

I've been having some interesting discussions lately at a general philosophy of science blog called It's Only a Theory (great name for such a blog). It has got me thinking about the connection between the study of academic composition and the philosophy of science.

Back in 1837, Bernard Bolzano published his Theory of Science (Wissenschaftslehre). In it, he argued that "logic should be a theory of science", and by this he meant something very particular, namely, "that science which indicates to us how we should present the sciences in scholarly books suited to their purpose" (38). Like (at least the early) Wittgenstein, he believed that science is best approached, to use Heidegger's formulation in Being and Time, as "an interconnection of true propositions" (H. 357). (I'll write another post after the break about why Heidegger's definition of the "logical conception of science" is important.) The question, for Bolzano, was how best to arrange these propositions so that they could efficiently express what we know about the world. He recognized that there are many more true propositions than known propositions, but argued, to my mind rightly, that we do well to write the ones that we do know down in a clear and surveyable manner.

Bolzano talked about "scholarly books" or "treatises" (Lehrbücher, arguably translatable as "textbooks"), which was a natural genre to focus on 170 years ago. But his general aim, separate from the question of genre, was to understand "how we can divide up the entire domain of truth in particular parts in an appropriate way and cultivate what belongs to each of them and present it in written form" (41). Today, I would argue, the "theory" or "logic" of science is about how to present scientific results in academic journal articles.

Also, with the progress we have made from logical positivism (in the philosophy of science) to social constructivism (in science and technology studies), leaving open how far along that route we want to travel, it may be useful to shift our focus from the logic of our store of knowledge ... Bolzano asks us to imagine the totality of human knowledge "written down in a single book" (35) ... to the rhetoric of our conversation about what we know. After all, our knowledge is constantly being revised and the more clearly we express what we think we know, the more efficiently those revisions can take place.

Theoretical Contributions

"If a man starts noticing ANYthing, there is no telling what he mayn't notice next." (Ezra Pound)

A common reason that editors and reviewers give for rejecting a manuscript is that its "theoretical contribution" is either unclear or non-existent. They may grant that the subject matter is relevant and even that the empirical material is interesting, but the paper is unpublishable because it does not "make a contribution to theory development", as the phrase goes. This criticism is worth taking seriously. And to do that we must understand what it means.

The Academy of Management Review is probably the most highly regarded place for publishing theory in the managerial sciences. It is special in that it allows purely theoretical or "conceptual" work, i.e., work that does not present empirical results. But even the other major journals, such the Administrative Science Quarterly or the Academy of Management Journal only publish research that carries a significant theoretical punch. That punch is the subject of this post.

While they were editors of AMR, David Whetten and Martin Kilduff each wrote a brief statement of what counts as a theoretical contribution. (Here are links to PDFs of Whetten 1989 and Kilduff 2006.) I prefer Kilduff's because it is more current and more practical than Whetten's. But both give you a good sense of what theory means for management scholars.

It may surprise you to learn that "the route to good theory leads not through gaps in the literature but through an engagement with problems in the world that you find personally interesting" (Kilduff 2006: 252). This is a very important point. Although theory development rarely succeeds in isolation from the writings of our your peers, a mere gap in the literature, i.e., the fact that your peers have not previously theorized a particular phenomenon, is not, in and of itself, an occasion for theoretical work. There is no merely "formal" justification for a theoretical paper, and the best way to be sure that you have a substantial contribution to make is to ask yourself whether you find your own conclusions interesting, not whether your peers should find them interesting.

That said, a theoretical contribution is precisely a contribution to the form, not the substance, of research. One (non-theoretical) thing that a good research paper does is to inform readers about what is going on in the world of (in our case) management practice. But, in order to transmit information, the sending and receiving station must agree about the form that the communication takes. A theoretical contribution is one that reconfigures, if sometimes only slightly, those protocols. A theoretical contribution transforms the way we look at things and the way we talk about them.

This is why Kilduff emphasizes those "problems in the world". You cannot contribute to theory if you don't have something to say about what is going on "out there" in real life. Our theories need to be transformed in so far as our current theories are unable to grasp the problems that managers deal with today. Your theoretical contribution is the change you are demanding in the way your reader understands empirical information. This is true even in purely theoretical articles where you don't, properly speaking, present empirical results. Likewise, even "purely empirical" work needs to have some implicit impact on how we see things. After reading your paper, your readers should begin to notice things they hadn't noticed before.

The Craft of Theorizing

Every Monday afternoon, I moderate an informal colloquium about the craft of research. This week we talked about about how to do a literature review (see this post for some thoughts on that subject). One of the participants suggested that we talk about theorizing next week, so I thought I would some spend some time this morning thinking about the practical side of that often rather abstract activity.

Theorizing is the art of developing a general position on a specific topic. Your theory should establish a connection between the empirical setting you are interested in and other settings of the same kind; it should therefore also establish a connection between your research and the research of your peers. Theorizing and reviewing the literature are therefore quite related activities.

Theory is not concerned with what actually happens in the field of practice we study; it is concerned with what we expect to happen. As our knowledge of what actually happens in specific organizations grows, our expectations of what generally happens in organizations change. Theorizing is the reflective process by which that change is made explicit and by which it is raised as a theme for discussion.

My favourite definition of theory is Pierre Bourdieu's: a theory is a "programme of perception". Theorizing, then, is the act of re-programming your perceptual apparatus. When you theorize, you are consciously transforming your way of looking at the world. Just as planning is not just a matter of intending to do something in the future, merely thinking about your subject does not constitute theorizing. You are theorizing when you are developing (sometimes just tweaking) your programme of perception.

Theorizing is a craft to the extent that your expectations are available to you to handle and manipulate. Your expectations are the material that you shape (craftily) when theorizing. Working with theory therefore has a distinct feel and what you feel when you theorize is a change in your expectations. You feel that the next time you look at your empirical data, you will see it differently. You will notice something new.