From an early age I have been studying and doing science. In college I discovered industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology and my focus shifted from natural to organizational science. Through my career I have seen an evolution in the organizational sciences that includes IO and management, away from what I learned as the scientific approach to something more akin to scimanities. No longer do research reports in our major journals focus on the science. The major focus is on narratives and stories. It has me wondering has science been forgotten in organizational research?
Science Is About Data
What characterizes science is that the focus is on systematically collected data used to address a research purpose. It is concerned first and foremost with what was done and what was found. Discovery is the heart of science–investigating a problem or a research question to find something new and interesting, not to mention potentially useful. We might ask how people respond to particular experiences at work or whether exposure to certain working conditions affects health. There are many such discoveries in the organizational sciences that has produced a large knowledge base, much of which informs organizational practice. For example, we know that how we treat employees affects their attitudes, engagement, and retention. We know that people under stress are more likely to have accidents.
In a scientific report, the main focus should be on the Method and Results sections. The Method provides details about what was done in the investigation. The Results summarize the findings. The purpose of the Introduction is to state the purpose of the investigation and to put it into the context of the existing literature. The Discussion goes beyond the Results and links what was found to the broader literature, putting those findings into context. This approach can be seen today in fields outside of the organizational sciences. Introductions tend to be short, and the focus is on Method and Results. In my experience this is where peer reviewers focus most of their attention in journals outside of my own field, such as the health sciences.
Has Science Been Forgotten in Organizational Research?
Where things stand now in the organizational domain, the science takes a back seat to the story the authors tell. In my experience as an editor, reviewer and author, the biggest complaint by reviewers on papers is inadequate theory in the Introduction. What most peer reviewers and editors seem to mean is that the narrative doesn’t tell a compelling story. The authors have failed to provide a convincing argument that their suppositions and claims make sense. Regardless of the rigor of the method or the implications of the results, the story is just not well enough told.
Not long ago I was part of a team that submitted a paper to a top organizational journal. The editor asked us to revise and resubmit, where one of the major problems noted by reviewers was that we failed to adequately explain our contribution. We did our best to remedy that deficiency, and in the next round the editor rejected our paper, noting that now that the paper explained our intended contribution, it wasn’t sufficient. This confused me. Aren’t peer reviewers expert scientists who can look at what was done and found and come to a learned conclusion whether the contribution was sufficient? Apparently, they were judging our contribution not on the rigor of our methods or the importance of our findings, but the quality of our explanation about what our intended purpose was, that is, our story.
Science or Scimanities?
One day I was reading a research report and it struck me that the Introduction seemed more like humanities than science. It was very well crafted, leading the reader on a journey of ideas. There were claims made and citations given at the end of the claims. But missing was an explanation of how the work cited supported those claims, as if just having names and dates in parentheses was sufficient. I started looking up citations, and what I discovered is that it wasn’t unusual for the work cited to provide no data relevant to the claim. Rather it was a source that discussed the idea, perhaps speculating about the claim in the Discussion. What was missing in some cases was reference to prior research that provided support for the claim, and more importantly, what the nature of that support was. In other words it read like humanities, although it was about a scientific study, hence scimanities.
The Way Forward
Has science been forgotten in organizational research? I would not say forgotten as the studies reported are scientific, but in many ways science has been de-emphasized. Introduction sections have become overly long, with too much emphasis on story and not enough on science. Methods have become dominated by complex statistics that give the illusion of rigor. I would like to see a return to our roots in putting most of the emphasis in research reports on what was done and what was found. Carefully crafted introductions that blend elements of humanities and science can be impressive pieces of prose, and respect to people with that level of writing talent. But they should be secondary in scientific research reports. If a researcher finds a cure for a serious disease, who cares if the research report introducing it to the world is worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Image generated by DALL-E 4.0. Prompt: “Image of story and a test tube. Make the aspect wider.”
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I reckon it is a cyclical process. It will come back when more people are sick of “story telling”, or “catchy titles”. Unfortunately, I cannot predict when, but my guess is every 30-ish years!