The Epistemology of Management/Business Studies

Management/business studies is historically committed to positivism (Morrell, 2008). Business studies, although a subcategory of social science, treats the social world as navigable and testable via experimental methods approximating those of the natural sciences. This might suggest an ontological paradox – a social science whose preferred methods are positivist. This is possibly attributable to the practical concerns of the subject of study – business, in which performance is quantifiable (profit and loss) and all inputs, processes, and outputs can be assigned some numerical cost value and thereby managed. Perhaps for this reason, business academics attempt to apply the rigour of natural “hard” science to the study of this category of social activity. As in the hard sciences, positivist research in business studies strives to build bodies of evidence and deepen knowledge stocks (Hammersley, 2001) – presumably with the intention of facilitating profitable prediction. Positivism, following Comte, affirms the possibility of progressive, accumulative learning, whose outcome (assuming flow between theoretician and practitioner occurs) should quantifiably improve business performance.

Similarly, the ideological motifs of improvement through progress and knowledge accumulation can be traced to business studies’ adherence to positivism. Also, in terms of the praxis debate and precipitation of theory to application, there is a discernible reflection of enlightenment ideals (Hope, 2004).

According to Morrell (2008), evidence-based management emerged from evidence-based medicine, whose practices epitomize positivist principles: randomised controlled trials, systematic reviews of trial results, and meta-analysis (Sackett et al, 1996). When literature research is parameter-driven and conducted to pointedly address a bounded specific question, the procedure becomes a “systematic review” (Boaz et al, 2002). However, in management studies, no definitive criteria of evidence exist, so evidence-based approaches vary, with some researchers employing blunted variants such as “evidence-informed” or “evidence-aware” (Morrell, 2004). Positivism prevails in business academia nevertheless.

Given the development of a distinct management academic argot, practitioners and academics (users and authors of discourse, with all the power issues those activities represent: Foucault, 1978, 1980) constitute a nascent language/power community (Bennett, 1989, p. 51). Any ecology of actors and texts constitutes what Foucault terms a “regime of truth” (Foucault, 1988, Taylor, 1984). The categories “school”, “regime”, and “community” are methodologically compatible with an understanding of social phenomena, i.e. as language games (Wittgenstein, 1953).

Goshal (2005) asserts that management studies covers activities in which the “intentions of individual acts can be ignored”; this would apply to, for example, many (but certainly not all) functional processes of logistics, production, or operations management. On the whole however, organisational behaviour is epistemologically ambiguous, because, in Goshal’s words (2005, p.78), “intentions matter”. Since intentions are mental events, identifying cause-and-effect is problematic (Dennett, 1991). Such assertions suggest that management studies stands to benefit from inclusion on non-positivist research.

Epistemological consensus within management studies is scarce (Donaldson, 1996), but studies that contrast management with other disciplines (e.g. Osigweh, 1989) show that management academics incline towards “normal science” in the Kuhn (1962) sense.