Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper is concerned with the methodological and epistemological foundations of management theory. It develops the argument that management theory is essentially unreliable and in terms of a modernist or postmodernist epistemology, unable to offer any insights or understandings beyond those argued from the study of the specific instances of a specific case. This dismal argument casts doubt on the philosophical validity of much formal management theory, and has serious implications about the use and application of theory by managers. Similarly, the argument can be used to cast doubt on the ethical stance of gurus and consultants that have allowed readers, users and clients to believe mistakenly that they have bought prescriptions, theories and models which have validity and wide applicability beyond the instances of a specific case or a specific industry. Within the context of the philosophy of science, such scepticism about formal theory should be regarded as normal and healthy (Kuhn, 1970). Within the field of management, scepticism about formal theory offers managers the opportunity to seize the empty creative space ignored by the generalizing modernist solutions and thereby create, share and laud theory grounded in their own management practice. In this context, the impossibility of management theory based on the modernist paradigm should be seen as liberating rather than constraining. The abandonment of management theories spawned by modernism and the false claims of science provides managers with an opportunity to escape the dictums of the gurus and the tired models entombed within the hard covers of hundreds of strategy textbooks. In brief, the end of modernism and the abandonment of the myth of a general theory of management offers managers a chance to rethink and repractise ways of understanding, choosing and creating different and hopefully more fulfilling futures. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.056 | 0.068 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.151 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".