ANTi-History of the functionalist paradigm in organization theory: using the lens of March and Simon’s<i>Organizations</i>
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to examine the role of James March and his actor-network in the development of a functionalist paradigm of organization theory (OT). Recognizing the important contribution of March to the development of the field of OT, the authors set out to understand the role that he played in establishing the oft-quoted development of founding a behavioral facet of the functionalist paradigm of management theory. Design/methodology/approach The authors draw on ANTi-History to study some of the key factors that contributed to the challenges associated with the creation of a functionalist paradigm of OT. ANTi-History is an amodernist method drawing attention to how history is produced, differing from a modernist method for identifying the single-most truth of a series of past events and from a postmodernist method for revealing the relativity of accounts of the past. To that end, the method of ANTi-History is to explore the intersections of a series of human (e.g. scholars), non-human (e.g. a textbook) and non-corporeal (e.g. paradigms) actors to assess their role in producing a version of the past (e.g. a unified field of OT). Findings The authors reveal how the history, producing the paradigmatic idea of OT as a supposed field of inquiry, is not an account of an actual field of inquiry as much as it is the outcome of the shared and conflicted worldviews of multiple actors. Originality/value The unique and original contribution is in the tracking over time of the relationship between a known and important actor James March and the formation of a specific paradigm of OT. In particular, the authors focus on the factors and activities that formed or failed to form OT at points in time and James March’s role in this. In the process, the authors set out to learn not simply what James March achieved but how he achieved it.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it