What’s up with our obsession with the theoretical contribution: A means to an end or an end in and of itself?
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
Knowledge production in the discipline of management and organization studies (MOS) is in a labyrinth of its own making. Over the last 30 years, scholars in the discipline have exhibited an intransigent obsession with the theoretical contribution. At this juncture, with Organization about to commence its fourth decade in publication, I would like to take the opportunity to pause as well as to reflect on some of the implications and the consequences that emanate from this obsession. Drawing on specific examples from MOS, I focus my analysis on three mechanisms through which the discipline’s obsession with the theoretical contribution poses unintended but detrimental outcomes on knowledge production: (1) unnecessary proliferation of theoretical constructs, (2) building theory upon theory rather than empirical validation, and (3) making theory for theory’s sake.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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