What Do We Really Know? A 40-Year Scientific Realist Examination of Theory Testing in Project Management
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
ABSTRACT The scholarly project management literature that focuses on theory includes calls for theory adaptation and cross-fertilization, greater domestic theory development, and explicit communication of the philosophical underpinnings of theories. The nature and extent of theory testing, an indicator of intellectual progress, is an unexamined area. We address the research gap via a scientific realist analysis of theories tested in 4,033 articles published in three core project management journals (1983–2023). The results reveal steady growth in empirical research; a large volume of single tests of domestic theories commensurate with results in neighbouring management and organization studies disciplines; and a reliance on foreign theories for knowledge creation. We propose a more protective stance vis-à-vis foreign theories to enhance scholarly legitimacy and innovation, and hence propose a borrowed theory assessment framework to scrutinize them prior to admittance.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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