I agree with Jean-Marc Guillemette, practitioners have much to offer
business students. We invite practitioners to talk to our students all the
time. Students often think organization and management are
"supra-rational." They are much more likely to believe practitioners about
the "messiness" and "complexity" of organizational life, they me. The
limitation of practitioners is that often, the implicit and explicit
theories of management they have developed based upon experience are either
a) idiosyncratic, ie., they do not generalize to other situtations and the
practitioner does not know the limitations of their claims; and b) even
more important, organizational life and experience have not provided
practitioners with the opportunity to assess the "truth" claims of their
theories. This is what academics are trained to do. It is not as if we
sit in our ivory towers divorced from life. Rather, many of us spend our
lives in multiple organizations assessing truth claims and the
generalizability of those truth claims. The data that we use often, but
not always, comes from real live managers and workers who are on the firing
line trying to solve problems and make sense of organizational life.
Conna Condon makes the observation that researchers to date have not
adequately assessed the validity of Hersey and Blancchard's theory of
"situational leadership." If this is correct, and academics always hold
any truth claims about theories as tentative (since we never "prove" a
theory is correct, rather we observe that the theory comports with
description and predictions and thus we "do not reject" a theory, or we
observe that the theory does not accurately describe or accurately predict
situations, thus we "reject" a theory), Conna can review the research and
write an article for a scholarly journal such as Leadership Quarterly
pointing out why the rejection of the theory of "situational leadership" is
premature due to inadequate testing. Furthermore, if she is looking for a
dissertation topic, perhaps she can "adequately" test the theory of
"situational leadership" to see if it is valid.
Sometimes I think, we academics are all born in Missouri. On one hand we
are skeptics about what we believe, on the other hand we are subborn as
mules clinging to those beliefs. Fortunately, there are other academics
who are as skeptical about what we cling to subbornly, so that they
challenge and examine those beliefs. The result is that over the long run,
those theories that survive are more likely to contain genuine knowledge
than those that do not.
As Suppe (1977) said, "...it is a central aim of science to come to
knowledge of how the work really is..." The arbiter of adequateness of our
explanations and predictions is truth ("genuine knowledge") or
"truthlikeness (Popper's 1972, verisimiltude), and the degrees or
probabilities of truthlikeness (De Regt, 1987). According to McMullin
(1984), scientific realism (the philosophy that I an many, but not all
acaademics hold) claims that "the long run success of a scientific theory
givens reason to believe tyhat something like the entitites posulated by
the theory actually exits."
Regards,
Kim Boal
--------------------------------
Kim Boal
College of Business Administration
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409
(806) 742-2150
KimBoal@ttu.edu