Search

We are grateful to Steve Barley, Max Bazerman, Daniel Brass, Gary Alan Fine, Linda Pike, Robert Kahn, James March, Marshall Meyer, Keith Murnighan, Christine Oliver, and David Owens for their contributions to this essay. This essay was prepared while the first author was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. We appreciate the financial assistance provided by the Hewlett-Packard Corporation and the National Science Foundation (SBR-9022192). This essay describes differences between papers that contain some theory rather than no theory. The~re is little agreement about what constitutes strong versus weak theory in the social sciences, but there is more consensus that references, data, variables, diagrams, and hypotheses are not theory. Despite this consensus, however, authors routinely use these five elements in lieu of theory. We explain how each of these five elements can be confused with theory and how to avoid such confusion. By making this consensus explicit, we hope to help authors avoid some of the most common and easily averted problems that lead readers to view papers as having inadequate theory. We then discuss how journals might facilitate the publication of stronger theory. We suggest that if the field is serious about producing stronger theory, journals need to reconsider their empirical requirements. We argue that journals ought to be more receptive to papers that test part rather than all of a theory and use illustrative rather than definitive data.

I thank Reginald Bruce, Stanley Harris, and Susan Schurman for helping me gather these data. I thank Janice Beyer, Richard Daft, Thomas D'Aunno, Daniel Denison, Leonard Greenhalgh, Richard Hackman, Robert Kahn, Gerald Ledford, Debra Meyerson, Marina Park, Richard Price, John Van Maanen, Janet Weiss, and Mayer Zald for their help with this manuscript. I also wish to thank the ASQ editors and reviewers for their good advice. Portions of this paper were prepared while I was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am grateful for financial support provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. A qualitative and inductive study of eight organizational death is used to develop a model of how some dying organizations make the transition to death. The model focuses on the relationship between a dying organization and its members and on how leaders help orchestrate changes in the socially defined reality that members share about the organization's viability. The paper shows how the announcement that organizational death will occur encourages members to begin dismantling their organization. A key finding is that, contrary to leaders' predictions, members' efforts will often remain constant or increase after a closing is announced. A model to explain this phenomenon is created. The process of organizational death proposed here seems to best describe unambiguous organizational deaths that are announced in advance, those in which the organizations are dismantled through the efforts of their members, and those not characterized by severe conflict over the distribution of resources and obligations.'