Paradigm Wars

Doing lab experiments is like smoking cigarettes. It’s a filthy habit. But, if this guy musters up the courage and we pressure him enough, he can be cured.

Sure. And finding that extra .1% of variance explained using an eigenvalue you borrowed from a downloaded dataset that some other blokes collected is really the voice of God whispering in your ear.

As a junior professor, I scribbled down this pair of invectives from faculty colleagues while they argued the merits of a job candidate. Since then, I’ve heard similar tirades about favored methods at multiple conferences and universities ­— including our own. Those screeds epitomize a virtually never-ending battle between two camps of organizational scholars.

In business school parlance, the first of these camps is often referred to as the “behavioral” or “micro” paradigm. Investigators working in it evoke a psychological foundation for their theory, evidence, and data collection. Although behavioral scholars work in IS/IT, finance, and accounting (globally unrivaled at McCombs), they most likely find safe harbor in management (organizational behavior) and marketing (consumer behavior). Many such scientists use the laboratory experiment to strip away contextual nuisance and pinpoint explanatory mechanisms. It is the premier vehicle for establishing cause and effect.

The other camp is often referred to as the “archival” or “macro” or sometimes “theoretical” (read, math modeling and computer simulation) paradigm. Mother disciplines that these investigators draw from tend to be economics, sociology, and occasionally engineering. These scholars are spread throughout the business school as well, most often residing in finance, accounting, (managerial) marketing, (strategic) management, and sometimes operations or logistics. Their data almost always come from a field study, where “real” agents exist in and are affected by variables in natural contexts and time systems. Complex multivariate analyses complete the paradigm; it is the premier vehicle for estimating population parameters.

Disrespect, derision, disdain, denunciation, and dismissal (there are even more “d” words I can throw in there) often get flung between these two camps, each believing in their One True Way. The diatribes (told ya) get wearisome. They can even get destructive, particularly if decisions are being made about across-camp resource allocation. I thought it was clear that each paradigm has endemic, fundamental flaws for knowledge accrual, and that combining the two yields the most bulletproof insights, which is what Insiya Hussain shows in her terrific research below.
Indeed, this pan-paradigm approach was how Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory of behavioral decisions came to be. It is the best-supported set of general predictions in all of social science, and the most cited paper in the history of economics. It upended entire disciplines. It won the Nobel Prize.

Yeah, but it was the economics prize, said a local colleague recently. That’s the puny Nobel. It’s like winning an Olympic medal in breakdancing.

Sigh.

The wars rage on.

Dr. David A. Harrison
Associate Dean for Research
Charles & Elizabeth Prothro Regents Chair of Business Administration
Distinguished University Chair