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- Title
GENERATING THEORY BY ABDUCTION.
- Authors
SÆTRE, ALF STEINER; VAN DE VEN, ANDREW
- Abstract
The need to understand how new ideas and hunches are created that may subsequently lead to new theories or models has never been greater for academics and practitioners. Abductionprovidesamodeofreasoningforachievingthis. It isaformofgenerativereasoning that beginswithobserving and confirming ananomaly, andgenerating and evaluating hunches thatmay explain the anomaly, for subsequent deductive constructing and inductive testing. Although abductive reasoning is being recognized in the management literature, it requires more systematic development to be useful for theory creation. We argue that abduction can inform management scholars in creating theories in three important ways: First, wepropose four key steps inabductive reasoning of observing andconfirming anomalies and generating and evaluating hunches. Second, we go beyond individual reasoning to examine collective social-psychological processes of generating new theories. Third, we propose specific ways for disciplined imagination in abductive reasoning.
- Subjects
MANAGEMENT philosophy; ABDUCTION (Logic); SCHOLARLY method; REASONING; LOGIC; INDUCTION (Logic)
- Publication
Academy of Management Review, 2021, Vol 46, Issue 4, p684
- ISSN
0363-7425
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5465/amr.2019.0233