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- Title
How to Skin an Eel with too Sharp a Knife and Without Proper Sand on Hand.
- Authors
Heiskanen, Ilkka
- Abstract
The article presents author's personal experiences in applying the results of organizational research. The author's main conclusion was that in social science research in general and in organizational research in particular, one should try to decrease the emphasis on application so that the theoretical frameworks would not automatically include the ideas of common goals/utility functions/welfare functions and assumptions of the actors trying to achieve/ maximize/satisfy them. The author's problems in being an expert and applying the results of causal structural organizational research appeared on two levels. The task was to try to calculate which one of these gave as consequence something that was closest to our wished-for B. In these calculations one soon noticed that information was often better derived from the practical experience of the persons working in the field than from research results. But there is also no use denying the failings of structural causal analysis in organizational research. The empirical research results are still very scattered, and the theoretical frameworks cannot obviously yet codify them or give them sufficient meaning via interpretation. One can in short mention that this orientation would on the empirical level imply establishing national data banks for organizational research.
- Subjects
ORGANIZATIONAL research; PROBLEM solving; ORGANIZATION; ORGANIZATIONAL sociology; UTILITY functions; SOCIAL science research
- Publication
Interfaces, 1976, Vol 6, Issue 3, p93
- ISSN
0092-2102
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1287/inte.6.3.93