In many disciplines across the social sciences there are debates around whether research and research writing are under-theorised or over-theorised. Gorgi Krlev, argues that whilst these debates can provide insights, they fail to clarify why and when theorising can be useful at all. To promote better theory making he presents a framework for thinking through where theorisation does and doesn’t add value to research.

All social sciences have issues with theory. But they do not all have the same issue.

In social psychology, the replication crisis has been referred to as “a problem in theory”, meaning that the failure to reproduce empirical findings stems from a lack of theoretical grounding or coherence. Economics has become heavy in mathematics and moved “beyond theory”, supposedly to be considered a scientific field on par with the natural sciences.

My own discipline, management research, for similar reasons, sometimes referred to as “physics envy”, has swung to the other extreme: hardly any other discipline seems quite as obsessed with ‘theoretical contributions’ as management. The obsession has proliferated so much that some have started thinking about the act of theorising as mere ‘blah blah blah’.

So, we see three variations of the problem. I am sure we would see many more, if we delved into any field in the social sciences. This begs the question: Why do we need theory at all? And when do we need more or less theory?

A heated debate, which misses the point?

In a recent article I draw on management studies as a useful example of how theorising can be approached pragmatically. While I build on the specific context of management research, I believe there are broader lessons to be learnt for other disciplines.

Naturally for a discipline prone to theorising, there are competing theories about why management, in contrast to other social sciences, is so focussed on theory. Alongside physics envy, relevance theory says that after an initial period when management education was nothing more than practical advice, skills and tools, theory became prominent in order to show that management research had things to offer beyond honing managerial behaviour. Over-production of theory in management is from this perspective a coping mechanism for not being considered a science, or sometimes not even a social science.

No matter where the dominance of theory comes from, scholars now widely claim management researchers have been overdoing theory and that this has caused serious limitations. For example, it has inhibited the discipline’s ability to deal with current societal challenges. These critiques have rarely minced their words. Stanford professor Jeff Pfeffer has called for draining the “management theory morass” and Dennis Tourish, a critical management scholar at the University of Sussex, went as far as equating all of management theory with the production of nonsense.

As a reaction, there have been calls to “fuck science” and to re-humanize scholarly inquiry, challenging theory’s objectification, while others have questioned the need of growing “theoretical balls” to be allowed to theorise in management, challenging the masculine dominance of the debate. Some have proposed alternative, non-explanatory types of theory and thus greater theoretical diversity, while others have contemplated how to produce “impactful theories“, bringing a long-standing empirical debate about “what’s interesting vs. what’s relevant?” into the realm of theory.

While these new propositions help diversify theory, they do not answer my initial questions: Why and when do we need theory?

What does theory do?

I argue, to answer the questions we need to better understand the different instrumental functions of theory. Theory can be mainly concerned with: (1) building a new foundation for knowledge, (2) consolidating knowledge, (3) making meaning between strands of knowledge, or (4) translating knowledge.

It is hard to serve any single one of these functions well, let alone several at the same time. In management, researchers have a tendency of doing too much of everything, perhaps in order to comply with the scholarly myth that any paper must make three theoretical contributions. By better understanding what theory does, in which context and under which conditions, we might not only become more prudent (or daring) in our theorising, but also recognise where and when we need no new theory at all—and instead more empirical analysis, or methodological detail or reflection.

More emphasis should be put on empirics or methods when empirical findings are very important, yet not theoretically intriguing (confined), very relevant, original and new but hard to grasp (phenomenon-stage), or extremely vast and all encompassing (doubly-loaded), so that theorising becomes very hard or unreasonable.

What does this mean for theory more broadly?

Small adaptations will not do the job

From a management perspective, there is a lack of research in the confined areas. Precisely because of this, it should not matter that (a) research in these areas is limited in its power of generating new theory or that (b) researchers should refrain from theorising within these areas, because the resulting theories would be speculative.

Whilst incremental pitches over how to address the theory problems in management may have benefits, such as favouring abductive theorising over other types of theory, explaining better what we do when we theorise, or tuning down unit theory (more fine-grained and incremental) in favour of programmatic theory (more encompassing). They do not really address the core problem: that management has too much theory that helps us understand too little.

From the perspective of other social sciences, this framework should prove useful for authors, reviewers and editors as they write or assess new research, as it can help justify (more) theory, better place theory relative to other kinds of contributions, and prioritise the functions of theory that are most needed in a given field.

More broadly, the social sciences should consider whether its default mode of publication, hybrid articles that combine empirics and theory (both often done only half-heartedly) are really more valuable than papers exclusively dedicated to theorising or spaces for “no theory”-research. They should also try to ensure that theoretical, empirical and methodological arenas are well connected and have a mutually corrective function. Perhaps in this way scholars can amplify the quality of theory building and leverage their discipline’s empirical richness at the same time.

Note: A version of this blog post was previously published on the blog of the Journal of Management Studies.

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