Creative destruction in science
Drawing on the concept of a gale of creative destruction in a capitalistic
economy, we argue that initiatives to assess the robustness of findings in
the organizational literature should aim to simultaneously test competing
ideas operating in the same theoretical space. In other words, replication
efforts should seek not just to support or question the original findings,
but also to replace them with revised, stronger theories with greater
explanatory power. Achieving this will typically require adding new measures,
conditions, and subject populations to research designs, in order to carry
out conceptual tests of multiple theories in addition to directly replicating
the original findings. To illustrate the value of the creative destruction approach
for theory pruning in organizational scholarship, we describe recent
replication initiatives re-examining culture and work morality, working
parents’ reasoning |