Systemic abduction: Reconstructing towards concept clarity in management studies

Defining clear concepts and constructs is a prerequisite for all forms of validity in management and organization studies. This paper extends the existing recommendations on construct clarity and builds a method on systems thinking and abduction to help scholars with providing clear definitions in c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal for the theory of social behaviour Vol. 52; no. 2; pp. 336 - 361
Main Authors Sadeghiani, Ayoob, Ahmadi, Sadra, Shokouhyar, Sajjad, Hajipour, Bahman
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2022
Subjects
Abduction
Behavioral sciences
Concepts
construct clarity
critical conceptual review
Management
systemic abductive method
systems thinking
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Summary:Defining clear concepts and constructs is a prerequisite for all forms of validity in management and organization studies. This paper extends the existing recommendations on construct clarity and builds a method on systems thinking and abduction to help scholars with providing clear definitions in cases of (1) the constructs and concepts that come to academia from practice (2) the constructs and concepts on which there is no agreement among scholars, and (3) the constructs that were coined in the past eras but are mapped to the transformed observables in the new era. Moreover, we rethink the terms ‘concept, ‘construct’, and ‘variable’ and introduce six clarity criteria to be used in the process of concept refinement in management and organization studies, and other disciplines of social and behavioural sciences.
ISSN:0021-8308
1468-5914
DOI:10.1111/jtsb.12329