Creative destruction in science

• Published in: Organizational behavior and human decision processes Vol. 161; pp. 291 - 309
• Main Authors: Tierney, Warren, Hardy, Jay H., Ebersole, Charles R., Leavitt, Keith, Viganola, Domenico, Clemente, Elena Giulia, Gordon, Michael, Dreber, Anna, Johannesson, Magnus, Pfeiffer, Thomas, Uhlmann, Eric Luis
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.11.2020
• Subjects: Conceptual replication; Cultural differences; Direct replication; Falsification; Gender discrimination; Hiring decisions; Protestant work ethic; Psychology; psykologi; Replication; Theory pruning; Theory testing; Work values; Work-family conflict; Work-family conflict; Protestant work ethic; Direct replication; Hiring decisions; Conceptual replication; Work values; Theory pruning; Replication; Gender discrimination; Cultural differences; Falsification; Theory testing
• DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.07.002
• ISSN: 0749-5978; 1095-9920

•The creative destruction approach combines theory pruning and open science methods.•New measures, conditions, and populations are included in replication designs.•The goal is to make replication more generative and engage in theory building.•Recent studies examined work morality, biased reasoning, and gender discrimination. 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 about day care options, and gender discrimination in hiring decisions. It is becoming increasingly clear that many, if not most, published research findings across scientific fields are not readily replicable when the same method is repeated. Although extremely valuable, failed replications risk leaving a theoretical void— reducing confidence the original theoretical prediction is true, but not replacing it with positive evidence in favor of an alternative theory. We introduce the creative destruction approach to replication, which combines theory pruning methods from the field of management with emerging best practices from the open science movement, with the aim of making replications as generative as possible. In effect, we advocate for a Replication 2.0 movement in which the goal shifts from checking on the reliability of past findings to actively engaging in competitive theory testing and theory building. The materials, code, and data for this article are posted publicly on the Open Science Framework, with links provided in the article.