Building Practitioner-Held Theory Through Triangulation

Abstract

This study employs a research strategy called triangulation to determine the distributions of personal theories of organizations toward an organizational doctrine called practitioner-held theory. In this study, triangulation combines qualitative methods (interviews with city managers) before and after the use of quantitative methods (a survey of city managers) to develop practitioner-held theory. The survey results are analyzed to combine the personal theories of organizations of 220 city managers into ten theoretical dimensions: structural reform, task management, insular governance, participative management, Theory Y, norm setting, participatory democracy, citizen input into decision making, community leadership, and legislative involvement in management. Each dimension is discussed in the context of the public administration literature, from analysis of quantitative data, from analysis of qualitative data, and in relation to a practitioner-held theory model. The practitioner-held theory model's support of practitioner thinking based on limited instrumental rationality is discussed by clarifying action-consequence relationships and highlighting the normative positions of practitioners on organizational issues. The conclusions evaluate practitioner-held theory against general criteria.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.