Overcoming the rationalistic fallacy in management research

Abstract

Abstract The editor presents the book’s origins, purpose, and structure. Taking inspiration from the work of the Swedish researcher, Sune Carlson, the chapter presents a practice perspective on management that avoids the scientists’ yardstick prescriptions of how managerial work should be competently performed. In the practice perspective, managers are viewed as competent practitioners who cope daily with intense demands, complexity, and uncertainty. Reasons are offered to explain the popularity of the theoretical–analytical perspective that predominates in contemporary management research. The researchers whose work is presented in the book’s following seventeen chapters take this perspective as they examine the realities of information and work overload, complexity, uncertainty, performance pressure, surprises, unintended consequences, and irreconcilable expectations, to say nothing of the emotional demands of work. The chapter calls for a strong research tradition based on these realities of managerial work.

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 — 28 citations exist upstream.

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