Standing out in the fields of organization science

✍ Scribed by Denise M. Rousseau

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 98 KB
• Volume: 28
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-3796
• DOI: 10.1002/job.457

✦ Synopsis

No agreed-upon organizational science paradigm exists because there is still no single field of organizational science. True to its history, ours is an interdisciplinary domain focusing on behavior, in, around, and of organizations (cf. Perrow, 1973;Katz & Kahn, 1978). Organizational science is more than just a broad tent. Several fields reside under it and some keep another home elsewhere. Though organizational behavior and theory, human resource management, and organizational research methods live primarily under our tent, others such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics are disciplines in themselves, giving their organizationally leaning subgroups special labels ('industrial' and/or 'organizational'). These more fully formed disciplines and their organizational subgroups have their own paradigms and definitions of 'top tier.'

The notion of organizational science was new three decades ago. I had the good fortune to work with Karlene Roberts and Chuck Hulin on a book we thought then radically entitled Developing an Interdisciplinary Science of Organizations (Roberts, Hulin, & Rousseau, 1978). This interdisciplinary organizational science was intended to be more real, practical, and scientifically valid than the discipline-based studies of the time and their focus upon tiny slices of phenomena associated with organizations. Its three authors are all psychologists and at the time of the book's publication in 1978, two of us were in departments of Psychology. Back then JOB didn't exist and the Academy of Management Journal was considered to be a fairly sketchy outlet far less prestigious than psychology and sociology journals. Thirty years is a short time in science. In the ensuring years, however, the