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Posted: January 2009

 

Too Much Theory, Not Enough Understanding

Roger W. Schmenner (Indiana University)

 

Ten years ago, Morgan Swink and I published an article in JOM entitled “On Theory in Operations Management”.  It was meant to counter the concerns of many at that time that operations management did not have theories of its own that could ground our discipline.  Now, ten years on, what is the status of theory in our field?  Has it advanced?  Are we using theory in productive ways to advance our understanding?  How have our theories changed in response to empirical investigations?  Which theories have been abandoned and which ones have been developed in their places?  I’m afraid that my responses to these questions do not ring with contentment.  It is time to reassess the role of theory in operations management.

 

What is Theory and How Should It Work within a Discipline?

            Our paper 10 years ago pointed out a number of important features concerning the use of theory, many of which were attributed to Carl Hempel, a renowned philosopher of science. 

1.      Theories explain facts and provide stories as to how phenomena work the way that they do.  They can, and should, be used to make predictions.

2.      Theories are not built; they are invented.  That is to say, theories cannot be systematically constructed or deduced from facts.  Theories require inspiration and creativity.  Facts and the regularities among those facts may exist for generations before an adequate theory is invented to account for them.

3.      Theories can be disproved by findings that run counter to their predictions or explanations.  On the other hand, theories cannot be proved.  They can only be supported by other evidence.

4.      The building blocks of understanding are hypotheses and their tests.  Hypotheses do not need to be based on any theory; they can be mere guesses.  When hypotheses are tested, we gain facts with which we can confront theory.

In a number of disciplines, these features of theory and their use are fundamentally important.  Recently, for example, there was much ado about the newly-built, 27 km-in-circumference underground large hadron collider near the Geneva airport.  This expenditure of $8B has been made specifically to provide more “facts” against which to evaluate the so-called “standard model” of sub-atomic physics.  The standard model has been able to handle the facts as they are currently known, so the entire physics community has rallied behind this construction of a new and more powerful accelerator that, it is hoped, can provide new facts with which to confront the standard model.  It is also hoped that new facts can resolve the usefulness of string theory as well.  String theory is elegant, to its credit, but there are an increasing number of skeptics with regard to its usefulness.  The physics community is thus united in the importance of generating new facts and of showing the weaknesses of prevailing theories with those facts.  The goal is to topple a deficient theory (and all theories can be deficient) and to erect a new one that does a better job with the facts as they are known.

 

 

 

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