Researchers and Medics: An Essay on Combining Discovery and Justification

10 Pages Posted: 27 Jan 2012

See all articles by Bernard Verstegen

Bernard Verstegen

Independent

Tjandra Börner

Open University of the Netherlands

Date Written: January 25, 2012

Abstract

One of the most disturbing phenomena in academic management research is the enormous emphasis on justification of ideas, theories or statements in practice. What’s more, there is an enormous emphasis on strict justification. It doesn’t really matter what it is that is justified, all that matters is that it is firmly justified. For that purpose we have a lot of techniques and methods available and we know how to apply these in a confident manner. But of course that is nothing but fooling ourselves. If the ideas, theories or statements that are justified are unimportant or evident we would wind up with sure things without interest.

In this paper we will argue that context of discovery and context of justification can indeed be interwoven in management science and we will discuss for a specific research project how the connection may look like. As representation is related to the closeness or distance between discovery and justification, we will go into the struggle of the researchers with how to represent behavioral routines. We will argue for this specific instance that the connection, the unification, cannot be complete, that a distance between context of discovery and context of justification remains. We will develop an argument for keeping both the context of discovery and the context of justification within the domain of academic discourse.

Keywords: Context of discovery, context of discovery, management control, health care

JEL Classification: B40, I18, M41

Suggested Citation

Verstegen, Bernard and Börner, Tjandra, Researchers and Medics: An Essay on Combining Discovery and Justification (January 25, 2012). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1991891 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1991891

Tjandra Börner

Open University of the Netherlands ( email )

P.O. Box 2960
Heerlen, 6401DL
Netherlands

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