USING PARETO-BASED SCIENCE TO ENHANCE KNOWLEDGE FOR PRACTICAL RELEVANCE

There is a growing list of scholars who think there is something fundamentally wrong with organizations studies/science. This appears due to a break in the knowledge food-chain created by the discipline-centric nature of academic research in B-schools vs. the cure-based approach in medical research. Medical research is aimed at cures. B-school research, for the most part, is not. It is as simple as this. Discipline-push vs. cure pull basis of research legitimacy is discussed next. Then focus turns to the idea that whereas studies of 'averages' is what gains statistical legitimacy and academic recognition in business schools whereas practitioners worry more about positive and negative extremes: they get promoted when there are positive ones and fired when outcomes are dramatically negative. What counts as useful knowledge emerges by comparing organization studies with earthquake science. The current difference is dramatic - the most fundamental difference is that disciplines each apply discipline-centric theories to different levels of organizations - psychological studies of workers at the bottom; economic studies of industries at the top. Complexity science suggests that causal dynamics are scalable; that is, like causal dynamics in cauliflowers, the same dynamic works at multiple levels. Finally a number of changes in organizational research methods are suggested. Pareto-based science is a better alternative to many of the failures of modernism than postmodernism.