Laboratory Organizations and Unnoticed Causes

At a time when laboratory-oriented disciplines in the social sciences are increasingly being urged to go into the field (Koch, 1964; McGuire, 1967), studying organizations in a laboratory may appear old-fashioned before it is even begun. Curiously the literature on organizations in the laboratory has been more about them than of them. This issue of Administrative Science Quarterly provides valuable correction of this emphasis and makes possible a better evaluation of the usefulness of laboratory experiments.' Though few would doubt that there is any alternative except experimentation to understand organizations, many would question whether laboratory organizations go very far in furthering inquiry. The preceding papers provide an excuse to question the worth of a laboratory approach, and the purpose of this paper is to address this question. The phrase "unnoticed causes" in the title is the keynote for these remarks. The experiments in this issue single out some issues that have gone unnoticed in the complexity of actual organizations, and the results generate questions that take on the aura of causes to be pursued. Although previously unnoticed, these causes seem to reorder one's way of thinking about organizations, and the fact that it was the empirical rather than speculative aspect of these studies that revealed these formerly unnoticed causes, suggests something of the value of experimental organizations in a multimethod approach to studying organizations. In the following sections, both the conceptual and methodological reordering suggested by the preceding studies is discussed.