Middle-Range Theory

Conceptual Overview

The social sciences devoted to the study of organizations and the relations between individuals and organizations emerged primarily from psychology and sociology during the late 1950s and the 1960s with the publications of March's 1965 Handbook of Organizations, March and Simon's 1958 Organizations, Katz and Kahn's 1966 The Social Psychology of Organizations, and James Thompson's 1967 Organizations in Action. The general systems movement was flourishing during this period, and there seemed to be a zeitgeist in favor of viewing organizations as open social systems, possessing all the properties of such systems. This preference was stronger among the sociologically oriented views of organizations than among the works of psychologists, but nevertheless, the forces mentioned earlier in favor of parsimony and general theory were ascendant; parsimony was defeating detail and elaboration. The problem, of course, is that the more general a theory (across people, contexts, and time), the less it can be expected to provide specific explanatory power for individual cases, as noted by Merton. In a sense, in the limit, any theory that purports to explain everything, in fact—empirically—cannot account for anything, or very much; the exceptions swamp the cases for which the theory is accurate.

In 1978, a conference was held at the University of British Columbia to investigate the relevance of Merton's notions of middle-range theory for the organizational sciences. A book was published in 1980, edited by Pinder and Moore, to report the major papers presented and the discussions elicited by those papers. Two general categories of middle-range theory emerged from the conference. The first category consisted of theories that applied to limited varieties of organizational phenomena, such as socialization and leadership, for example. So, theories of leadership would not be expected to apply to problems of organizational design, except, perhaps, by deductive inference.

...