Please open the attached document for the specific details. However, I would like to call your attention to a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Business and Psychology on inductive research in organizations. A summary of the call is as follows:
Special Issue on Inductive Research in Organizations
Journal of Business and Psychology
Special Feature Editors
Ann Marie Ryan, Michigan State University
Neal Schmitt, Michigan State University
Paul Spector, University of South Florida
Robert Vandenberg, University of Georgia
Sheldon Zedeck, University of California Berkeley
Steven Rogelberg, University of North Carolina Charlotte
For the past two decades the field of organizational psychology has evolvedtoward demanding more and more theory, making it increasingly difficult to publish descriptive or exploratory research papers. The deductive approach now dominates where editors and reviewers often demand that every paper must ground results in theory-based hypotheses, and with some journals, that nearly every paper must make an original theoretical contribution. Whereas there is no doubt that the deductive approach has value, our science is also dependent upon the generation of data as the raw material upon which new theories are based. Thus inductive approaches that focus on observations not based on a priorí theory can be as valuable as observations designed to test theory. Such inductive approaches are commonly found in medicine and the natural sciences where many papers describe studies that are descriptive and exploratory rather than confirmatory.
This special issue solicits paper submissions that describe studies that are inductive rather than deductive, that is, they report results of studies that are not positioned as tests of theories. This might include studies that describe phenomena (e.g., the incidence of certain problems across organizations), or are exploratory (e.g., the study of new phenomena or phenomena that have received little attention). Also appropriate for the special issue would be intervention studies that would not have a strong theoretical basis. This might include a study demonstrating that a particular intervention had an effect on an important organizational variable, such astask performance.