Working Paper Series, Department of Industrial Economics & Strategy, Copenhagen Business School
No 02-6:
The essential tension in the social sciences: Between the “unification” and “fragmentation” trap*
Christian Knudsen
Abstract: A new framework is presented that suggests that scientific
progress requires a balance between exploitation of existing research
programs (normal science) and exploration of new research programs
(revolutionary science) Too much pluralism can be as destructive for
scientific progress as too little pluralism. In order to make progress in
an intellectual field one need to uphold what Thomas Kuhn described as an
essential tension between tradition and innovation. In the framework
presented here, this implies balancing on a knife-edge trying to avoid
falling into either a “fragmentation trap” or a “unification trap”. The
“fragmentation trap” is a self-reinforcing process where the exploration of
new theories completely comes to dominate the exploitation of existing
research programs, while the “unification trap” is a self-reinforcing
process where the exploitation of an existing research program completely
comes to dominate the exploration of new research programs. A number of
strategies for avoiding both the “fragmentation trap” and the “unification
trap” are presented and discussed in relationship to management studies and
economics, respectively. The framework is finally used to discuss the type
of traps that faces different social sciences and the way they are
organized as discussed by Richard Whitley in his comparative analysis of
intellectual fields.
JEL-Codes: A12; B40; (follow links to similar papers)
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