Summary
How do management theories become accepted truths? Our article, published in the Journal of Management Studies (https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.70042) shows that mechanisms often gain legitimacy not because they are empirically validated but because they evolve within consensus narratives. We call this process semiotic abduction, the drift from creative explanation to untested belief. We argue for a more reflexive abductive cycle and broader validation practices in management research.
When Theories Become Accepted but Never Tested
Management research thrives on new ideas, especially those that help us explain puzzling organizational phenomena. These ideas often emerge through abduction, a form of reasoning where we develop the most plausible explanation for an observed pattern, without directly observing the underlying mechanism. Abduction is essential: without this creative leap, theory would stagnate.
But abduction also carries a risk. A mechanism that sounds logically correct can quickly become widely accepted even before it is rigorously tested. If so, management research risks drifting into what Umberto Eco, one of the founders of semiotics, described as:
“a machine that produces redundancy: while pretending to shake the reader, it actually reconfirms them in a sort of imaginative laziness.” Eco’s warning applies powerfully to management theory. Sometimes a mechanism feels compelling not because we have strong evidence, but because it aligns with established logical narrative in the field.
What We Studied: The Logic of Semiotic Abduction
Our article introduces the concept of semiotic abduction, a process through which mechanisms evolve from plausible conjectures into community-accepted explanations without sufficient empirical grounding. We show that this drift is shaped by three forces:
1. Logical Coherence: a mechanism “fits” stylized facts or aligns neatly with prior theory, giving it intuitive appeal.
2. Semiotic Reinforcement: when empirical studies confirm a relationship between X and Y, and a theory plausibly embeds a mechanism linking them, the mechanism may receive undue scientific legitimacy—even if the mechanism itself remains untested.
3. Community Reinforcement: through citations, replication of terminology, and conceptual extensions, the mechanism becomes part of the field’s shared vocabulary. Subsequent papers build on it without reassessing its empirical validity, amplifying its status as if it were already confirmed. The following example provides an illustration of our key points:
Consider the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and firm performance. From a stakeholder theory perspective, CSR outcomes are framed as strategic responses to external pressures: firms invest in CSR to manage the competing demands of customers, suppliers, investors, and employees. Conversely, from a social identity perspective, CSR reflects a shared identity co-constructed with stakeholders, generating a unique demand for symbols and commitments that only the focal company can authentically provide.
1. Logical Coherence
Both stakeholder pressure and shared identity offer intuitively compelling explanations for the CSR–performance link. Each aligns with established theory and “stylized facts.” This appeal is often amplified by the empirical opacity of these mechanisms; because stakeholder pressure, identity co-construction, and symbolic demand are difficult to observe directly, logical coherence is frequently used as a substitute for direct evidence.
2. Semiotic Reinforcement
When empirical studies repeatedly document a correlation between CSR and performance, the logically consistent mechanisms—whether stakeholder pressure or identity-based symbolic demand—gain credibility by association. Because these underlying drivers are rarely measured with precision, the confirmation of the CSR–performance relationship is often implicitly accepted as a confirmation of the assumed mechanism.
3. Community Reinforcement
Over time, the interplay of logical consistency and limited observability institutionalizes these mechanisms within the scholarly community. Through citations, shared vocabulary, and incremental conceptual extensions, stakeholder pressure and social identity become “taken-for-granted” explanations. Their persistence is sustained more by interpretive stability and academic consensus than by rigorous empirical validation.
What We Found: Semiotic Abduction, False Positives, and False Negatives
Our analysis suggests that mechanisms often become accepted because they work semiotically, not because they are empirically verified. This dynamic produces what we call mechanism drift, which can compromise the robustness of management science and fragment scholarly conversations.
Mechanism drift produces two epistemological problems:
1. False Positives: Theories appear to perform well in empirical models while resting on mechanisms that have never been substantiated. Narrative coherence masks empirical fragility.
2. False Negatives: As scholars build on inherited mechanism structures, the field becomes path dependent. Alternative mechanisms—potentially valid but inconsistent with dominant narratives—are excluded, sidelined, or never explored.
In our example above related to the firm’s adoption of CSR, one of the two theoretical narratives is adopted as the default explanation. This can lead to a “theoretical false positive”—where a mechanism is assumed rather than tested—or a “theoretical false negative,” where the alternative mechanism is never explored in the same paper.
Why It Matters: Implications
The consequences of semiotic abduction extend well beyond scholarly debates.
Managers Decision-makers and consultants: may implement strategies based on mechanisms that feel intuitively right but lack empirical support, may design KPIs, incentive systems, and stakeholder initiatives around untested causal assumptions.
Educators: in Bachelor and Master Teaching, instructors often rely on “canonical” mechanisms and frameworks because they are simple, memorable, and pedagogically efficient. Yet these mechanisms may rest on semiotically abducted assumptions that have never been rigorously tested. Understanding semiotic abduction helps educators teach critical thinking, encouraging students to question not only how a theory is framed but also whether the mechanism behind it has real-world empirical grounding. For PhD students, the stakes are even higher. They are not just consumers of theory, they are future producers. Semiotic abduction provides a lens for teaching how theories drift and why mechanisms require empirical validation before becoming building blocks for new research.
What To Do Differently: Strengthening the Abductive Cycle
We argue that the solution is not to abandon abduction, but to strengthen its relationship with validation. Theory building should become a structured yet creative methodology, where validation is embedded within the abductive process itself. Abduction should not be a single imaginative leap but a reflexive and iterative cycle that anticipates and incorporates its own path of validation. We also call for reciprocal methodological integration between qualitative and quantitative research: Quantitative studies can identify and test macro-level relationships between X and Y, Qualitative research can empirically validate the mechanisms linking them.
Who Should Read the Full Paper — and Why
Scholars, doctoral students, and practitioners who rely on management mechanisms to guide decisions will benefit from our full article. It provides a structured way to identify mechanism drift and offers practical tools to mitigate it. As Sherlock Holmes warns: “Never guess. It is a shocking habit, destructive to the logical faculty. What seems strange to you is only so because you do not follow my train of thought or observe the small facts upon which large inferences may depend.”
