IIFT 05 Dec 2021 VARC | Previous Year IIFT Paper

I am occasionally troubled by the disparate rumblings of dissatisfaction about the role of theory in management. As a profession, we seem to experience recurring bouts of doubt about what theory is, and is not, and whether we should have a single unifying theory or many.
While we agonize over the degree of theoretical abstraction needed to produce knowledge, arguing occasionally for a step back from highly abstract theorization to “middle-range” theories or the much less ambitious notion of “mechanisms”, it is apparent that, as a community of scholars, we are deeply engaged with and passionate about the role of theory in our profession. There is, perhaps surprisingly, considerable consensus on what theory is: theory is simply a way of imposing conceptual order on the empirical complexity of the phenomenal world. As Bacharach (1989) astutely observed, theory offers “a statement of relations between concepts within a set of boundary assumptions and constraints”. Ultimately, theories reflect, in highly abstract terms, the organization of a discipline’s knowledge base.
However, theory does much more than simply abstract and organize knowledge. It also signals the values upon which that knowledge is built. And it is in this somewhat shadowy connection between and among theory, knowledge, and values that cracks in our consensus about theory begin to appear. Although we might agree, broadly, about the substantive elements that constitute theory, we appear to disagree as a profession about why we need theory and what role it should play in creating, maintaining, and shaping what type of knowledge we value in the field. Fundamentally, we disagree about the value of theory.
Some see theory as a means of knowledge accumulation. These are the empiricists, who clearly constitute the dominant contemporary view. Informed by positivism, empiricists view management as a science and theory as the cumulative product of the progressive acquisition of knowledge. Empiricists value theory for its ability to capture and summarize the phenomenal world. They have a Darwinian understanding of the relationship between theories, seeing an implicit competition between theories in their ability to capture reality. Over time, as theory progresses in its ability to proximate and predict reality, a single unified theory should emerge. When a single theory fails to emerge (as is inevitable), empiricists tend to reject the value of theory entirely and focus energy exclusively on the collection of data. Declaring a moratorium on theory—Alfred North Whitehead’s “dustbowl empiricism”—is a recurring phenomenon in the history of social science. Dustbowl empiricism is characterized by what Feyerabend (1975) described as the rhetorical bullying that is implicit in appeals to rationality and evidence.
Dustbowl empiricism is, of course, doomed to fail. Knowledge accumulation simply cannot occur without a conceptual framework. When explicit frameworks are pushed into the background, theory becomes implicit. Implicit theories are inherently dangerous because they discourage researchers from asking fundamental questions about the assumptions that underpin knowledge and the methods used to acquire knowledge. The random accumulation of evidence is also doomed because of the inherent tendency of humans to theorize. Theorization is an essential element of how we make sense of the world, and randomly accumulated data are, as Coase (1988) critically observed, nothing but “a mass of descriptive material, waiting for a theory, or a fire.”
Management researchers constituting an alternative subgroup value theory as a means of knowledge abstraction. These are the rationalists, and they serve as a useful and important counterbalance to the empiricists. Instead of seeing theory as the summation of empirical observation, rationalists see theory as occurring prior to empirical observation. That is, theory offers a perceptual lens that structures sensory experience. Without theoretically derived categories, rationalists argue, humans would be unable to cognitively organize or even recognize sensory experience. Rationalists value theory for its logic. Because they favor deduction over induction, rationalists often prefer theories that offer internal coherence or elegant explanations of the world. For these scholars new theory is more likely to come from the interpretation of past masters, through parsing canonical texts (i.e., literature reviews), than from empirical observation.
The ultimate danger of an overemphasis on rationalism is theoretical “fetishism,” where theory becomes an exercise in writing and interpretation but is detached from the empirical world. Taken to its extreme, rational theories tend to become self absorbed—more attentive to naval-gazing efforts of deconstructing prior theory than to challenges from contradictory phenomena. Elsewhere I have written about the emergent fetishism in theory and the concomitant danger of increasing scientism in management theory. However, rationalists offer a critically important counterbalance to empiricists, and it is the effective union of induction and deduction, or empiricism and rationalism, that tends to produce new knowledge.
A growing number of management scholars see a powerful normative value in theory. The highest and best use of theory, for this constituency, is not to represent the phenomenal world as it is but, rather, to fashion theoretical lenses that allow us to see the world as it might be. In contrast to both empiricists and rationalists, who see virtue in assuming an objective distance between research and practice and who believe that their research is largely free of political and moral assumptions, normative theorists embrace the notion that no theory is value free. They adopt McKenzie’s (2006) argument that management theories are less a camera that captures reality and more an engine that produces it.
Normative scholars, thus, value theory for its ability to create new reality. They construct theories that contradict the (often dismal) view of the world given to us by both empiricists and rationalists and, instead, articulate new possibilities for organizational behavior and managerial action. Rather than attending to the deconstruction of the causes of action, normative theorists tend to focus on the motives and ethics of actors and the process by which they make choices for action.
The question “why theory?” thus has several potential answers. In fact it is the tension between these different value propositions for theory that generates a series of observable and somewhat predictable dynamics in management scholarship.

The contrasting styles of communication represented by the managers from Spain and say Japan are often referred to as low-context and high-context, respectively.
In order to understand the implications, suppose you are having a discussion with Sally, a business colleague, and you both come from a culture that prefers low-context communication. People from such cultures are conditioned from childhood to assume a low level of shared context—that is, few shared reference points and comparatively little implicit knowledge linking speaker and listener.
Under these circumstances, it’s highly likely that, while speaking with Sally, you will explicitly spell out your ideas, providing all the background knowledge and details necessary to understand your message. The United States is the lowest-context culture in the world, followed by Canada and Australia, the Netherlands and Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Though cultural norms are transmitted from one generation to the next through means that are generally indirect and subliminal, you may remember receiving some deliberate lessons concerning appropriate ways to communicate. I certainly received such lessons as a child growing up in the United States. My third-grade teacher, Mary Jane, a tall, thin woman with tightly curled hair, used to coach us during our Monday morning circle meetings using the motto, “Say what you mean and mean what you say.” When I was sixteen, I took an elective class at Minneapolis South High School on giving effective presentations. This is where I learned the traditional American rule for successfully transferring a powerful message to an audience: “Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.” This is the philosophy of low context communication in a nutshell. The communication technique is designed to help people quickly identify and correct misunderstandings, thereby reducing (if not eliminating) one common cause of needless, pointless debate.
Childhood lessons like these imbued me with the assumption that being explicit is simply good communication. But, as Takaki explained, good communication in a high context culture like Japan is very different. In Japan as in India, China, and many other countries, people learn a very different style of communication as children—one that depends on unconscious assumptions about common reference points and shared knowledge.
For example, let’s say that you and a business colleague named Maryam both come from a high-context culture like Iran. Imagine that Maryam has travelled to your home for a visit and arrived via a late-evening train at 10:00 p.m. If you ask Maryam whether she would like to eat something before going to bed, when Maryam responds with a polite “No, thank you,” your response will be to ask her two more times. Only if she responds “No, thank you” three times will you accept “No” as her real answer.
In a high-context culture like Iran, it’s not necessary—indeed, it’s often inappropriate —to spell out certain messages too explicitly. If Maryam replied to your first offer of food, “Yes, please serve me a big portion of whatever you have, because I am dying of hunger!” this response would be considered inelegant and perhaps quite rude. Fortunately, shared assumptions learned from childhood make such bluntness unnecessary. You and Maryam both know that “No, thank you” likely means, “Please ask me again because I am famished.”
If you’re from a low-context culture, you may perceive a high-context communicator as secretive, lacking transparency, or unable to communicate effectively. On the other hand, if you’re from a high-context culture, you might perceive a low-context communicator as inappropriately stating the obvious, or even as condescending and patronizing.

When I had first arrived at my hotel in New Delhi, I was hot and, more important, hungry. Although I would have spent that week conducting classes for a group of Indian executives at the swank five-star Oberoi hotel, the Indian business school hosting me put me up in a more modest and much smaller residence several miles away. Staying in a simple hotel just steps from the bustle of workaday New Delhi, I thought, would make it that much easier for me to get the flavour of the city.
Lunch was at the top of my agenda. The very friendly young man behind the concierge desk jumped to attention when he saw me approaching. I asked about a good place to eat. “There is a great restaurant just to the left of the hotel. I recommend it highly,” he told me. “It is called Swagat. You can’t miss it.”
It sounded perfect. I walked out to the road and looked to the left. The street was a whirlwind of colors, smells, and activities. I saw a grocery store, a cloth vendor, a family of five all piled onto one motor scooter, and a bunch of brown- speckled chickens pecking in the dust next to the sidewalk. No restaurant.
“You didn’t find it?” the kind concierge asked in a puzzled tone as I re-entered the hotel. This time the young man explained, “Just walk out of the hotel, cross the street, and the restaurant will be on your left. It’s next to the market. There is a sign. You can’t miss it,” he said again.
Remembering my confusing encounter with the concierge in New Delhi, if I had been an Indian from Delhi with the shared cultural understanding of how to interpret implicit messages, I would have been better able to interpret the concierge’s directions. Lacking those assumptions left me bewildered and unable to find my way to the restaurant.

Read the follwing passage:
Of course the cosmic mystery doesn’t help us at all in maintaining the social order. People often argue that we must believe in a god that gave some very concrete laws to humans, or else morality will disappear and society will collapse into primeval chaos.
It is certainly true that belief in gods was vital for various social orders, and that it sometimes had positive consequences. Indeed, the very same religions that inspire hate and bigotry in some people inspire love and compassion in others. Yet though gods can inspire us to act compassionately, religious faith is not a necessary condition for moral behaviour. The idea that we need a supernatural being to make us act morally assumes that there is something unnatural about morality. But why? Morality of some kind is natural. All social mammals from chimpanzees to rats have ethical codes that limit things such as theft and murder.
Among humans, morality is present in all societies, even though not all of them believe in the same god, or in any god. Christians act with charity even without believing in the Hindu pantheon, Muslims value honesty despite rejecting the divinity of Christ, and secular countries such as Denmark and the Czech Republic aren’t more violent than some devout countries.
Morality doesn’t mean ‘following divine commands’. It means ‘reducing suffering’. You just need to develop a deep appreciation of suffering. If you really understand how an action causes unnecessary suffering to yourself or to others, you will naturally abstain from it. People nevertheless murder, rape and steal because they have only a superficial appreciation of the misery this causes. They are fixated on satisfying their immediate lust or greed, without concern for the impact on others - or even for the long-term impact on themselves. Even inquisitors who deliberately inflict as much pain as possible on their victim, usually use various desensitising and dehumanising techniques in order to distance themselves from what they are doing.

Many thinkers have constructed elaborate social theories, explaining why in the long run such behaviour is counterproductive. You would not like to live in a society where strangers are routinely robbed and murdered. Not only would you be in constant danger, but you would lack the benefit of things like commerce, which depends on trust between strangers. Merchants don’t usually visit dens of thieves. That’s how secular theoreticians from ancient China to modern Europe have justified the golden rule of ‘don’t do to others what you would not like them to do to you’.
Yet we do not really need such complex long-term theories to find a natural basis for universal compassion. Forget about commerce for a moment. On a much more immediate level, hurting others always hurts me too. Every violent act in the world begins with a violent desire in somebody’s mind, which disturbs that person’s own peace and happiness before it disturbs the peace and happiness of anyone else. Thus people seldom steal unless they first develop a lot of greed and envy in their minds. People don’t usually murder unless they first generate anger and hatred. Emotions such as greed, envy, anger and hatred are very unpleasant. You cannot experience joy and harmony when you are boiling with anger or envy. Hence long before you murder anyone, your anger has already killed your own peace of mind.
For some people, a strong belief in a compassionate god that commands us to turn the other cheek may help in curbing anger. That’s been an enormous contribution of religious belief to the peace and harmony of the world.
Unfortunately, for other people religious belief actually stokes and justifies their anger, especially if someone dares to insult their god or ignore his wishes. So the value of the lawgiver god ultimately depends on the behaviour of his devotees. If they act well, they can believe anything they like. Similarly, the value of religious rites and sacred places depends on the type of feelings and behaviours they inspire. If visiting a temple makes people experience peace and harmony - that’s wonderful. But if a particular sacred place causes violence and conflicts, what do we need it for? It is clearly dysfunctional. Not visiting any place of worship and not believing in any god is also a viable option. As the last few centuries have proved, we don’t need to invoke God’s name in order to live a moral life. Secularism can provide us with all the values we need.

Read the following passage:
I teach undergraduate psychology courses at the University of Maryland, and my classes draw students with diverse interests. But every one of them perks up when I pose this question: Do you want two extra-credit points on your term paper, or six points?
I tell my students that the extra-credit offer is part of an exercise illustrating the interconnectedness of choices individuals make in communities. I explain that the exercise was inspired by an ecologist named Garrett Hardin and an address that he delivered 50 years ago this summer, describing what he called “the tragedy of the commons.” Hardin said that when many individuals act in their own selfinterest without regard for society, the effects can be catastrophic. Hardin used the 19th century convention of “the commons”—a cattle grazing pasture that villagers shared— to warn against the overexploitation of communal resources.

I’m hoping that my students will grasp the connections between the classroom exercise, Hardin’s ideas, and our planet’s most pressing problems (including climate change). I allow them to choose between two points or six points of extra credit—but there’s a catch. I stipulate that if more than 10 percent of the class members choose six points, no one gets any points. The extra-credit points are analogous to water, fuel, grazing pasture (from Hardin’s analysis), or any natural resource. According to some free market economic theories, if everyone strives for maximum personal benefit, then societies will thrive. By this logic the student’s rational choice would be to pick six points, just as the shepherd’s rational choice would be to use as much grazing pasture as possible. And those who maximize personal consumption aren’t greedy—they’re strategic.
But when everyone chooses this path, the common resource is overtaxed, and societies end up with overharvesting, water shortages, or climate change. A possible solution seems simple: If everyone just moderated their consumption, we’d have sustainability. As many of my students say, “If everyone chooses two points, we’ll all get the points.” And yet, for the first eight years I used this exercise, only one class— of the dozens I taught—stayed under the 10 percent threshold. All the other classes failed.
This exercise was developed more than 25 years ago. Professor Steve Drigotas of Johns Hopkins University had been using it for some time when he administered it to me and my classmates in 2005. My class failed too—and I, who had chosen two points, was incredibly frustrated with my peers who had chosen six. In 2015 one of my students tweeted about the exercise—“WHAT KIND OF PROFESSOR DOES THIS”—and his lament went viral. People around the globe weighed in: Does so many people choosing six points mean it’s human nature to be greedy and selfish?
Actually most people aren’t. But it’s very tricky to get people to cooperate, especially in large groups of complete strangers. After all, if someone else is taking more for themselves (running more water or choosing six points), why shouldn’t I? But if we all think this way, eventually we’ll all lose.
Hardin suggested that education might make a difference—that if we teach people about the consequences of taking too much, they might not. I’ve been skeptical about this idea. When my student’s tweet went viral, some colleagues said that I wouldn’t be able to use the exercise again (because students would already know how it works). I laughed. If it were only that easy! My suspicion was justified. Even after the exercise got wide exposure, my students still failed the challenge to get the extra-credit points.
Despite this I remain optimistic. After all, most of my students, about 80 percent, choose two points—just as most people choose to cooperate in real-world situations. Most of us want to do what’s right. But that alone won’t solve our problems, so we need to think creatively and use behavioral science to find solutions.
In 2016 I decided to change things up. In hopes of finding a way to increase cooperation, I drew from the scientific literature on social groups and introduced a third option: Students could choose two points, six points—or zero points. That’s right. Zero. Why would anyone do that? Well, for each student who chose zero points, one of the six-point choosers (selected randomly) would lose everything, reducing the total number of six-point choosers by one.
The zero-point option is self-sacrificial; students forgo points for themselves in order to help the group by restraining those who take too much. In behavioral experiments this type of action is called altruistic punishment, a term coined by economists Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter. Their research documented people willingly giving up some of their own resources in order to punish those who behave selfishly in a group context—and doing so in the belief that every individual profits from increased cooperation.
Usually a few of my students each semester choose the zero-point option, and sometimes that’s all it takes. Just a handful of people can make a huge difference— that is, a few self-sacrificing students can bring down the total number of six-point choosers to below the 10 percent threshold. This additional element has dramatically increased cooperation in my courses. Now roughly half my classes receive the extra credit points. In my opinion this is a remarkable turnaround. And some of my classes have done this without anyone actually choosing the zero-point option; simply knowing it was available was enough to increase cooperation.

Though this type of solution may work on the small scale of a classroom, won’t we need much larger action to curb global problems like climate change? Yes, but the principle is the same-it’s about collective action and reducing overconsumption. For example, recently I started volunteering with Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL), an organization that advocates for a policy known as carbon fee and dividend. This plan would put a steadily rising fee on fossil fuels and distribute the money raised back to American households (to protect families against rising costs). Ultimately this would reduce fossil fuel consumption by making this type of energy more expensive to use — so reducing consumption would be better for both our wallets and the environment. At CCL, volunteers meet with lawmakers and conduct outreach to the community. Through our efforts—again, collective action—we gain allies in Congress and the public. By early this year the House’s bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus had 70 members (half Democrats and half Republicans) from states across the country. The challenge that Garrett Hardin described 50 years ago remains today: Our survival depends on each of us and all of us conserving the commons. I choose to remind myself of that with these wise and hopeful lines from the Beatles: “All the world is birthday cake / so take a piece / but not too much.”