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.