Tight Mapping: A Concrete Procedure for Borrowing from Radical Traveling Theories

摘要

The scientific domain of organization and management is multidisciplinary; its theorists have borrowed extensively from other domains such as biology, psychology and sociology. Many of the borrowed theories are radical traveling theories, i.e., abstract, general theories that have made groundbreaking contributions to their domain of origin, and that have great potential for organization and management. Theory borrowing has received considerable attention over the past thirty years, during which time fundamental epistemological issues have been addressed, but little attention has been paid to the difficulties that are involved in carrying out borrowing. More pragmatic works are needed, and with this in mind, we suggest tight mapping transformative analogical reasoning. This mode of reasoning creatively and rigorously reduces the abstraction of radical traveling theories so that they provide accurate and coherent organization and management theories. Tight mapping facilitates borrowing and can be helpful to the many organization and management theorists who borrow from radical traveling theories. We hope that our concrete suggestion for tight mapping will serve as a starting point for further pragmatic research on theory borrowing.