#meta-theory

The theory of Personality Constructs proposed by George Kelly is considered a meta-theory. It is a theory of theories that assume that each individual creates or perceives their own personal theories that shape their own personality. To grasp the picture of the meaning of this theory, I think it this way. We all live on earth hence having the same world. However, we experience this world differently from each other. Putting it simply, we all have our own beliefs of the different ways to deal with the world.

“Bad and dangerous people try to understand the Whole — they develop ideologies and metaphysics, what Pinker derides as “Big Ideas.” These bad people, drunk on their own hubris, next search for ultimate “root causes” for society’s ills, rather than doing the sensible thing and merely treating symptoms as they pop up.”

I wouldn’t want to put words into Pinker’s mouth without having first read his book.  But, if he is suspicious of getting at “root causes” (did he use that literal phrase?) of things, then why not just admit, as this article seems to suggest, that he’s given up on the Enlightenment project and that his hidden ideology, against his own counsel against ideology, is mostly an exercise in theory building around status quo bias?

System justifiers, status quo defenders, and triumphalist heralds of the superiority and finality of any given historical period are a well trod class, not to mention dismally predictable.  Anyone alive to the historical moral realities of the human experience outside oneself must, so it would seem, take a skeptical view of such cheerleading for the present order.

At the risk of being uncharitable, I would ask Pinker to please point to the spot in the below diagram where the free market requires that we not think anymore or where thinking gets dangerous:

(From Edwards, M. (2008). Evaluating Integral Metatheory: An Exemplar Case and a Defense of Wilbur’s Social Quadrant. Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, 3(4), pp. 61-83)

Certainly there are historical cases of meta-theoretical concepts like “being” that have arguably led into obscurantist thickets.  Logical positivism and psychoanalysis are derelict buildings.  Failed intellectual ventures nevertheless tell us very important things about the limitations of thought, the intelligibility of concepts and the viability of theory.  We probably have to undertake them in order to fully work out their inherent logic and paths of argumentation.  Critical thought is in large part the clearing away of rubbish.  Given human error and the limitations of thought it pretty much has to be that way.  We have to learn from our mistakes.

But not all meta-scale theories are failures.  Scientific naturalism, for example, still stands.  Critics will dispute this, and they should.  Or, having learned from debate and from history we can still posit forms of Marxism that are, at least to me, still valid.

In a forthcoming recent paper, Symmetric Assumptions in the Theory of Disruptive Innovation - Theoretical and Managerial Implications, coauthored with Christian Sandström and Mats Magnusson, we discuss the meta-theoretical assumptions of Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation. More specifically, we focus on the asymmetries present in the theory's basic behavioral assumptions. 

The classic example of a theory suffering from such asymmetric assumptions comes from political science, where it was long held that individuals qua politicians, public-sector bureaucrats etc. acted in the public interest, whereas individuals qua voters, lobbyists etc. acted in their own interest. By assuming self-interested behavior on the part of all actors and institutions, the theory was improved markedly.

Another example comes from strategic management, where Nicolai Foss and Niklas Hallberg in a recent paper call for more attention to assumptional symmetry, e.g. regarding the level of friction present in the Resource Based View of the firm's depiction of product markets (typically no friction) and factor markets (typically significant friction).

We claim that Christensen's theory similarly rests on asymmetric assumptions where the nature and behavior of firms differ depending on the positions they occupy in the theory, i.e. whether the firm in question is a) the incumbent facing a disruptive threat, or b) an actor in the incumbent's external environment. While such inconsistency may (or may not) be troubling from a purely theoretical point of view, we argue that this inconsistency has also contributed to the arguably slow development of solutions to the innovator's dilemma. 

The first asymmetry concerns firm complexity:

In the TDI (theory of disruptive innovation), incumbent firms are seen as complex organizations with substantial internal heterogeneity. Importantly for the theory, this includes actors and sub-units with diverse preferences, incentives and competencies competing to secure resources for different innovation projects. Drawing upon resource dependency theory, TDI then suggests that the firm-internal actors who satisfy demands of the current market will attract resources at the expense of more disruptive initiatives. However, the complexity described in incumbents is not assumed to exist in the firms that populate its surrounding environment. Instead, the environment is primarily depicted as internally homogeneous customer segments, e.g. low-end and high-end. Less attention is paid to differences either between or within organizations in these segments. This means that important  differences in competencies, preferences and incentives that may exist among different actors and sub-units within individual customer organizations are not recognized by the theory. The external environment is essentially reduced to a set of broad forces that determine who within the focal firm wins in the competition for resources.

The second asymmetry concerns firm agency:

Christensen’s original research illustrated how the resource allocation process of established firms is controlled by their most profitable customers. Incumbents thus failed to make sufficient investments in disruptive technologies because they were “held captive” by their existing market. The underlying assumption here is that incumbents are controlled by their customers, whereas the customers cannot be influenced by the incumbent. As a result—and consistent with the TDI’s application of resource dependency theory—the only way in which firms can relate to their existing customers is by passive adaptation, i.e. developing offers that fit one of the existing customer segments’ predefined demand functions (Christensen and Rosenbloom, 1995). This focus on adaptation as the only way incumbents can relate to customers may explain why existing prescriptions for overcoming the innovator’s dilemma have primarily focused on firm internal factors. Managerial solutions have thus far addressed e.g. how new and old business models should relate to each other, how incumbent firms can work with internal resources, processes and values, e.g. by establishing organizational designs that shield disruptive initiatives from the adaptive forces of resource dependency (e.g. Markides and Charitou, 2004; Christensen and Raynor, 2003, O’Reilly and Tushman 2008). Indeed, this basic premise makes the issue of developing suggestions for how incumbents may proactively manage their customers, and more generally their surrounding value network, a non sequitur.