verbal theorizing, the mike ryall challenge and ezra zuckerman

So, the most provocative presentation (easily) at this year’s UTAH-BYU Winter Strategy Conference was given by Mike Ryall (University of Toronto).  Mike argued that “verbal theorizing” has problems, serious problems.  He reiterated the Ryall Challenge (originally issued at last year’s AOM session on the Strategy Research Initiative, SRI), for any scholar to submit a natural language paper that meets the following criteria:

1. Unambiguous – meaning does not vary from scholar to scholar.
2. Rigorously derived – conclusions logically consistent with premises.
3. Measurable – empirically refutable.
4. Plausible – consistent with researcher’s priors.

OK, so, it’s hard to disagree with the need for increased clarity, fine.  Yes, jargon can be a problem.

But, ambiguity and grand theorizing also leave room for additional work – thankfully so.  And jargon in fact can be a very efficient way to communicate.  In short, I think the Ryall Challenge is sort of meaningless, it seems to unfairly use the criteria of formal modeling to assess natural language theorizing.  Of course both types of work have their purposes.  When pushed, Mike does not seem to deny this either (see his last slide).

In fact, I think we might live in the best of all possible worlds (which is always the alternative hypothesis) – we have people who do more “ambiguous,” natural language-type theorizing, others model, others do empirical work of various sort, mixed-methods, etc.  These approaches complement each other.  And the good stuff floats to the top, gets attention, cited, etc.  Put differently, the market — over time — sorts the wheat from the chaff.

Now, it gets more interesting.  Ezra submitted a paper to try to meet the Ryall Challenge, his RSO paper “Speaking with One Voice: A Stanford School” Approach to Organizational Hierarchy.”

In the presentation, Mike spent quite a bit of time thrashing unpacking the verbal argument in Ezra’s paper.  Mike wrote a paper-length response to Ezra, Ezra is responding and each is posting their respective responses onto their web site.  I told Mike that we’d be thrilled to have him and Ezra guest blog on this issue.

Here are Mike’s slides (the sanitized, public version).

UPDATE – here are some additional resources related to Mike’s presentation.  The SRI Strategy Reader.  A list of the two dozen+ top, mid-career strategy scholars involved in SRI.  Upcoming, joint SRI and Administrative Science Quarterly paper development workshop.