1 Understanding Business Research

What Is Science?

Business administration is a science, in much the same way that sociology, physics, biology and psychology are. While the subject matter in all these disciplines is different, they share three fundamental features. (Stanovich, 2010)^[1]. The first is systematic empiricism. Empiricism refers to learning based on observation, and scientists learn about the world -including other humans!- systematically. They do so by carefully planning, making, recording, and analyzing observations of it. Logical reasoning and even creativity play important roles in science too, but scientists are unique in their insistence on checking their ideas about the way the world works against their systematic observations. When these systematic observations turn out to conflict with their ideas, ideas should be adapted.

The second feature of the scientific approach—which follows in a straightforward way from the first—is that it is concerned with empirical questions. These are questions about the way the world actually is. Therefore, these questions can be answered by systematically observing it. The question of whether a particular investment strategy yields higher returns than another is empirical in this way. Either the investment strategy produces higher returns or it does not, and this can be determined by systematically observing and analyzing financial data.

Having said this, there are many interesting and important questions that are not empirically testable and that -scientifically speaking- are much more difficult to answer. Among these are questions about values—whether financial practices are ethical or unethical, fair or unfair, or beneficial or harmful, and how financial systems ought to be structured. To give another example: marketing research may make a statistical model that can predict whether customers would respond to an e-mail campaign. The subsequent question of whether it’s an ethically good idea to use customer data as input for this model, and the question of whether it’s actually fair to customers to keep sending them marketing messages is another question altogether.

The third feature of science is that it creates public knowledge. After asking their empirical questions, making their systematic observations, and drawing their conclusions, scientists publish their work. This usually means writing an article for publication in a professional journal, in which they put their research question in the context of previous research, describe in detail the methods they used to answer their question, and clearly present their results and conclusions. Increasingly, scientists are opting to publish their work in open access journals, in which the articles are freely available to all – scientists and nonscientists alike. This important choice allows publicly-funded research to create knowledge that is truly public.

Publication is an essential feature of science for two reasons. One is that science is, perhaps surprisingly, a remarkably social process. It is a large-scale collaboration among many researchers distributed across both time and space. Our current scientific knowledge of most topics is based on many different studies conducted by many different researchers who have shared their work publicly over many years. The second is that publication allows science to be self-correcting. Individual scientists understand that, despite their best efforts, their data or methods can be flawed, they might make mistakes, and their conclusions may be incorrect. Publication allows others in the scientific community to detect and correct these errors so that, over time, scientific knowledge increasingly reflects the way the world actually is.

Because individual studies can be flawed,  or specific to the time and place in which they were conducted, academics typically don’t treat a single study as the final say on a certain subject. In fact, sometimes there is lots of debate on whether a certain effect,  theory or finding actually exists, even after many studies by many different authors. In order to settle such debates or test how widely important theories and results apply, many disciplines such as psychology and marketing have recently seen more large-scale replication studies that test key theories in many different labs and locations at the same time. For example, one psychological and marketing theory is the so-called ego-depletion effect. This theory suggests that someone’s self-control is a resource that can be depleted, but there has been much debate on whether such an effect actually exists. In response, a group of 61 authors has published a paper in which the same experiment is performed across 23 different labs in 12 different countries, in order to test whether the effect actually exists (Hagger et al. 2016) ^[2]