Joan Woodward Memorial Lecture: Applied social science: Is it just common sense?
基于伍德沃德的研究，探讨权变方法在组织分析中的应用条件，并反思“常识”与科学知识的关系，对组织研究者和管理实践者理解理论应用有启发。
Joan Woodward (1916–71) introduced the teaching of industrial sociology at Imperial College. Her best-known study, comparing organizations on the basis of their production technologies, was followed by research on the behavioural consequences of management control systems. Together they laid a major foundation stone for the contingency approach to organization. Although not explicitly concerned with application, the contingency approach makes possible analysis and some degree of prediction about organization. For applied work, three further conditions are necessary, that come from the arena of dynamics rather than research: internalizing a finding and turning it into use; starting from where the other is; and creating some transitional space. Whether an outcome is regarded as ‘common sense’ has to do with experience of a situation before it is researched, familiarity with findings afterwards, and the kind of language used. The capacity to think institutionally shifts these boundaries: with it, more things become accessible as common sense that without it would be split-off ‘science’, needing to be re-integrated.