What Are Mechanisms? Ways of Conceptualizing and Studying Causal Mechanisms
梳理了管理学中关于因果机制的三种方法论视角（情境、构成与干预），分析各自的理论假设、方法选择及解释类型，并针对每种视角的推断挑战提供具体指导，适合关注机制解释的研究者。
Over the last two decades, much of management research has converged on the belief that one of its major aims is to identify the causal mechanisms that produce the phenomena that researchers seek to explain. In this paper, we review and synthesize the literature that has amassed around causal mechanisms. We do so by detailing the different methodological perspectives that are featured in management research, which we label as the contextual, constitutive, and interventionist perspectives. For each of these perspectives, we examine what it theoretically presupposes a mechanism to be, how this connects to methodological choices, and how this shapes the kind of mechanism-based explanations that each perspective offers. We also explore the main inferential challenges for each of these perspectives and offer specific methodological guidance in response. In this way, we aim to offer a common plank for theorizing and research on causal mechanisms in ways that recognize and harness the productive differences across different epistemologies and methodological traditions.