Joan Woodward Memorial Lecture: Applied social science: Is it just common sense?

Abstract

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.