In the summer of 2018, I attended a management conference in Wuhan, China, where I had a casual conversation with an ethnic Chinese scholar whom I had known for some years. He was an enthusiast of the theory of yin (陰) and yang (陽) rooted in Chinese philosophy and he tried to persuade me that this theory could explain virtually all phenomena, whether natural or social. I expressed some serious reservations about his claim because if a theory is said to be able to explain everything, it probably explains nothing. However, so as not to jeopardize our friendship, I refrained from challenging his argument. The way he described how yin–yang theory explained a certain phenomenon also indicated that he had a problematic conception of explanation. What does it really mean anyway when one claims that a theory has explained a phenomenon?
Fast forward to 2021. The whole world had been in “lockdown” for close to a year because of the Covid-19 pandemic that had originated in Wuhan (coincidentally the same city where the management conference mentioned above was held). Since I was born and grew up in Hong Kong and many of my friends and relatives lived there, I paid particular attention to news about infection and vaccination in the city. Not long after the vaccination program started there in early 2021, several people died within a few days of receiving the first dose of the vaccine. However, each time this happened, the Hong Kong government announced − after an investigation by a team of medical experts − that it had found no direct relationship between vaccination and the death of the unfortunate person; that is, it could not be scientifically established that the vaccination had caused death and so vaccination was ruled out as an explanation of the death. I wondered how the team of experts determined whether a causal relationship existed or not. Was it that only if a person died within, say, thirty minutes of receiving a vaccine that vaccination would be considered to be the cause of death? How should the post-vaccination death of people be explained?
The above two incidents reminded me of the theories of explanation and causation that I read in philosophy, in particular the philosophy of science, decades ago. Given the critical role played by explanation in not only science but also our daily lives, it is natural that explanation has long been a key topic of philosophical discourse. In fact, the literature has grown voluminously, especially so after the publication in 1942 of Carl Hempel’s landmark paper “The Function of General Laws in History,” which presents the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation.
The act of explaining is something most people seem to have an intuitive grasp of. Yet many may be caught off guard by a question like “When we say that this is an explanation for an event or a phenomenon, what exactly do we mean?” Although I wrote a chapter on explanation in my previous book The Philosophy of Management Research, a single chapter does not do justice to this complex and important subject matter. My search of the extant literature failed to identify even one book that bridged the gap between a technical, philosophical treatment of the subject and the more practical needs of management as well as other social science scholars. This omission in the literature gave rise to my idea to write this book.
The main objective of this book is to deepen management scholars’ understanding of various issues associated with explanation. Such understanding in turn will improve the quality of their research both conceptually and empirically. This objective has determined the book’s practice orientation and selection of materials. For instance, I skipped Philip Kitcher’s unification theory of explanation, which is so technical that few management researchers would likely find it useful. Similarly, my presentation of Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes in Chapter 3 is relatively brief despite the doctrine’s significant position in philosophy and its complicated nature; it is less relevant to management research than the other modes of explanation discussed in that chapter. I drew examples mostly from management literature and business news but also used examples from natural science and daily life if I judged that these examples would illustrate more clearly my arguments. Needless to say, I repeated some of the common examples used by philosophers, such as the barometer, the birth-control pill and the flagpole counterexamples to illustrate the problems of the covering law model of explanation. Given that one of the basic objectives of scientific research is to explain phenomena, scholars in social science disciplines other than management will also find this book useful. In addition to providing knowledge about explanation, I also hope that readers will appreciate and benefit from the philosophical arguments presented in the book. These arguments, in my opinion, are generally more rigorous and sophisticated than those that usually appear in management literature.
I tried to strike a balance between breadth and depth of coverage within given space constraints. The coverage is broad enough that management scholars should be able to find in this book a great deal of what they need to know about explanation for the benefit of their own research, whether qualitative or quantitative. Owing to the broad coverage of topics, depth is sometimes sacrificed; each of the highly technical issues included in this book could have easily taken up the space of a journal article or even an entire book. My treatment is presented necessarily in a simplified manner. Readers may refer to the cited references if they wish to go into details. To help readers in this respect, I have included in this book most of the classic references for each topic discussed.
Although this book has a stronger philosophical flavor than most academic management texts, as indicated by the phrase “A Philosophical Treatise” in its title, I sometimes sacrificed the rigor of argument typically found in philosophy by avoiding pedantic and technical philosophical issues. While some background knowledge of philosophy would surely be helpful to readers, my writing is pitched at a level such that in-depth knowledge of philosophy is not required to understand most of the discussion. Philosophical concepts and arguments − especially complicated ones − are as far as possible introduced with clarity and elaboration. That said, I hope readers will be willing to exert more effort to understand this book than they would employ when reading an average management text and that they are prepared to consult philosophical texts where necessary to understand particularly technical points. I also won’t explain commonly used terms like ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, positivism, realism, induction and deduction, the meanings of which can be easily found via the Internet.
The process of writing this book was, for my part, a learning journey. I started to delve into the literature about three years ago and soon noticed that the number of references had snowballed quickly to an unmanageable scale. I therefore had to be more selective in my review. Moreover, my routine (and sometimes unexpected) research, teaching and administrative duties as well as family issues interrupted my progress from time to time. This book was really a side-project, partly because none of my doctoral students at that time were working on anything remotely related to the topic of the book. Since most of the examples appearing in the literature were from the natural sciences, I faced occasionally the challenge of finding appropriate management examples to illustrate my arguments. A consolation, however, was that I not only got to know more about the subject of explanation but was also able to sort out conceptual issues that had previously puzzled me. On the whole, the process of researching and writing this book was an enjoyable, albeit strenuous, intellectual experience.
I wish to pay special thanks to Professors Florian Ellsaesser and Jochen Runde, my coauthors on a journal paper, extracts of which were incorporated into Chapter 2. I learned a great deal from working with them. Miss Valerie Appleby and Mr. Toby Ginsberg of Cambridge University Press gave me generous assistance without which the publication of this book would be delayed. Last but not least, I thank my younger son, Boris, who let me use his photo as the cover of the book.
