Browsing by Author "Pólos László"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Cascading organizational change
    (2003) Pólos László
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    Concepts and Categories: Foundations for Sociological and Cultural Analysis
    (Columbia University Press, 2019) Pólos László
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    Logics of organization theory: audiences, codes, and ecologies
    (Princeton University Press, 2007) Pólos László
    Building theories of organizations is challenging: theories are partial and “folk” categories are fuzzy. The commonly used tools—first-order logic and its foundational set theory—are ill-suited for handling these complications. Here, three leading authorities rethink organization theory. Logics of Organization Theory sets forth and applies a new language for theory building based on a nonmonotonic logic and fuzzy set theory. In doing so, not only does it mark a major advance in organizational theory, but it also draws lessons for theory building elsewhere in the social sciences. Organizational research typically analyzes organizations in categories such as “bank,” “hospital,” or “university.” These categories have been treated as crisp analytical constructs designed by researchers. But sociologists increasingly view categories as constructed by audiences. This book builds on cognitive psychology and anthropology to develop an audience-based theory of organizational categories. It applies this framework and the new language of theory building to organizational ecology. It reconstructs and integrates four central theory fragments, and in so doing reveals unexpected connections and new insights.
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    Reasoning with partial knowledge
    (2002) Pólos László
    We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from classical first-order logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: Adding premises overturns conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify metaprinciples that appear to guide the observed sociological argumentation patterns, and we formalize a semantics to represent them. This semantics yields a new kind of logical consequence relation. We demonstrate that this new logic can reproduce the results of informal sociological theorizing and lead to new insights. It allows us to unify existing theory fragments, and it paves the way toward a complete classical theory. Observed inferential patterns which seem “wrong” according to one notion of inference might just as well signal that the speaker is engaged in correct execution of another style of reasoning. —Johan van Benthem (1996)