Received Wisdom, Kernels of Truth, and Boundary Conditions in Organizational Studies

This volume of the Research in Organizational Sciences is entitled "Received Wisdom, Kernels of Truth,and Boundary Conditions in Organizational Studies". Received wisdom is knowledge imparted to peopleby others and is based on authority and tenacity as sources of human knowledge. Authority refers to theacceptance of knowledge as truth because of the position and credibility of the knowledge source. Tenacityrefers to the continued presentation of a particular bit of information by a source until this bit ofinformation is accepted as true by receivers. The problem for organizational studies, however, is that thisreceived wisdom often becomes unquestioned assumptions which guide interpretation of the world and decisions made about the world. Receivedwisdom, therefore, may lead to organizational practices which provide little or no benefit to the organization and, potentially, negative organizationaleffects, because this received wisdom is no longer valid. The 14 papers in this volume all, in some way, strive to question received wisdom and presentalternatives which expand our understanding of organizational behavior in some way. The chapters in this volume each strive to present new ways ofunderstanding organizational constructs, and in so doing reveal how received wisdom has often led to confirmation bias in organizational science. Theknowledge that some perceived truths are actually the products of received wisdom and do not stand up to close scrutiny shakes up things withinresearch areas previously thought settled allowing new perspectives on organizational science to emerge.