Methodology of paradigms in organizational growth studies

Abstract

The paper justifies and describes the paradigms that organize hypotheses, theories and models of organizational growth into groups and determines the fundamental principles, avenues and methodology of organizational growth studies. The methodological framework includes Kuhn’s concept of paradigm on reconstruction of theoretical knowledge about organizational growth supplemented with Lakatos’s Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes that allows identifying the methodological core of growth paradigms. Theoretical generalizations underlying the research are presented as organizational growth concepts and combined into three paradigms on the basis of the theoretical and methodological principles that are common to all of the paradigms and make up the core of each of them. Through this, the author justifies the causal paradigm that views an organization as a deterministic and mechanistic system focused on establishing development regularities that describe one-to-one causal relationships between the elements and subsystems of a company, and emphasizes two paradigms founded on the ideas about an organization as an organic system capable of developing itself and increasing its complexity. The first of the two paradigms is the growth outcome paradigm, the theories and models of which deal with organizational growth as a natural process, similar to growth and evolution of biological organisms (ontogenesis). At that, the primary research objective within this paradigm is to identify innovations typical of each new stage of a company’s life cycle and to create favourable conditions for their introduction. The other paradigm is the process paradigm that asks how growth affects organizational structure and internal processes.

Keywords

• organizational growth
• paradigms
• company life cycle
• models of organizational growth
• mechanistic organization
• organic organization
• system-based approach