Handbook of Organizations (RLE: Organizations)

CHAPTER 5	Laboratory Experimentation with Organizations1
	KARL E. WEICK

Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled (Kaplan, 1964, p. 28).

If Kaplan's statement is put alongside Scott's observation that “most of what we know today about organizations and the behavior of their members is known on the basis of field studies” (p. 261, this Handbook), it would seem that laboratory studies of organizations are rare, and that this may be due to ignorance of laboratory methodology and narrow formulations of ...