MacIntyre was, in effect, arguing that managers act as though they are operating in a world characterized by the kind of cause-and-effect relationships with which we are familiar in the natural sciences—drop an apple and it will fall, for example. But via a lengthy argument for which we do not have the space here,14 he demonstrated that in the social sciences generalizations were few and far between, and that they generally lacked predictive power. He concluded in characteristic fashion that, ‘the salient fact about those sciences is the absence of the discovery of any law-like generalizations
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