Faculty of Business Seminar Series / Prof. Dr. Attila Yaprak

Title: Academic Disciplines and Their Theory Construction Journeys: Conceptual and Empirical Foundations

Abstract: Along their journeys toward becoming disciplines, fields of study go through evolutionary phases. The most important ingredient in this process is the development of theories that help explain the field’s phenomena. While the natural sciences, such as physics and chemistry, have a long history of theory development, the social sciences, such as economics and business, have shown more recent strides in theory development. These fields’ scholars have also been questioning the development of their paradigms through time in their attempts to explain spiraled knowledge growth in them vs. quantum leaps in theory development.

In this presentation, Dr Yaprak will speak to how scholars of an area of study, such as marketing or management, construct and continue to develop successful theories; the roles of paradigms, falsification, and research methods in establishing theory in that discipline; the criteria that should be used in evaluating the quality and sustainability of theories in business disciplines; and the roles of theory building and theory testing, systematic reflection and scientific meaning, and the development of conceptual vs. empirical contributions in constructing successful theories. He will speak to the characteristics that a theoretical contribution should possess to make it valuable by going through the development of consumer culture theory in marketing.

Time permitting, he will also speak to how we develop measures of (marketing) constructs and establish psychometric properties in (marketing) research. In this context, he will speak to how researchers assess reliability and validity and measurement invariance in research; how they deal with concerns over equivalencies, common method bias, and scale dimensionality in research; and how empirical testing and generalizations support theory development in a discipline. He will sprinkle examples from the business disciplines into his presentation to help lift audience participation in his presentation.

 Place : Meeting Room AB2-345