Test Your Feel For...

The expert investigator orients themselves towards existing situations and sees their task as obtaining statistically valid evidence to enable them, or more often others, to make the final decision.

They are expected to be able to explain rather than to achieve. They therefore tend to be impartial and impersonal. Their conviction and motivation is aimed at producing ever greater certainly and accuracy, and not primarily at generating organizational development.

As a result they are typically in a staff position, often within a planning section: or, to avoid any compromise of integrity, remain in academia or in consultancy organizations.

■ The negative effects of empiricism are to narrow the decision-maker's focus, and to weaken morale by excluding values and personal interests from detailed consideration.

■ The enduring controversy that an empiricist endlessly struggles with is between:
knowledge/rationality represented by like-minded investigators and scientists,
and
ignorance/irrationality represented by managers, professionals, the public and politicians.

■ A thoroughgoing empiricist is ready to apply the method in complex or confusing situations. They are not bothered by the cost of information collection being exorbitant, the lengthy time-delay rendering results pointless, and piloting being impracticable. Empirical approaches have therefore bankrupted organizations.

■ Empiricists are rooted in the present and recent past. They tend to be hostile to change and innovation, because these alter the basic parameters within which facts can be agreed, collected, analysed, piloted, applied and evaluated.