Scholarly Defensive Routines

Definition

Scholarly defensive routines are the unwritten norms, reward structures, and methodological rules that scholarly communities use to maintain the status quo of research practice. These routines prevent researchers from conducting interventionist, prescriptive research aimed at creating double-loop learning and implementable solutions, even while scholars document the need for such research.

In the Book

Argyris identifies a fundamental puzzle in Chapter 5: scholars document practitioners' defensive reasoning and organizational defensive routines, showing these features have counterproductive effects, yet the scholars themselves do not conduct research designed to overcome these effects. Why? The scholar's defensive routines include: (1) the belief that scholarship's ultimate aim is to describe the universe as completely as possible, not to change it; (2) research methodologies that espouse unlimited exploration but practice biased, limited exploration; (3) the emphasis on internal and external validity while ignoring implementable validity; and (4) community norms that treat interventionist research and prescriptive knowledge as violating proper scholarly practice. Normal science and narrative-interpretive research share this limitation: they focus on describing existing events (theory-in-use level) but do not focus on creating rare events (what would exist under Model II). Scholars use defensive reasoning to justify these limitations: conducting implementation research is seen as dangerous to knowledge validity, as risky to one's career, and as beyond the proper scope of academic inquiry.

Why It Matters

Scholarly defensive routines create a paradox of knowledge: the very people positioned to research solutions to organizational dysfunction instead maintain a research culture that privileges description over prescription. This allows practitioners and scholars to collude in "blind leading the blind"—each seeing the problems but neither taking responsibility for solving them. Breaking these routines requires elevating implementable validity to equal status with internal and external validity in research evaluation.