Taken-for-granted assumptions

Undeclared and unexamined assumptions that are, by definition, self-evident to a community can be seen as impositions by other communities that do not share them (Romaioli & McNamee, Reference Romaioli and McNamee2021). In turn, a given community and its members will defend as reasonable arguments that logically descend from those assumptions against competing communities. We suggest that it is not qualitative methods, per se, that are at odds with open science principles (as Guzzo et al., Reference Guzzo, Schneider and Nalbantian2022, and Pratt, Kaplan, & Whittington, Reference Pratt, Kaplan and Whittington2020, among others, argued), but the universalistic and all-encompassing claims that are tied to open science are incompatible with epistemic stances most often embraced by qualitative scholars.

Consider the following excerpt from one of the first articles advocating for open science in psychology, which defined our discipline as hinging on “testing statistical hypotheses using empirical observations and data” (Shrout & Rodgers, Reference Shrout and Rodgers2018, p. 487). Industrial–organizational (I-O) psychologists went a step further and argued that open science principles are the hallmark of a “robust” science and I-O psychologists “must actively pursue the tenants of open science” (McAbee et al., Reference McAbee, Grubbs and Zickar2018, p. 59). However, these seemingly innocuous statements encompass several assumptions on what science is and what it is not. The primacy of numerical data and quantitative methods, large samples, successful replications as a measure of scientific merit, and testing pre-registered hypotheses are foundational of open science and are hailed as a solution to improve research quality for the entirety of I-O psychology field and broader psychological science (Banks et al., Reference Banks, Field, Oswald, O’Boyle, Landis, Rupp and Rogelberg2019). We advance that this is position is disingenuous, as it further marginalizes critical organizational psychologists and constructivist research, for which we should instead create space (Bazzoli & Probst, Reference Bazzoli and Probst2022a,b). Further, we should characterize open science for what it actually is: a response to a set of challenges raised for the most part by positivist and quantitative psychologists.

For example, constructionist epistemologies are not concerned with replicability of findings at all; rather, borrowing a page from the book of American Pragmatism (e.g., Dewey, Reference Dewey and Thayer1982), “what is true is what works,” in the sense that forms of knowledge are assessed on their ability to meet their stated goals with a focus on the consequences that sharing that type of knowledge will have on participants, their communities, society as a whole, and other scientific disciplines. Similarly, the social reality we inhabit is not necessarily objective and measurable and can be instead understood as the by-product of negotiations people carry out with others and the environment, considering historical, local, and cultural contexts. Following Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1953), when a community defines a “reality,” its members are bound to a cultural and historical tradition that informs how they know that reality through their shared negotiations, norms, and symbols.

Given this, organizational theories need not be evaluated only on whether their predictions hold true to empirical investigations and formal statistical testing. A theory’s generative potential can also be explored (Gergen, Reference Gergen1978), that is, its capability to challenge assumptions of culture, raise questions relevant to social life, and eventually generate alternatives for social action. Last, every form of knowledge is a social construction, included—indubitably—critical and constructionist perspectives; therefore, open science is not necessarily better science, it is just another way of doing science and approaching psychological phenomena. This point, however, has not yet been recognized by open science advocates, who have uncritically adopted a postpositivist framework and a realist ontology.

Perils

Principles of open science are already embedded in certain funding mechanisms; for instance, open access publication of data (with very limited exceptions), protocols, and the article itself are mandated for projects funded by the Horizon Europe (2021–2027) framework. Furthermore, there is a movement, especially in Northern Europe, that aims to link adherence to open science practices to tenure and promotion. Those policies are not value neutral and can be understood as manifestations of funding agencies’ deep-seated values, paradigmatic assumptions, and beliefs. A slavish adoption of these principles will lead to an exclusionary and hostile notion of what counts as science, what is deemed valuable, and what should be done in the future to tackle societal challenges. In short, by imposing and implementing a set of universalistic principles that legitimize the cultural authority of the dominant postpositivist ontology and epistemology, open science serves as a tool to reinforce postpositivism’s hegemonic position in I-O psychology and beyond, to the detriment of other epistemologies.

Rewarding open science practices is a sensible stance to enhance rigor for some quantitative organizational research, but it poses challenges for other types of research. Others argued that core open science tenets might be unethical (Brabeck, Reference Brabeck2021), especially when doing research with vulnerable and minoritized people (e.g., women victim of abuse, undocumented immigrants) and might discourage altogether other types of research. Action research and ethnographies might disappear as they completely reject the idea of testing hypotheses and the presence of a bias-free, independent researcher, which are requirements of many open science practices. These methods instead focus on doing research with participants, not on them. Similarly, constructionist research approaches insist on researcher’s reflexivity (McNamee & Hosking, Reference McNamee and Hosking2012), which is severely limited in favor of following pre-registered protocols.

As noted earlier, unchecked implementation of these principles will further marginalize scholars doing research that does not fit positivist epistemologies. This marginalization will look like exclusion from funding opportunities, limited career opportunities, and adverse reputational consequences. On a more theoretical note, such an uncritical implementation is a threat to the pluralism of scientific research, narrowing the available discourses and methods to analyze relevant organizational phenomena. Unfortunately, certain qualitative researchers have already begun embracing methodological simplicity to produce mechanistic accounts of social life to fit the dominant epistemology (Donmoyer, Reference Donmoyer2012).

A way forward?

Considering open science not as valid in itself, but as a tool that can influence—in a powerful way—psychological science is key to this commentary. We resist open science’s contention to be a gold standard for all psychological research, as evaluating a way of doing research using criteria that are foreign to its own epistemic premises or using assumptions that are derived from a competing epistemology is meaningless, given that epistemic systems are incommensurable. Each research tradition would in fact emphasize some aspects over other because they better align with their stated (and unstated) values and beliefs. In other words, there is no birds’ eye when it comes to theories and paradigms as we cannot step out of our own linguistic systems. Instead, our aim is to encourage scientists to reflect and clarify what “open” and “science” mean and suggest ways for scholars to reflect on the wider impact that their research can have.

On the one hand, coming to terms that today’s open science movement is not a movement for all psychologists and it only seems to work for European and North American quantitatively oriented researchers (e.g., South African researchers resisted sharing their data because of high income countries’ well-known history of exploitation; Traynor & Foster, Reference Traynor and Foster2017) is of particular importance considering the recent expectation that all social scientists engage in open science practices can easily be misunderstood by those tasked with evaluating research and decide what lines of research deserve funding, recognition, and ultimately what counts as good science. On the other hand, we would like to suggest one useful (we hope) reflection about how constructionist discourses can complement the open science movement. Disclosing researchers’ own positionality seems a sensible topic to include under the umbrella of transparency: a reflection on how research questions and data were generated and how results were interpreted could be published alongside the paper, following the lead of Nosek et al., (Reference Nosek, Alter, Banks, Borsboom, Bowman, Breckler and Yarkoni2015). In other words, we encourage scholars to analyze the boundaries within which a paper has been produced, acknowledging that those boundaries are not value-free, and were shaped by researcher’s environment and beliefs. Doing so, we believe, will enhance research transparency by uncovering whose experiences are being valued and investigated as well as what assumptions are being made. In the end, we are not claiming that epistemic assumptions that are foundational of open science principles are ill conceived or unreasonable; we are instead asking whether they are always and universally useful, concluding that perhaps they are not, and warning that scientific endeavors that purport to be value-free can be dangerous in certain circumstances.