Theory
This week we studied the theory on the subject of... theories. It was quite interesting to analyze what is theory and give it a proper definition. Doing this, we used the article "What Theory is Not" (Sutton, Staw), which reminded me of another work of this format, "The nature of explanation" (K. Craik) that has been written in 1943. Surprisingly for me, there were the same ideas in the both articles, that leads to the conclusion that this subject is still could be discussed, 60 years later.
The most important point for me was to remember that any science paper with references and diagrams, hypothesis and various data is not theoretical if there is no hypothesis that can be tested - it is an easy scheme to use while looking for the information for my master thesis and other work.
Also, theory is an important philosophical term, used since times of Plato and Aristotle. It is a human tool used in order to understand and systematize our knowledge about the world. It doesn't exist by itself, as we pointed out during our group discussion.
Five types of theories can help in describing some scientific papers due to providing structured templates of parameters for every kind of theory to include. At the same time, sometimes it is impossible to choose the only one theory, or discuss its types at all, as we learned during the seminar. Personally, I consider Gregor's work as a good mind exercise.
Practice
We discussed various theories in order to find the paper with actual theoretical concept, and have learned (and googled) a lot of theories in the end, such as Social capital theory, Game theory, Social Cognitive theory etc. It was interesting to learn how the hypothesis development works, to see the similarities in the structure of every theory, and try to think about each theory in the case of particular research, and then globally.
The editing work can also be considered as very useful. We had a difficult task: to edit a description, which was already complete. These skills sometimes can be very useful, while working on a voluminous text.
