MGT 500 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Outline Of Physical Science, Comparative Advantage, Alternative Culture

• School: Ball State University
• Department: Management
• Course: MGT 500
• Professor: Ronda Smith

Document Summary

Physical science laws in chemistry, astronomy, and physics are consistent and can be applied in various situations because they allow scientists to make generalizations about gravity or be confident about sending people to space to fix things. People are very complex and there are very few universal principles to help us explain behavior in organizations. We aren"t all the same, so we are limited in our ability to make simple, accurate, and broad generalizations about ourselves. Two people in a certain situation may act completely differently. However, this doesn"t mean you can make reasonably true explanations or predictions about human behavior. This does mean, though, that ob concepts have to reflect conditions that are contingent on something or situational. Contingency variables are things like a leads to b, but only when there are specific conditions in. The science of ob was created by applying concepts considered more general to a certain situation, individual, or group.