From Contingency to Structural Inevitabilities: Criteria for Law-Like Theories in Organization Studies

Organization studies have long emphasized contingency and context, producing a wealth offrameworks but few law-like generalizations. This paper argues that advancing toward strongertheory requires explicit criteria for structural inevitabilities — principles that hold across time,sector, and scale. We propose four criteria that distinguish law-like theories from frameworks:universality (applicable across organizational forms), irreducibility (cannot be collapsed intosmaller elements), interdependence (elements operate as a coherent system), and falsifiability(claims can be empirically refuted). We illustrate the criteria through the Black Belt OS, aproposed structural law of collective organization, while emphasizing that the illustration issecondary to the framework itself. We then discuss implications for theory-building, includingthe potential to shift organization studies beyond description toward structural laws that paralleladvances in the natural sciences. By establishing criteria for structural inevitabilities, this papercontributes to ongoing debates on theory strength and invites a research program aimed atidentifying and testing organizational laws