Does it describe a new discovery, methodology, or synthesis of knowledge?

Our paper synthesizes both knowledge and research. For instance, Dale Miller and colleagues at the Stanford Graduate School of Business have shown how the assumption of self-interest, one of the core assumptions of economics, can become self-fulfilling.

A study of the Chicago Board Options Exchange has shown how the Black-Scholes option pricing model (developed by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes in 1973) became "institutionalized" in software that made the pricing predictions of the model become more accurate as representations of reality over time.

The contribution of our paper is to draw these and other examples together and to describe the various ways in which theories may become self-fulfilling, thereby outlining a research agenda for exploring how theories evolve and become accepted, as well as providing a way of understanding the impact of theory on organizations and societies.

Our paper is significant because: a) it shows that social science theories matter for policy—social policies on topics ranging from the regulation of labor markets and capital markets, to the education of students, to the treatment of criminals, to the design of institutional arrangements for organizing health care—incorporate, either implicitly or explicitly, assumptions about people and organizations, and b) the theories that come to dominate in this process are not necessarily the most accurate, but c) because of the self-fulfilling nature of many theories of individual and organizational behavior, are d) the theories that are most widely and strongly believed to be true.

We became involved in this research because we were interested in the influence of economic thinking on the social and policy sciences and on management practices more specifically.

In particular, we kept encountering management research that treated core assumptions from economics as facts about how humans will behave—even though the best evidence shows that these assumptions are dangerous half-truths, at best. Examples include taken-for-granted beliefs that people are naturally competitive and, as economist Oliver Williamson of the University of California at Berkeley, asserts, are self-serving with guile.

We actually did not encounter any obstacles along the way. The paper took a long time to write and we did go through many revisions, but our editors and reviewers at the Academy of Management Review were very supportive and helpful in the process of developing the paper.

There are a number of social and political implications of our research. Perhaps the most profound and direct is that people ought to question the implicit assumptions, typically drawn from economics, that have so frequently been used to construct policy and organizational practices. We ought to be at once more critical of the market-like language and arrangements that have come to dominate the design of institutions and, at the same time, more willing and indeed, eager to understand the underlying assumptions and to counterpose them with what we know from experiments and field studies about individual and organizational behavior.

Also we need to understand how theory testing may be difficult because of the self-fulfilling nature of social theory, and, as a consequence, devise more sophisticated ways of seeing which theories are true and which are not.