Advancing Abductive Theory Building: Balancing Creative Curiosity and Programmatic Rigour Through ‘Loosely Coupled Abduction’

Abductive theory building holds much promise for management research. Unlike induction and deduction, abductive theorizing begins with a surprising fact or ‘mystery’ that cannot be accounted in extant knowledge stocks. However, emergent debates about its utility in management research risk becoming polarized, with some scholars promoting abduction as creative guesswork on the one hand (or what we term uncoupled abduction) and others calling for more disciplined programmatic rigour on the other hand (or what we term tightly coupled abduction). Both poles are problematic. In this Point essay, we develop a middle ground, which we term loosely coupled abduction. It benefits from both creative curiosity and programmatic rigour without succumbing to their respective disadvantages in theory construction. We go on to explore the implications of loosely coupled abduction for building new knowledge in management and organization studies.