Organizational research constitutes a differentiated, complex and fragmented field with multiple contradicting and incommensurable theories that make fundamentally different claims about the social and organizational reality. In contrast to natural sciences, the progress in this field can’t be attributed to the principle of truthlikeness where theories compete against each other and only best theories survive and prove they are closer to the truth and thus demonstrate scientific knowledge accumulation. We defend the structural realist view on the nature of organizational theories in order to demonstrate that despite the multiplicity of isolated and competing explanations of organization-environment relations these theories are still logically compatible and mutually consistent which, in turn, assures theoretical progress in the field. Although postulating different and incompatible ontologies, three most successful organization-environments theories, namely, contingency theory, new institutionalism and population ecology share the same explanations of the relations between organizations and environments at the structural level. Without this principle one would say that what occurs in the field of organization theory is a change rather than a progress.

组织研究构成了一个分化，复杂和零散的领域，其中有多个相互矛盾且无与伦比的理论，它们对社会和组织现实提出了根本不同的主张。与自然科学相反，该领域的进步不能归因于真实性原则，即理论相互竞争，只有最好的理论才能生存并证明它们更接近真理，从而证明科学知识的积累。我们捍卫关于组织理论本质的结构现实主义者观点，以证明尽管对组织-环境关系有各种孤立和相互竞争的解释，但这些理论在逻辑上仍然是兼容的和相互一致的，从而又可以确保该领域的理论进步。尽管假设了不同且互不相容的本体论，但三种最成功的组织环境理论（权变理论，新制度主义和人口生态学）在结构层面上对组织与环境之间的关系有相同的解释。没有这个原则，人们会说组织理论领域发生的是变化而不是进步。