Introduction

Sociologists will find the comparative materials a stimulant and guide to scholarship and research on organizational careers. Substantive theory is developed for a substantive or empirical area of sociological inquiry, such as patient care, race relations, professional education, delinquency, or financial organizations. The focus of comparisons is now on generating a formal theory of organizational careers from several substantive theories, not on generating a theory about a single substantive case of an organizational career. A substantive theory must first be generated from data in order to see which of a number of diverse formal theories may be applicable for generating additional substantive formulations. The logico-deductive theorist, proceeding under the license and mandate of analytic abstraction and deduction from assumptions and conjecture, engages in a premature parsimony of formulation. A dense theory lends itself to ready modification and reformulation to handle new qualifications required by changing conditions in what is "going on.".