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This chapter examines how natural philosophers and scientists in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries employed the term “life form.” It asks how life came to have a form, where the term “life form” came from, and what “life form” has come to mean in the contemporary moment, when it is possible to use the term to refer to as-yet-conjectural manifestations that may redefine the very referent of life itself. To map the historical transformation of the term “life form,” the chapter draws on Raymond Williams's 1976 Keywords, in which Williams offered histories of keywords in social theory, detailing the shifting, contested meanings of such terms as “culture,” “nature,” and “ideology.” Using this approach, the chapter identifies a move from deductive reasoning to inductive reasoning to abductive reasoning.

Few outsiders pay attention to organization and management research, suggesting we need to enhance our skillful research performance. We are uniquely able to address grand challenges that societies face since all involve organizing, but we fail to deliver on our capabilities because we focus instead on filling small gaps in our own theories, and we use constricted notions of rigor. This chapter develops one way to enact skillful research that contributes to resolving grand challenges rather than just extending our own theories. Enacting skillful research performance relies on abductive reasoning to cycle through formulating, evaluating, and reframing rich understandings that define and resolve practical problems. The author explains how to use cycles of abductive reasoning in researching and publishing, and outline new criteria for publishing to support this enhanced enactment of skillful research performance.

This chapter describes the decision making process by forensic experts. Forensic testimony is generally considered more reliable than most other forms of evidence and plays a key role in establishing guilt or innocence. Despite exaggerations in the media, automated, computerized methods are of limited capability and require experts to make judgment calls at various steps. Abductive reasoning is often required, perhaps inviting confirmation bias, particularly with decision making often based on reaching weight-of-evidence thresholds. Forensic scientists are expected to help find a conclusive outcome rather than the probabilistic one more compatible with scientific reasoning, and the need for rapid closure can lead to decisions based on incomplete data. Yet the interpretation of bottom-up information based on top-down information may lead to distortions, as in any type of data-driven decision making. Many of the same biases and difficulties that undermine human reasoning in other contexts reappear here too.

A simple outline of inductive and deductive reasoning. Misleading explanations of induction in the GTM literature. The discussion of induction and GTM as an inductive method in The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Strauss’s early claims regarding GTM as an abductive method. Problems with deductive and inductive reasoning. Strauss and Corbin’s recognition and discussion of the rigid conception of induction in GTM in their article in 1994. Abduction and abductive reasoning—combining logic and cognition. The work of C. S. Peirce and thr Pragmatist influence on Strauss. The development of Strauss’s work by the German-speaking grounded theorists such as Reichertz, Kelle, and Strübing. Dreyfus & Dreyfus’s model as a way of understanding abduction in action.

This chapter explores fracture-critical problems in almost all aspects of the invisibly designed world, and shows how the pattern-recognition power of design thinking enables the making of useful connections among apparently disparate and disconnected phenomena, demonstrating the real value of abductive reasoning.

The chapter considers viral pandemics enabled by the transcontinental airline system, one which is rarely seen as a threat to public health. It explores how we have addressed disease transfer in the past and examines what we might learn from that to protect ourselves today, using abductive reasoning to suggest simple yet effective solutions.

The chapter explores the value of design thinking and abductive reasoning to political discourse; both enable us to see the world in less ideological and more nuanced ways. They also help us recognize the unintended consequences of poorly designed contemporary politics and the unseen connections between costs and benefits, which our political culture often views as unrelated

I conclude that if Frankfurt School theory is to realize its aspiration to be a radical political critique of capitalist society then it needs to pay more heed than it has done recently to the experiences of oppressed groups and what these tell us about the way the world is organized. That these experiences should be of pivotal importance in guiding theory is a direct implication of the Frankfurt School’s claim that unmasking critique ought to make a practical contribution to real-world struggles against oppression. I pull together the various threads of the idea of theorising from experience with a view to specifying its entailments for an unmasking critique of oppression. Critique, on this view, works with a dialogical account of context transcendence, a relational account of experience, is abductive and problem-led in method, and adopts an experientially negativist approach to normativity.