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Attention Is Attention: Preserving Ontological Integrity in Organizational Research
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DOI：10.1111/joms.70140.png)
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Abstract
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Inspired by the Attention-Based View of the firm, organizational research has illuminated how organizations learn, adapt, and perform, yet recent theorizing risks diluting attention's explanatory force by compromising its ontological integrity. In this Counterpoint, I argue that attention must be preserved as a scarce, selective, and situated mechanism linking cognition, structure, and behaviour. I clarify the ontological attributes that follow from the definition of attention and show how efforts to re-ontologize attention as ‘crescive’ risk collapsing causal explanation into phenomenological description. I then argue that many persistent gaps in the literature are misdiagnosed as limitations of the Attention-Based View when they in fact stem from the field's failure to fully exploit the ontology inherent in attention's definition. I develop this claim through two such gaps, limited normative theorizing and insufficient theorization of situations, and advance three research agendas: developing attention patterns that manage scarcity, revealing the costs of selective attention, and designing information environments that condition returns on attention. By preserving rather than dissolving its ontological core, this Counterpoint shows that attention's enduring power lies not in expanding its boundaries but in fully exploiting the scarcity, selectivity, and situatedness it already affords.
Keywords:
attention
ontology
scarcity
selectivity
situatedness
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