Consortium for the Advancement of Research Methods & Analysis
2025-2026 Webcast Lecture Series
Historical Methods and PEEBI Testimonial Structure for Abductive Studies in Strategy
Dr. Sandeep Pillai
Friday, September 5 | 9:00 AM – 10:15 AM EDT
Abstract
Quantitative studies are increasingly relying on inference to the best explanation (IBE) or modern abduction. I discuss how historical methods—hermeneutics, contextualization, and source criticism—can improve IBE by helping scholars arrive at “best” explanations that are lovely, in the sense that they are useful, general, and provide meaning, and likely, in the sense that they are close to the truth. Further, I discuss how such scholarly work can be presented within the constraints of a typical management journal article. I propose an abductive testimonial structure, termed PEEBI, which consists of five sections in which the authors take prior knowledge and theories, establish the context and observations that are worthy of scholarly interest, identify candidate explanations that may explain the observed patterns, evaluate the candidate explanations, determine the best explanation and their reasoning for accepting it, and abstract the best explanation to a more generalizable theoretical contribution. This structure foregrounds transparency and the author’s judgment, elevating the reader’s role by providing them with the information to make their own informed judgments.
Dr. Sandeep Pillai
Biography
Sandeep Pillai serves as an assistant professor in the Management area at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business. Sandeep is a scholar of strategy and entrepreneurship who investigates the antecedents of entrepreneurial outcomes in contexts characterized by fundamental product, production, market, or regulatory uncertainty, as well as their consequences for industry agglomeration. He relies on historical methods to combine traditional econometric analysis and qualitative archival analysis to study diverse contexts, such as the early American automobile industry (1895-1918), Maoist China (1964-1978), the Italian fashion industry (1945-1980), China’s Treaty Port Era (1842–1949), U.S. medical devices industry (1990-2015), and the Finnish pulp and paper industry (1934-1975). In his second stream of research, he leverages recent work in the philosophy of science to explore how scholars can enhance modes of reasoning, methods, and testimonial structures to improve the veracity of claims made in management research. Sandeep formerly served as an assistant professor at Bocconi University and holds a PhD from the University of Maryland.
