Genericization

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Before explaining genericization, the notion of generic knowledge has to be characterized more precisely. It extends the notion of generic proposition developed by the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. Generic knowledge expresses knowledge about kinds of things and processes rather than about particular instances or about statistical regularities. The so-called generic drugs in the medical field offer a good metaphor for grasping the meaning of the term generic in the phrase generic knowledge. A generic drug's labeling, namely its chemical name, captures the specific core of a drug that can be found under various brand names.

The notion of generic knowledge did not diffuse rapidly in the social sciences. This may be because it poses a number of epistemic questions, such as: How do we acquire knowledge about a certain kind of thing or process if we have a limited number of examples, or have experienced only a single instance of the thing or process in question?

Robert Prus used the term in 1987 in the field of organization studies to equate generic social processes to the dynamic features of association that transcend the content or substantive features of group life. One form of negotiation that takes [Page 423]place in a group, for example, can be envisioned as an instance of a generic process, while the items being bargained for denote the content mediated through this social form.

In the mid-1990s, the notion of generic knowledge was taken up by researchers from various cognitive sciences who were curious to investigate pending epistemic questions. For instance, Sandeep Prasada underscored that generic knowledge involves knowledge of properties that are considered essential for being a particular kind of thing, for instance, dogs have four legs. At the same time, generic knowledge is not rendered invalid by the existence of what seem to be counterexamples; for example, the fact that there exist some dogs that have only three legs does not render the above statement false. Besides, when a certain kind of thing has certain properties, it is considered to be by virtue of being that thing, not by virtue of any hidden underlying mechanism.

The notion of generic knowledge does not imply making a positivist or realist ontological assumption of the existence of a unique real world governed by law-like underlying mechanisms. Rather, it is consistent with constructivist epistemological paradigms such as Ernst von Glasersfeld's radical constructivism, as well as with interpretivist methodological paradigms, on which case study research often relies.

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