Complex, Dynamic and Contingent Social Processes as Patterns of Decision-Making Events – Philosophical and Mathematical Foundations

This work discusses the mathematical foundations of a post-positivist research framework to explain surprising facts in the expected behaviour of any complex, dynamic and contingent phenomenon, reconciling the ontological and epistemological assumptions of Critical Realism with the American Pragmatism. Theoretical propositions turned into a set of grammar rules can acknowledge a pattern of sequences of decision-making events on conducting individual actions or social interactions with partners. The result is a discrete mathematical model for a category of social process that needs modifications to explain all instances of the surprising fact as a new event outcome regarding specific configurations of other past event outcomes that become the historical context for its generation. The data-grounded theory refinement is possible through structural comparison between cases belonging to the same category of social process, but differing in respect to this contingent pattern of sequences of events. As an example, the case study of the competence development process in the firm is detailed in terms of a grammar of its socioeconomic bevahior to support the generation of middle-range theories of the firm.