• Synthesis

• External Shocks
• Spillovers

• Reconciling stakeholder interests
• Reshaping organizational forms
• Shared responsibility and sustainable cooperation

In the first chapter of his magnum opus Foundations of Social Theory, James Coleman offers a meta-theory that spells out an ideal explanatory structure (or mode of explanation) in social science. This theoretical structure has become widely known in visualized form as the Coleman “bathtub” which consists of three components: a macro-to-micro component, an individual-action component, and a micro-to-macro component. It has been widely adopted in management research as a handy representation of the microfoundations of explanation. Yet, simultaneously, a growing literature has been forming which either implicitly or explicitly rejects the Coleman bathtub as a productive framework for management theorizing. The purpose of this Essay is to respond to these criticisms by clearly delineating what the Coleman bathtub says and does not say. The Essay suggests that critics of the Coleman bathtub have tended to mistakenly infer certain strong implications based on the bathtub concerning the key issues of agency, organizational change, and social ontology. By elaborating on the actual commitments and implications of the bathtub, we demonstrate that the framework, although providing some important theoretical constraints, is a far more flexible, open-ended, and generative structure than is recognized or admitted by its critics. We end by discussing future uses of the bathtub.

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