Embracing weird: Quantum context and quantum social sciences

Quantum-like modeling provides new capabilities for social science research. Quantum-like modeling is already used in decision-making and cognition research but has broad potential for understanding complex phenomena in, for example, organizational research as well. This paper discusses how quantum-like modeling offers new ways to deal with context in organizational research where context includes intersubjective minds such as culture as a whole. Hilbert space, as the state space of quantum mechanics, is best understood as context, and allows us to quantitatively and comprehensively account for context including those variables that are the constituents and products of intersubjective minds. Moreover, the analytical tools available to quantum theory have powerful and direct application in social science because of their agility in dealing with context probabilistically. We therefore ar-gue that there are excellent philosophical, logical, and conceptual tools that might usefully be borrowed from quantum theory to better account for context. These tools have already been used for researching probability and cognitive state updating (learning). However, they are not currently used in mainstream organizational research, although organizations are ideal places to employ these new approaches because of their relatively well-defined boundaries. In this current paper, we present a discussion of contextuality in a quantum framework and its possible extension to modeling highly context-sensitive behavior in organizational settings by laying out the foundations for behavioral quantum-like modeling.