If your theory is narrowly construed as “people around me have features F”, then your own personal experience is evidence for the theory.
You can observe not only whether people have those features, but whether they seem to be doing things that cause other people with those features to be included more centrally in rent-collection coalitions and people without such features to be marginalized.
You can then look and see whether, for instance, there are any widespread depictions of corporate life that don’t substantively agree with the Dilbert / Moral Mazes depiction. You can think about stories you’ve heard from others, and get a sense for how often their experience agrees with it and how often, like Dagon’s, it disagrees (and whether there are any regular patterns there).
Something like survey data might be helpful if you designed a fantastically good survey, but you can make inferences without it, as indeed we have to do for nearly all the ways we make judgments to navigate our lives.
You can observe not only whether people have those features, but whether they seem to be doing things that cause other people with those features to be included more centrally in rent-collection coalitions and people without such features to be marginalized.
You can then look and see whether, for instance, there are any widespread depictions of corporate life that don’t substantively agree with the Dilbert / Moral Mazes depiction. You can think about stories you’ve heard from others, and get a sense for how often their experience agrees with it and how often, like Dagon’s, it disagrees (and whether there are any regular patterns there).
Something like survey data might be helpful if you designed a fantastically good survey, but you can make inferences without it, as indeed we have to do for nearly all the ways we make judgments to navigate our lives.