Philosophy & Organization Theory

PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS Series Editor: Michael Lounsbury Recent...

Author: Haridimos Tsoukas | Robert Chia

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PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY

RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS Series Editor: Michael Lounsbury Recent Volumes: Volume 15: Volume 16:

Deviance in and of Organizations Networks in and around Organizations

Volume 17:

Organizational Politics

Volume 18: Volume 19:

Social Capital of Organizations Social Structure and Organizations Revisited

Volume 20:

The Governance of Relations in Markets and Organizations Postmodernism and Management: Pros, Cons and the Alternative

Volume 21: Volume 22: Volume 23:

Legitimacy Processes in Organizations Transformation in Cultural Industries


Professional Service Firms The Sociology of Entrepreneurship

Volume 26:

Studying Difference between Organizations: Comparative Approaches to Organizational Research


Institutions and Ideology Stanford’s Organization Theory Renaissance, 1970–2000

Volume 29:

Technology and Organization: Essays in Honour of Joan Woodward

Volume 30A:

Markets on Trial: The Economic Sociology of the U.S. Financial Crisis: Part A

Volume 30B:

Markets on Trial: The Economic Sociology of the U.S. Financial Crisis: Part B

Volume 31:

Categories in Markets: Origins and Evolution

RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS VOLUME 32

PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY EDITED BY

HARIDIMOS TSOUKAS University of Cyprus, Cyprus & Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK

ROBERT CHIA University of Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2011 Copyright r 2011 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Editor or the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-85724-595-3 ISSN: 0733-558X (Series)

Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Howard House, Environmental Management System has been certified by ISOQAR to ISO 14001:2004 standards Awarded in recognition of Emerald’s production department’s adherence to quality systems and processes when preparing scholarly journals for print

CONTENTS LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

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ADVISORY BOARD

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INTRODUCTION: WHY PHILOSOPHY MATTERS TO ORGANIZATION THEORY Haridimos Tsoukas and Robert Chia

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ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY: PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS AND SCIENTIFIC SOLUTIONS Gabriele Lakomski and Colin W. Evers

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PRAGMATISM: A LIVED AND LIVING PHILOSOPHY. WHAT CAN IT OFFER TO CONTEMPORARY ORGANIZATION THEORY? Bente Elkjaer and Barbara Simpson

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MACINTYRE, NEO-ARISTOTELIANISM AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Ron Beadle and Geoff Moore

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MARXIST PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES: MARXIST CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF SOME IMPORTANT ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS Paul S. Adler

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CONTENTS

BEYOND UNIVERSALISM AND RELATIVISM: HABERMAS’S CONTRIBUTION TO DISCOURSE ETHICS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERCULTURAL ETHICS AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Andreas Georg Scherer and Moritz Patzer HERMENEUTIC PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY Frank J. Barrett, Edward H. Powley and Barnett Pearce

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PHENOMENOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Robin Holt and Jo¨rgen Sandberg

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ORGANIZING DERRIDA ORGANIZING: DECONSTRUCTION AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Andreas Rasche

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THINKING BECOMING AND EMERGENCE: PROCESS PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES Ajit Nayak and Robert Chia

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THEORY AS THERAPY: WITTGENSTEINIAN REMINDERS FOR REFLECTIVE THEORIZING IN ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT THEORY John Shotter and Haridimos Tsoukas

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TRIANGULATING PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE TO UNDERSTAND COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONAL AND MANAGERIAL PROBLEMS John Bechara and Andrew H. Van de Ven

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RICHARD RORTY, WOMEN, AND THE NEW PRAGMATISM Barbara Czarniawska

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Paul S. Adler

Department of Management and Organization, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Frank J. Barrett

Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA

Ron Beadle

Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

John Bechara

Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Robert Chia

Department of Management, Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

Barbara Czarniawska

GRI, School of Business, Economics and Law, The University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

Bente Elkjaer

School of Education, University of Aarhus, Copenhagen, Denmark

Colin W. Evers

University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Robin Holt

University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

Gabriele Lakomski

University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

Geoff Moore

Durham Business School, Durham University, Durham, UK

Ajit Nayak

University of Exeter Business School, Exeter, UK vii

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Moritz Patzer

Institute of Organization and Administrative Science (IOU), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Barnett Pearce

Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Edward H. Powley

Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA

Andreas Rasche

Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

Jo¨rgen Sandberg

University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia

Andreas Georg Scherer

Institute of Organization and Administrative Science (IOU), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

John Shotter

KCC Foundation, London, UK

Barbara Simpson

Department of Management, University of Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow, UK

Haridimos Tsoukas

University of Cyprus, Cyprus; and Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

Andrew H. Van de Ven Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

ADVISORY BOARD SERIES EDITOR Michael Lounsbury Alex Hamilton Professor of Business, University of Alberta School of Business, and National Institute for Nanotechnology, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

ADVISORY BOARD Howard E. Aldrich University of North Carolina, USA

Paul M. Hirsch Northwestern University, USA

Stephen R. Barley Stanford University, USA

Renate Meyer Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria

Nicole Biggart University of California at Davis, USA Elisabeth S. Clemens University of Chicago, USA

Mark Mizruchi University of Michigan, USA Walter W. Powell Stanford University, USA

Barbara Czarniawska Go¨teborg University, Sweden Gerald F. Davis University of Michigan, USA

Hayagreeva Rao Stanford University, USA Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson Uppsala University, Sweden

Marie-Laure Djelic ESSEC Business School, France Frank R. Dobbin Harvard University, USA

W. Richard Scott Stanford University, USA Robin Stryker University of Minnesota, USA

Royston Greenwood University of Alberta, Canada Mauro Guillen The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Haridimos Tsoukas University of Cyprus, Cyprus and University of Warwick, UK Richard Whitley University of Manchester, UK ix

INTRODUCTION: WHY PHILOSOPHY MATTERS TO ORGANIZATION THEORY Haridimos Tsoukas and Robert Chia The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. (James, 1911/ 1996, p. 51) Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity y The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection. (Whitehead, 1929, p. 20)

The relentless demand for a better understanding of the world around us and the justification of appropriate human action has been a major motivational impulse in the growth and evolution of modern societies. The need to know what human life is about, what reality is made of and how we should live a rich and fulfilling life has been an abiding preoccupation since the dim and distant dawn of human civilization. One noticeable inexorable trend in this civilizing process has been the gradual shift from an overwhelming reliance on brute force to the cultivation of reasoned curiosity and the consequent development of knowledge as a means of meeting basic survival needs and attaining collectively desired ends. It may be that, as Aristotle famously remarked, human beings have the innate desire to know; however, the particular forms of knowledge generated have varied over time.

Philosophy and Organization Theory Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 32, 1–21 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2011)0000032003

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HARIDIMOS TSOUKAS AND ROBERT CHIA

The form and conception of knowledge we presently rely on to justify our actions has not always been what it is. It, too, has undergone substantial evolution and transformation over the centuries. Michel Foucault (1970), in The Order of Things, notes that each historical epoch brings with it a different conception of what it means to know and that this is itself grounded on the epoch’s experience of order. Thus, Renaissance thought, for instance, relied heavily on the idea of an unending spiral of linked resemblances in both the material and symbolic worlds as its basis for knowledge. Proximity, convenience, analogy and emulation provided the organizing code for the creation of knowledge during this period, so much so that the walnut, which resembles the human brain, was believed to cure wounds of the pericranium. Similarly, signs observed in nature and human signs were believed to be inextricably intertwined so that there was nothing bizarre, for instance, about Paracelsus’s claim that snakes may be repelled by chanting certain Greek words (Foucault, 1970, pp. 27–33). This Renaissance conception of knowledge as deriving from observation of similarities and resemblances, however, was replaced by a Modern consciousness involving the breaking up and analysis of representations and the establishment of causal relations through the principles of identity and difference. Naming, representing, classifying and the establishment of causal relations became the key activities of a knowing mind. Knowledge took on an air of certainty so much so that it became vital to demonstrate the universality and irrefutability of their truth claims; proof was now needed. With this need for proof and justification came the demand for theoretical conjectures that adhered closely to the principles of objective observation, logical rigor in analysis, and transparency and accuracy in representation. Theories came to be recognized as empirically verifiable and intellectually justifiable claims regarding the nature of reality. As Modern consciousness gradually took roots, developed and yielded results, such theoretical representations became no longer unquestioned, selfjustifying starting points (Foucault, 1970, pp. 238–239). Quite the contrary. The Cartesian doubt was eventually turned to the cognizing subject too. What defines the late Modern episteme, in particular, is not the security of a single authoritative representation of things but a confusing proliferation of competing accounts (Foucault, 1970, p. 346); interpretation is now needed. The late Modern episteme ushered in a heightened awareness of a certain historical consciousness and a realization of importance and limitations of perspective in the apprehension of things. Our knowledge is now acknowledged to be incomplete and partial; we recognize an inevitable ‘owing’ in our ‘kn-owing’.

Introduction: Why Philosophy Matters to Organization Theory

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Conceptual knowledge is ‘forever inadequate to the fullness of reality to be known’ (James, 1911/1996, p. 78). Our concepts are secondary formations ‘inadequate and only ministerial y they falsify as well as omit’ (James, 1911/ 1996, p. 79). What we do in the act of theorizing is to ‘harness up reality in our conceptual scheme in order to drive it better’ (James, 1909/1996, p. 248). This power of framing abstract concepts from the flux and flow of lived experiences is one of our most sublime human prerogatives in that our intellectual journeys into these abstractions enable us to return to the concrete with ‘an increase both of vision and power’ (James, 1909/1996, p. 217), provided that we do not ever forget that these theories and concepts are ‘manmade extracts from the temporal flux’ and allowed to become a ‘tyranny that defeats the end’ it was intended to serve (James, 1909/1996, pp. 218–219). It is this late modernist equation of theory with a partial perspective or ‘viewpoint’ that dominates our contemporary intellectual consciousness and that, thus, accounts for the proliferation of competing perspectives in the social sciences in general and in organization theory (OT) in particular. The etymology of theory is revealing. As Toulmin (1982, p. 239) notes, the word theoros in classical Greece was mainly used to indicate the official delegate who was dispatched from the city-state to attend intercity athletic Games, especially the Olympic Games. He was not meant to take part in those games, only to observe them. Gradually theoros was used to refer to any spectator at the Games, official or unofficial, in contrast with a participant. Eventually, the abstract noun theoria acquired the meaning of spectating, in contrast to participating. With Aristotle, theoria came to refer to the philosopher’s detached intellectual inquiry as opposed to the praxis of the ‘man on the street’ – the carpenter, the farmer, the trader (Toulmin, 1982, p. 239). Theoretical conjectures are in effect ‘organized’ collections of propositional statements making claims regarding the phenomenon under investigation that renders them plausible and logically coherent to a community of inquirers. The impetus for a specific configuration of such propositional statements into a coherent whole derives from deeper, and frequently unexamined, metaphysical presuppositions regarding the nature of reality, our relation to it and the nature of knowledge thus produced. As philosopher of science Harre (1985, p. 16) notes, ‘we have to choose some concepts with which to think about the world, and this amounts to devising or learning a language, and accepting a system of picturing and conceiving the structure of the world’. The world causes us to have beliefs but does not dictate the content of our beliefs (Rorty, 1989, p. 6). It is our ‘system of picturing’ of the world that guides the questions we raise and the explanatory forms we deem plausible.

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In this way, the study of organization is inextricably dependent on the prior organization of mentalities and modes of thought. For some time now, it has been recognized that, especially in the human sciences, there can be no unbiased conceptualizing of human experiences without our implicit reliance on both an existing ‘observational order’ in terms of the types of things we do in fact discriminate and a dominant ‘conceptual order’ in terms of which we do interpret (Whitehead, 1933, p. 183). For Whitehead, observational discrimination ‘is not dictated by the impartial facts. It selects and it discards and what it retains is rearranged in a subjective order of prominence’. It is therefore a key task of human inquiry to urge observation and conceptualizing beyond the boundaries of their ‘delusive completeness’ (Whitehead, 1933, p. 184): a task that necessitates not in asking if a theory is true or false, but in ‘noting its scope of useful application and its failure beyond that scope’ (Whitehead, 1933, p. 257). Theories are tools for interrogating reality and for deriving their practical imports. They are not irrefutable truth claims. As such, it becomes incumbent on scholars of all stripes and persuasion to open themselves to the possibility of alternative, plausible theoretical viewpoints and to engage in a robust critical consideration of the competing perspectives on offer in their own specific field of study. Yet, there is much evidence to suggest that this intellectual openness does not always characterize the world of academia, as particular types of knowledge become accepted as legitimate and are institutionalized. Academic institutions, after all, function as all institutions do: they provide closure to meaning, privileging particular ways of observing, thinking and arguing, and build particular reward systems around them. In that respect, it is only too easy to be seduced by a favourite theory and to dogmatically cling on to that which we are familiar and comfortable with. This is a condition that William James was at pains to warn us of. He notes that a misunderstanding of the status of theories and concepts often led to the denial of the very properties that sensibly presented themselves to us, which the theories were intended to capture, because we remain overly enamoured by the elegance and apparent completeness of the theory itself (James, 1909/1996, pp. 218–219). This tendency to cling on to our own preferred views and to dismiss theories that do not conform to our own operating premises and hence to avoid sustained critical questioning of our own assumptions is widespread in the human sciences. Indeed, it has, at times, led to blatant ridiculing or offhand dismissal by the academic doyens of the establishment. One example of the hostility to provocative plausible accounts that comes


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to mind was the intense reaction to the controversial work of the political philosopher Bloom (1987) in The Closing of the American Mind, when he forcefully argued that modern higher education, in particular, has essentially failed democracy and impoverished the souls of its students. For Bloom the unthinking promulgation of an uncritical relativism has threatened to overwhelm Western democracies and to paradoxically propagate an ‘openness to closedness’ through its refusal to countenance the provision of an intellectual space for the airing of deeply entrenched prejudices. It is in fact an openness that denies the special claim of reason, an openness of ‘indifference’ that obscures awareness of a deeper, more abiding level of ignorance. He points out that, while it took a lifetime of unceasing intellectual labour for Socrates to come to the realization that he was ignorant, ‘Now every high school student knows that. How did it become so easy?’ (Bloom, 1987, pp. 40–43). Ignorance is now no longer construed as an acute and abiding awareness of the existence of a background ‘unthought’ that circumscribes the thinkable, but a mere ‘gap’ in our knowledge. Socrates, on the other hand, was acutely aware of what he did not know and hence always open to the possibility of otherness. Literary critic Johnson echoed this deeper insight on the importance of the ‘unthought’ when she wrote most passionately: ‘Ignorance, far more than knowledge, is what can never be taken for granted. If I perceive my ignorance as a gap in knowledge instead of an imperative that changes the very nature of what I think I know, then I do not truly experience my ignorance’ (1989, p. 16). In other words, it is only when we become painfully aware that it is ignorance of our ignorance, and not simply a gap in knowledge that prevents deep insights into the human condition, we begin to glimpse that illusive realm of complex thinking that characterizes Socratic ignorance. To heighten our awareness of this ignorance of ignorance, Bloom argues forcefully for a return to the Socratic style of learning in which the persistent questioning of conventional wisdom in pursuit of deeper insights becomes a dominant feature of academic life. Bloom cites de Tocqueville as showing that the greatest democratic danger is not so much the threat of novel radical perspectives but ‘enslavement to public opinion’ because of a refusal to openly engage with subjectivities and prejudices. There is, as the German philosopher Hans George Gadamer remarked, an enduring modern intolerance or ‘prejudice against prejudice’. Prejudice and subjectivity are inevitably infused into our understanding and comprehension of life and, as Whitehead points out, it is precisely the task of

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philosophical inquiry to engage in the relentless self-correcting of our own initial ‘excess of subjectivity’. In other words, it is only by allowing the airing of our deeply entrenched subjective prejudices and critically engaging with them that we can then begin to ‘recover the totality obscured by the selection’ (Whitehead, 1929, p. 20). True insight and understanding are only achieved not by avoiding contrary or vastly alien viewpoints, but by confronting them through careful scrutiny for internal paradigmatic coherence and exploring their consequent implications for the world of practical affairs. This is the true task of philosophical inquiry and a task that sets the parameters for this volume. The need for creating a deeper awareness of the ‘unconscious metaphysics’ underpinning our theorizing efforts is particularly acute in OT. Our awareness that such philosophical presuppositions invariably underpin OT was irreversibly heightened more than 30 years ago by the seminal contribution of Burrell and Morgan (1979), in their influential Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis. Burrell and Morgan undertook a significant effort at uncovering the underlying theoretical underpinnings of various competing perspectives on the nature of organizational functioning. According to them, all theories of organization are based on an underlying philosophy and an implicit theory of society so that, as social scientists, organization theorists inevitably make implicit ontological assumptions regarding the nature of reality they are investigating, epistemological assumptions about how we can know with some degree of certainty about that reality and assumptions about whether the social world being investigated is ultimately orderly/regulated or conflictful/changeful in nature. From the resultant set of competing assumptions, Burrell and Morgan developed their typology, consisting of four alternative paradigms for organizational analysis: functionalism, interpretivism, radical structuralism and radical humanism. Burrell and Morgan’s efforts have led the way towards meta-theorizing in OT and to the crucial realization that theories of organization are themselves legitimate objects of analysis in our efforts to understand the phenomenon of organization. As Tsoukas and Knudsen (2003) remarked, when we raise meta-theoretical questions, we begin our journey towards greater reflexive awareness. We begin to realize that our culture, our race, our ideology, our gender, our class, our language and our authority structures (and we might add, our epoch) dramatically affect the validity of our knowledge claims. Exposure to alternative accounts of organizational functioning forces us to reflect on the partiality and inevitable incompleteness of our knowledge claims. They sensitize us to


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the possibility of a realm of tacit knowing and practical understanding that resists logic, linguistic formulation and theoretical explication. If philosophy helps make us self-aware of critical assumptions we tacitly incorporate in our organizational theorizing, how does it happen? What types of philosophical inquiry are conducive to our refining our research practice as organization theorists? There are three ways in which philosophical reflection may find its way to organizational research: ontological, epistemological and praxeological (Tsoukas, 2005, p. 5; Tsoukas & Knudsen, 2005, p. 363). We examine each one as follows: 1. Ontology: Every scientific discipline takes for granted certain key categories, which define the nature of its subject matter and frame its inquiries. The critical questions here are: ‘What are the phenomena we investigate made of? What are their salient properties?’ Or to put it more philosophically, ‘What is the Being of the entities that constitute the object of inquiry?’ (Guignon, 1983, p. 64). Without a tacit understanding of foundational categories that are thought to be constitutive of the salient properties of the object of study, the practice of conducting scientific research cannot even begin. The theoretical frameworks organization theorists develop reflect deep ontological commitments about the nature of reality. By ontologically carving up the world in particular ways, researchers bring out the constitutive elements of the phenomena they explore. Important advances in the social sciences at large, and in OT in particular, come from making fresh ontological distinctions that enable social scientists to approach a particular phenomenon in a new light and, accordingly, design new research programmes. There are numerous such examples in OT. We examine a few below. One of the most important ontological distinctions made in OT is Weick’s (1979, 1995) redirecting of attention from organizations to organizing. Focusing on organizing, Weick has argued that organizations are not readymade entities with predefined properties waiting to be discovered by the researcher, as, for example, the famous Aston studies had assumed (Pugh, 1981), but systems of interaction that become organized. What we label and experience as ‘organizations’ (notice the quotes) are products of human action. Researchers’ task, therefore, is to explain how organization (notice the singular) emerges, to investigate the processes through which collections of individuals are transformed into organized entities and ascribed a singular identity. Accordingly, if ‘organization’ is an emergent phenomenon, so is,

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partially at least, the ‘environment’ with which organizations are deemed to interact with. The environment is partly an organizational creation insofar as it is enacted through the actions organizations undertake: organizations help bring forth the environment they deal with (Weick, 1995). Weick’s ontological move from organizations to organizing has revealed a hitherto almost invisible (in theoretical terms) world: a world of constrained yet evolving interactions, feedback loops, relationships and double interacts. He has brought to our attention the circularity that characterizes much of human action: individuals and organizations partly grapple with problems of their own making. Rejecting the entitarian image underlying the ontology of traditional OT, Weick has enabled scholars and practitioners alike to pay closer attention to questions of novelty, process and agency. The importance of ontological commitments is also highlighted in the ongoing controversy surrounding the nature of strategy. For defenders of rationalist accounts, strategy is an essentially analytical exercise that takes the form of systematic scanning of the environment and the organization, planning for the future and executing the plan. Such a view of strategy assumes a Cartesian split between conception and execution (thinking vs. acting) and an identification of strategy with senior managerial intentionality (Mintzberg, 1994). For those who take a process view of strategy, thinking and acting are closely intertwined, and strategy making is much more intuitive, context-dependent, process-sensitive and emergent than analytical, intended and planned (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, & Lampel, 1998). Scholars who take a practice perspective on strategy go further by first bringing intentionality under scrutiny and showing how it is constructed through practitioners drawing on particular sociomaterial practices (Jarzabkowski, Balogun, & Seidl, 2007; Johnson, Langley, Melin, & Whittington, 2007; Whittington, 2006), and second by exploring the taken-for-granted background on which organizations tacitly (i.e. non-deliberately) draw, in order to generate the consistencies in action that, looked at ex post facto by scholars, are labelled as realized strategies (Chia & Holt, 2009; Chia & MacKay, 2007). In other words, what strategy is taken to be depends crucially on how intentionality, action and rationality are viewed – all these are metatheoretical issues, susceptible to different philosophical treatments (Tsoukas, 2010). For rationalists, strategy is largely what is intended; it is a plan. For process theorists, strategy is largely contextual and improvisational; it is a pattern. For practice theorists, strategy is what practitioners do, intended or not, planned or improvisational; it is praxis. Clearly, the kind of ontological commitments made concerning the status of intentionality, action and rationality will help define the phenomenon at hand and how it ought to be


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studied. So, for some practice theorists, the idea that a coherent and consistent strategy might emerge non-deliberately rather than through deliberate intention is more plausible than might appear to be the case (Chia & Holt, 2009). Several other examples, illustrating the significance of ontological redefinitions – the change in the ‘system of picturing’ – for the conceptualization of organizational phenomena, can be mentioned. The shift from seeing change as a fait accompli, thus approaching it as a succession of states, to seeing change as immanent in organizations, stemming from actors’ reflexivity as well as their having to accommodate new experiences, has led several researchers to talk about ‘organizational becoming’ (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002) and continuous improvisation (Orlikowski, 1996; Weick, 1998): the move from approaching routines as stable entities to seeing routines as ‘emergent accomplishments’ (Feldman, 2000, p. 613), thus incorporating both stability and change; the redefinition of organizational mind as ‘a propensity to act in a certain manner or style’ (Weick & Roberts, 1993, p. 361), actualized in patterns of behaviour, rather than as a mental entity engaged in information processing; and the reconception of professional competence as constituted by specific ways of being in the world, namely by distinctive ways of engaging in a sociomaterial practice, rather than defined by a set of specific attributes, such as knowledge, skills, attitudes and personal characteristics (Sandberg & Pinnington, 2009), all of them are examples of ontological redescriptions of the relevant phenomenon at hand. What these examples have in common is an underlying performative imagery: organizational change, routines, mind and competence are not viewed as entities or accomplished events (as has traditionally been the case), but as enactments. Insofar as this is the case, we are invited to think the processes through which such enactments are carried out. By changing the underlying ontological imagery, what was previously thought to be already accomplished and stable is now revealed to be context- and processdependent, and unstable. While change and novelty were thought to be properties of the organization, now the organization itself is an emergent property of change. Such an ontological reversal enables fresh questions to be asked and new empirical patterns to be noticed. 2. Epistemology: If ontology is concerned with, to use Aristotle’s phrase, carving up reality at the joints, epistemology is concerned with how we know what we claim to know. If ontological redefinitions lead to positing new imageries, thus enabling new conceptual distinctions to be made, epistemological considerations lead to exploring how our claims to

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knowledge are couched and justified. Typical questions include the following: Should organizational research be aiming at explaining organizational phenomena, predicting them or both? Or understanding them? Are organizational phenomena akin to those studied by the natural sciences? Should we be concerned with explaining the variability of outcomes in terms of the variability of antecedent conditions leading to outcomes or should we be aiming at showing the processes or mechanisms that lead to particular outcomes? If theories are meant to be generalizable, what is meant by this term and how may generalizability be achieved? Are actors’ beliefs and desires needed in order to explain an organizational phenomenon or can they be dispensed with? For the sake of illustration, consider the latter question. The task of organizational researchers has traditionally been assumed to be the discovery of empirical regularities and their subsequent explanation through contingency models (CMs) of explanation of the type ‘If A, then B, in circumstances Z’ (Donaldson, 2001). In a more elaborate form, CMs take the following form: ‘Given any organization X, if X wants to maximize its performance A and X believes that B is a means to attain A, under the circumstances, then X does B’ (cf. Rosenberg, 1988, p. 25). Notice that this general statement connects beliefs and desires to actions. For a CM to be used, both the account of the situation (‘under the circumstances’) and the rational disposition of the actor (‘if X wants to maximize its performance A’) must be governed by objective criteria of application. For contingency theorists, such objective criteria are possible if large populations of organizations are examined, in which, like in a market, actors’ rationality is assumed as a general tendency. Accordingly, there is no need to examine particular actors’ beliefs and desires. Ansoff (1991, p. 459), for example, argued some time ago that ‘the levels of success in organizations which are aligned with the environment were [found to be] substantially higher than in organizations which were out of alignment’. In other words, under norms of rationality, the more aligned an organization is with its turbulent environment, the more successful the organization will be (for similar claims, see Hrebiniak & Joyce, 2001). What particular actors believe and desire is of no consequence in CMs of explanation. For other researchers, however, CMs do not do justice to the contextuality of organizational phenomena, since research findings refer to aggregates, while our research subjects – namely, practitioners – act within specific organizations (Mintzberg, 1991, p. 465). The difference in the levels of reference is crucial. In aggregating, ‘researchers construct homogeneity


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in heterogeneous phenomena’ (Starbuck, 2006, p. 143), whereas practitioners experience the particularity of their own situations. To do justice to the inherent contextuality of organizational phenomena, contextualist forms of inquiry must be pursued, interpretivists argue. CM models require objective criteria of application concerning the situation and actors’ rationality, which, however, are not possible, since an account of the situation and of an actor’s beliefs and desires is actor-dependent, that is to say subjective (Rosenberg, 1988; Bohman, 1991; Tsoukas & Knudsen, 2005, p. 368). An actor’s beliefs and desires cannot be merely read from his/her actions, for the actor may hold quite different second-order or contextdependent beliefs and desires. For example, destroying their farm produce may violate criteria of utility maximization, but doing so may be rational for farmers as a form of protest. Even if a full description of an actor’s beliefs and desires is given, his/her course of action cannot be predicted, since to do so would require an objective description of the situation, which, however, cannot be done independently of attributions of beliefs and desires. As Bohman (1991, p. 27) aptly observes, ‘to say that ‘‘A is in a situation of type C’’ is already to give an interpretation of A’s beliefs and desires, to locate the action in a set of practices and in the larger context of the agent’s other beliefs and desires’. To return to Ansoff’s example, for a contextualist, to what extent an environment is ‘turbulent’ cannot be decided irrespectively of managers’ web of beliefs and desires – it is, at least to some extent, a matter of interpretation. What constitutes ‘turbulent’ to one manager may be perceived as quite ‘passive’ by another. Organizations do not respond to pre-given environments but to environments as perceived and enacted by the organization (Weick, 1995; Tsoukas & Knudsen, 2005, pp. 366–368). In other words, from a contextualist (or interpretive or constructivist) epistemology, what an environment is inevitably depends on socially acquired attitudes, habits of attention and the language chosen to describe it. The language of description, in turn, depends on the interpreter’s historically shaped web of beliefs, desires and predispositions. What actors believe in and desire cannot be reduced to an objective description for, as Rosenberg (1988, p. 44) noted, doing so would risk changing the truth value of the statements involved. Put differently, we cannot substitute synonymous descriptions for intentional states without changing their truth value. Statements that attribute beliefs and desires are irreducibly interpretive (Bohman, 1991, p. 28). Interpretive forms of inquiry tend to be sensitive to process explanations, whereas CM models follow variance models (Van de Ven & Poole, 2005; Tsoukas & Knudsen, 2005; Langley &

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Tsoukas, 2010). Practice theorists go further in showing that social and organizational processes may generate unintended outcomes, both positive and negative, through the everyday actions and interactions of practitioners (de Certeau, 1984; Bourdieu, 1990; Chia & Holt, 2009). Intentionality is not the final word in understanding individual and collective behaviour. 3. Praxeology: If ontology is concerned with the general structure of reality and epistemology is concerned with how scholars formulate and justify their knowledge claims, praxeology deals with how knowledge is related to action and, more specifically, how theory is related to practice. Praxeology is particularly important for the policy sciences, since the latter are, by design, concerned with generating actionable knowledge (Tsoukas & Knudsen, 2003, Part IV). Typical praxeological questions include: What is actionable knowledge? What makes knowledge practical? How is theory related to practice? What types of knowledge are related to what types of practice? What is the structure of practical reason? How can theory inform practice, yet do justice to the novelty the latter may bring about? What is the role of free will (or choice) in explanations of organizational behaviour? How is ethics related to knowledge? Endorsing Lewin’s (1945) classic statement that ‘nothing is more practical than a good theory’, Van de Ven (1989, p. 486) noted that a good theory is one that ‘enlightens the profession of management’. How does it happen? The mainstream view has been that OT, being an applied field, is similar to engineering and, thus, on the one hand, it relates to the social sciences as engineering does to physics, while, on the other hand, it relates to the profession of management much like the engineering sciences relate to the profession of engineers (Zald, 1996, p. 251; Van de Ven, 2007). This was, by and large, Thompson’s (1956/1957), Simon’s (1976) and Barnard’s (1968) view of administrative science; they urged organization scientists to conceive of formal organizations as ‘abstract systems’ (Barnard, 1968, p. 74) – as sets of formal rules operative under norms of procedural rationality – in order to reveal ‘the principles of general organization’ (Barnard, 1976, p. xlvi). The formally validated knowledge organization scientists generate, typically formulated as CM propositional statements, is thought to be turned into similarly structured propositional rules of action to be followed by practitioners. Indeed, as MacIntyre (1985, p. 107) noted, it is the allegedly scientific character of managerial knowledge that legitimates managerial action. On this account, OT is broadly modelled on the natural sciences (McKelvey, 1997). Prediction is symmetrically related to explanation. Time,


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temporality and emergence are not taken seriously into account. Individual and collective histories and the ways by which they can subtly shape tendencies and predispositions play little or no part in the explanatory schemata. Lay knowledge is thought biased and, ideally, ought to be jettisoned in favour of scientifically validated knowledge. Propositional statements are derived from the study of past behaviour, which they are taken to explain; action will be reliably guided (i.e. its consequences predicted) by applying the same propositional statements in the future. Human action is, thus, thought to relate to theory in a technical, instrumental manner. In this context, enlightened action means evidence-based, scientifically validated, instrumental action. Scientific knowledge is seen as leading to particular techniques used to obtain particular results, devoid of any intrinsic ethical commitments. Ethics becomes relevant only in the way knowledge is used, not in how it is constituted (Simon, 1976). By contrast, a poetic (as opposed to instrumental) praxeology (Shotter, 1993; Tsoukas, 2005, p. 5) places emphasis on the internal (rather than external/instrumental) relationship between theory and practice and the transformative character of theories. On this view, individuals and organizations are situated into, and draw on, broader sociomaterial practices, which are constituted by self-interpretations (Taylor, 1985a). Human beings are socially dependent ‘self-interpreting animals’ (Taylor, 1985a, p. 45), not in the weak sense of being able to engage in reflection and interpretation, but in the strong sense of being constituted by social relations and self-interpretation. Notions such as ‘trust’, ‘loyalty’, ‘authority’, etc., are inextricably bound up with the social life of a subject of experience. The language we use to describe our goals, beliefs and desires, worked out in particular sociomaterial practices, defines also the meanings these terms have for us (Taylor, 1985a, p. 71, 1985b, p. 23; Winch, 1958, p. 15). Different vocabularies constitute differently carved up semantic spaces, within which particular notions are located and from which they derive their meanings. Sociomaterial practices are mutually constituted with the vocabularies that describe them: without being enacted in a particular practice, a vocabulary would be incomprehensible; we would be unable to see what it is referring to (an experience we often have with foreign languages). And vice versa: a practice could not exist without the use of a particular vocabulary. Thus, there is an internal relationship between theories and the practices they refer to. As the case of modern finance has shown, the adoption of a theory alters the self-understandings constitutive of a practice and, therefore, it changes the practice (MacKenzie, 2006). If theory is seen as a vocabulary through which important distinctions may be enacted in a sociomaterial

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practice, it is not ‘applied’ by practitioners in the same way a mathematical formula is applied by an engineer; the theory modifies to some extent the distinctions incorporated in a practice, thus altering both the practice and the practitioner. A poetic praxeology, therefore, brings out the doubly transformative character of theories. The latter not only helps alter some self-understandings in a practice but also helps alter actors’ experience of the practice. Moreover, a poetic praxeology sees actors are as being inevitably shaped by the practices they are part of; they oftentimes unreflectively acquire and unconsciously internalize a cultural habitus (Bourdieu, 1990) that subsequently serves to shape their modus operandi in their everyday dealings with the world. Insofar as actors regularly draw on the linguistic resources and traditions of their practice, they often act in a relatively unreflective manner, but nevertheless possess the innate capacity for self-observation and reflexivity, thereby potentially altering their practices to suit particular circumstances. Theories provide further vocabularies to practitioners to articulate in different ways what is only tacitly understood in their practices. The internal relationship of theories and practices indicates that normative questions are already implicated when evaluating theories. As perhaps the fallout from the economic crisis at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, precipitated by the collapse or near-collapse of large financial institutions, has made clear, theories are validated through practice. As Taylor (1985a, p. 111) remarks, ‘[y] because theories which are about practices are self-definitions, and hence alter the practices, the proof of the validity of a theory can come in the changed quality of the practice it enables. Let me introduce terms of art for this shift of quality and say that good theory enables practice to become less stumbling and more clairvoyant’. Conceptions of ethics, effective action and the common good are inevitably joined up and mutually implicated in evaluating theories. Unlike instrumental action, praxis (and, by implication, poetic praxeology) is always already ethically oriented. In conclusion, ontological, epistemological and praxeological questions, and the ways in which they impact organizational theorizing, indicate that philosophical questions are higher-order meta-questions to OT as a scientific discipline concerned with studying empirical organizational phenomena. Philosophical questions are generated from outside the scientific frameworks within which scientists carry out their research practices. They are questions that focus on the frameworks themselves. Of course, scientific practices can normally carry on successfully without ever dealing with such meta-questions.


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However, when scientific practices stumble in their efforts to make sense of the empirical world and to ‘enlighten practitioners’, taken-for-granted ontological categories call for our attention, tacitly accepted ways of understanding come under scrutiny and conventional ways of intervening in the world become unsatisfactory. The very frameworks of scientific inquiry, hitherto tacitly accepted for the practice of scientific research to be carried out (Tsoukas, 2005, p. 324), become questionable and philosophical reflection enters the scene. Philosophical questions are essentially conceptual in character (Block, 1979, p. 450; Winch, 1958; Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), that is, they are questions about the nature of the concepts we use in organizational research to describe and explain organizations (including the concepts ‘describe’, ‘explain’ and ‘organizations’) (cf. Fay, 2000, p. 52). The questions, for example, ‘what is organizational change?’, ‘what is organizational learning (or knowledge)?’ or ‘what is a decision (or strategy)?’, are not empirical questions but conceptual, requiring elucidation. The philosophy of OT, therefore, deals with the study of the conceptual problems in OT. To be concerned with the elucidation of key concepts commonly used in the practice of OT as a scientific discipline is to bring a philosophical orientation to the study of those concepts and move the discussion to the meta-level, to interrogate the very framework within which OT questions are explored. In other words, philosophical analysis helps keep meaning open in a scientific field. Like all institutionalized activities, the practice of scientific research legitimates and takes for granted particular ways of engaging with, observing and talking about the world. Insofar as this is the case, closure of meaning is inevitably brought about. Philosophical inquiry fights that closure. Castoriadis goes even further and associates philosophy with thought itself: the latter is possible only insofar as the former takes place. It is worth quoting him in full (Castoriadis, 1991, p. 21): ‘Philosophy is not about the question: What is Being, or what is the meaning of Being, or why is there something instead of nothing, etc. All these questions are secondary, in the sense that they are all conditioned upon the emergence of a more radical question [y]: What is it that I ought to think (about being, about physis, about the polis, about justice, etc. – and about my own thinking)? This questioning goes on, and has to go on, incessantly, for a simple reason. Any being-for-itself exists and can only exist in a closure – thus also society and the social individual. Democracy is the project of breaking the closure at the collective level. Philosophy, creating self-reflective subjectivity, is the

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project of breaking the closure at the level of thought. But of course, any breaking of the closure, unless it remains a gaping ‘‘?’’ which does not break anything at all, posits something, reaches some results, and, thereby, risks erecting again a closure. The continuation and renewal of reflective activity – not for the sake of ‘‘renewal’’ but because this is self-reflective activity – entails therefore the putting into question of previous results [y]’.

ABOUT THIS VOLUME All chapters in this volume explore connections between certain streams in philosophy and OT. As the titles of the chapters suggest, most authors write about a particular philosopher or group of philosophers that makes up a distinct school of thought, summarize important aspects of his/their work and tease out the implications for OT. The central question authors explore is: ‘what does a particular philosophy contribute to OT?’ Whether addressing this question in historical terms (‘what has been the influence of a particular philosophy on the development of certain OT approaches?’), exploratory terms (‘what benefits to organizational analysis does a particular philosophy bring?’) or a combination of both, the end result is similar: particular philosophical issues, properly explained, are discussed in relation to important questions in OT. The chapters deal with analytical philosophy (Lakomski and Evers), phenomenology (Holt and Sandberg), hermeneutics (Barrett, Powley and Pearce), process philosophy (Nayak and Chia), Derridean deconstructionism (Rasche), MacIntyre and neo-Aristotelianism (Beadle and Moore), Habermasian discourse ethics (Scherer and Patzer), pragmatism (Elkjaer and Simpson), Marxian philosophy (Adler) and the late Wittgenstein (Shotter and Tsoukas). Bechara and Van de Ven do not discuss a particular philosophical approach but several, showing the benefits of philosophical triangulation. Czarniawska, in her personal essay, writes about how Rortyan pragmatism has influenced her life and work. Some chapters are more concerned with one of the three dimensions of philosophical inquiry (ontology, epistemology and praxeology), while others with a combination of them. Thus, Holt and Sandberg, Nayak and Chia, Rasche, and Elkjaer and Simpson deal primarily with ontological issues surrounding the notions of human experience of the world, process, deconstruction and key pragmatist themes, respectively, whereas Lakomski


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and Evers deal with primarily epistemological issues having to do with the role of theories in OT. Beadle and Moore, Barrett, Powley and Pearce, and Adler combine, in different degrees, ontological, epistemological and praxeological issues. Scherer and Patzer focus primarily on praxeological questions arising from Habermasian discourse ethics, and Shotter and Tsoukas deal with epistemological and praxeological issues. As one would expect, there are some overlaps between the different chapters. It is nearly impossible, for example, to write about hermeneutics without implicating its first cousin, phenomenology. Philosophers such as Heidegger are often discussed in the context of both hermeneutics and phenomenology. Similarly, process philosophers draw to some extent on phenomenological analyses – it is difficult to keep them apart. Overlaps do not, however, point to useless redundancy. Even when two chapters discuss the same philosopher, they do so in their own distinctive ways, thus illuminating the issues at hand. Finally, if you detect in this selection of chapters a certain bias towards nonrationalist philosophical accounts, this is indeed the case. We happen to think that this is where most interesting philosophical work is taking place. At the same time, our choice of philosophical schools to include in this volume has been influenced by two considerations. One is the extent to which a particular philosophy has been drawn on or has implicitly provided impetus for the development of organization theories and theorizing, and second, by the availability of philosophically minded organization theorists who would be willing to write about a particular philosophy and OT. As well as philosophical diversity, we wanted to have some geographical and gender balance, always a difficult thing to achieve. We confess that, in an ideal world, we would have liked to have included more philosophers (e.g. Kirkegaard, Sartre, Popper, Deleuze, Adorno, Levinas, etc.) or social theorists and humanities scholars whose work has had interesting philosophical implications (e.g. Bakhtin, Foucault, Luhmann, Varela, Eco, Archer, Latour, Serres, etc.). We beg for the reader’s understanding. Space is limited, while this is only the start, anyway. As far as we know, this is the first time a mainstream OT series has explicitly devoted a whole volume to questions relating to philosophy (rather than merely epistemology) and OT, and we are grateful to Editor-inChief Michael Lounsbury for the invitation. We are pleased that a very good start has been made and that philosophical issues are explicitly placed on the agenda. We hope to continue and hope that others will want to join in.

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Langley, A., & Tsoukas, H. (2010). Introducing ‘‘Perspectives on Process Organization Studies’’. In: T. Hernes & S. Maitlis (Eds), Process, sensemaking & organizing (pp. 1–26). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewin, K. (1945). The research center for group dynamics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sociometry, 8, 126–135. MacIntyre, A. (1985). After virtue (2nd ed.). London: Duckworth. MacKenzie, D. (2006). An engine, not a camera: How financial models shape markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McKelvey, B. (1997). Quasi-natural organization science. Organization Science, 8, 351–380. Mintzberg, H. (1991). Learning 1, planning 0: Reply to Igor Ansoff. Strategic Management Journal, 12, 463–466. Mintzberg, H. (1994). The rise and fall of strategic planning. New York: Prentice Hall. Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B., & Lampel, J. (1998). Strategy safari. New York: Prentice Hall. Orlikowski, W. J. (1996). Improvising organizational transformation over time: A situated change perspective. Information Systems Research, 7, 63–92. Pugh, D. S. (1981). The Aston Program perspective: The Aston Program of research: Retrospect and prospect. In: A. Van de Ven & W. Joyce (Eds), Perspectives on organization design and behavior (pp. 135–166). New York: Wiley. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenberg, A. (1988). Philosophy of social science. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sandberg, J., & Pinnington, P. (2009). Professional competence as ways of being: An existential ontological perspective. Journal of Management Studies, 46, 1138–1170. Shotter, J. (1993). Conversational realities. London: Sage. Simon, H. (1976). Administrative behavior (3rd ed.). New York: The Free Press. Starbuck, W. H. (2006). The production of knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, C. (1985a). Human agency and language (Vol. 1). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C. (1985b). Philosophy and the human sciences (Vol. 2). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, J. D. (1956-57). On building an administrative science. Administrative Science Quarterly, 1, 102–111. Toulmin, S. (1982). The return to cosmology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tsoukas, H. (2005). Complex knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsoukas, H. (2010). Practice, strategy making and intentionality: A Heideggerian ontoepistemology for strategy as practice. In: D. Golsorkhi, L. Rouleau, D. Seidl & E. Vaara (Eds), Cambridge handbook of strategy as practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tsoukas, H., & Chia, R. (2002). On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13, 567–582. Tsoukas, H., & Knudsen, C. (2003). The Oxford handbook of organization theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsoukas, H., & Knudsen, C. (2005). The conduct of strategy research: Meta-theoretical issues. In: H. Tsoukas (Ed.), Complex knowledge (pp. 340–377). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van de Ven, A. (1989). Nothing is quite so practical as a good theory. Academy of Management Review, 14, 486–489. Van de Ven, A. H. (2007). Engaged scholarship. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Van de Ven, A. H., & Poole, M. S. (2005). Alternative approaches for studying organizational change. Organization Studies, 26(9), 1377–1404. Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Weick, K., & Roberts, K. (1993). Collective mind in organizations: Heedful interrelating on flight decks. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 357–381. Weick, K. E. (1979). The social psychology of organizing (2nd ed.). Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. Weick, K. E. (1998). Improvisation as a mindset for organizational analysis. Organization Science, 9, 543–555. Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and reality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1933). Adventures of ideas. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pelican Books. Whittington, R. (2006). Completing the practice turn in strategy. Organization Studies, 27(5), 613–634. Winch, P. (1958). The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Zald, M. N. (1996). More fragmentation? Unfinished business in linking the social sciences and the humanities. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41, 251–261.

Haridimos Tsoukas is the Columbia Ship Management Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Cyprus, Cyprus, and a Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK. He has published widely in several leading academic journals and was the Editor-in-Chief of Organization Studies (2003–2008). His research interests include knowledge-based perspectives on organizations, the management of organizational change and social reforms, the epistemology of practice and epistemological issues in organization theory. He is the editor (with Christian Knudsen) of The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory: Meta-theoretical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2003). He has also edited Organizations as Knowledge Systems, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 (with N. Mylonopoulos), and Managing the Future: Foresight in the Knowledge Economy, Blackwell, 2004 (with J. Shepherd). His book Complex Knowledge: Studies in Organizational Epistemology was published by Oxford University Press in 2005. He is also the author of the book If Aristotle were a CEO (in Greek, Kastaniotis, 2005, 2nd ed.). Robert Chia is professor of management at the University of Strathclyde Business School and Emeritus Professor of Management, University of Aberdeen. He received his PhD in organization studies from Lancaster University and publishes regularly in the leading international journals in organization and management studies. He is the author/editor of four books and a significant number of international journal articles as well as book


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chapters in a variety of management sub-fields. His latest book with Robin Holt, published by Cambridge University Press in October 2009, is entitled Strategy without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action. His research interests revolve around the issues of strategic leadership and foresight, complexity and creative thinking, and the impact of contrasting East–West metaphysical mindsets on executive decision making.

ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY: PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS AND SCIENTIFIC SOLUTIONS Gabriele Lakomski and Colin W. Evers ABSTRACT In this chapter, we present a critical assessment of contemporary organization theory variously described as either multiperspectival or fragmented. We argue that analytic philosophy as one of the major tools used for theorizing about organizations has had a major influence on the development of organization theory and largely explains the current state of affairs. At its core, we argue, is a fundamental methodological fissure in analytic philosophy itself: the distinction between descriptive and revisionary methods. The principal focus of descriptive analysis in organization theory is how agents use everyday language in organizational contexts, often by invoking language games. In contrast, revisionary approaches, concerned about the privileging of theories embedded in everyday language, as well as the complexity and ambiguity of ordinary-language use, aim for explicit theory evaluation and greater clarity by recasting ordinary language in formal systems, such as scientific, especially empiricist, theories, characteristic of the mainstream of theorizing about organizations from the 1940s onward. For a number of theoretical and epistemological Philosophy and Organization Theory Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 32, 23–54 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2011)0000032004

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reasons logical empiricism or positivism is no longer a widely held view either in the philosophy of science or in the organization theory. We examine some critical issues regarding logical empiricist epistemological foundations and propose a methodological naturalistic framework that supports the ongoing growth of knowledge in organization theory, naturalistic coherentism. In developing this new conception of science we thus opt for a revisionary methodology, but one that is beholden to neither the traditional logical empiricist/positivist conception of (organization) science nor the relativism and conservatism of postmodernist theory, widely considered to be the successor of positivist organization theory. Keywords: Organization theory; analytic philosophy; naturalistic coherentism; naturalism; descriptive and revisionary methods. Because the world is not a cluster of conjurer’s tricks, conjurers can exist – N. R. Hanson

INTRODUCTION Contemporary organization theory is a field characterized both by a plurality of views and perspectives (e.g., Walsh, Meyer, & Schoonhoven, 2006) on one hand, and by paradigmatic underdevelopment and fragmentation (Pfeffer, 1993) on the other. Explanations for this assessment range from the presumed clash of rival narrative traditions (Reed, 1997) to the claim that science, as a master narrative offering superior knowledge, has ‘‘run out of steam’’ (Burrell, 1997, p. 657). In this chapter, we present a critical assessment of this state of affairs and propose a methodological naturalistic framework that supports the ongoing growth of knowledge in organization theory, naturalistic coherentism. In particular, we argue that analytic philosophy, as one of the major tools used for theorizing about organizations, has had a fundamental influence on the development of organization theory up to the present. Analytic philosophy is usually described as a school of thought being concerned with logical or linguistic conceptual analysis (see Preston, 2006). Part of the reason for the current intellectual diversity in organization theory, we argue, can be found in a fundamental methodological fissure in analytic philosophy itself: the distinction between descriptive and revisionary methods. Another contributing factor is the appropriateness of these tools for two different foci of organizational analysis: the holistic level and the individual level. Roughly speaking, descriptive methods emphasize

Analytic Philosophy and Organization Theory

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the role of meaning in ordinary discourse. The principal focus of descriptive analysis in organization theory, for example, is how agents use everyday language in organizational contexts, often by invoking Wittgensteinian language games. In contrast, revisionary approaches, concerned about the complexity and ambiguity of ordinary-language use, aim for greater clarity by recasting ordinary language in formal systems, such as scientific theories. Famous classical examples of revisionary approaches in administration and organization theory are the positions advocated by Simon ([1945] 1976), March and Simon (1958), Cyert and March (1963), and Katz and Kahn (1978) whose views of science were that of logical empiricism. It is this type of revisionary conception that formed the mainstream of theorizing about organizations from the 1940s onward and is clearly evident, inter alia, in the mission statement of the flagship in the field, the Administrative Science Quarterly (see Thompson, 1956). Logical empiricism, often simply called positivism, is not a view currently or widely advocated in organization studies. However, Donaldson’s work (1985, 1996, 2005) must be acknowledged here in that it provides a spirited, albeit lonely, defense. In the discussion to follow, we present in broad outline some of the key features of analytic philosophy and its influence in organization studies, raise critical issues regarding logical empiricist epistemological foundations, and discuss the paradigms approach (or P-theory) as the self-proclaimed successor to logical empiricism that is prominent in current organization theory. En passant, we also offer some comments about why we believe postmodernism in organization theory to be deeply conservative and to remain wedded to an empiricist agenda. Our final section outlines naturalistic coherentism as a more productive methodological framework for theorizing about organizations. While it is not the only naturalistic approach to organization theory, it is, we argue, the most consistent and differs significantly, for example, from McKelvey’s ‘‘quasi-natural’’ conception (McKelvey, 1999, 1997, 2002), which maintains a worrying dualism in its premise. In developing this new conception of science we thus opt for a revisionist methodology, but one that is beholden to neither the traditional logical empiricist/positivist conception of (organization) science nor the relativism and conservatism of postmodernist theory.

ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES The term ‘‘analytic philosophy’’ is usually applied to a philosophical orientation identified with the names of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell in

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the early days of the 20th century (Preston, 2006, provides a good overview). Characteristic of Moore and Russell was their belief that natural language was too loose and philosophically imprecise, and that greater clarity of meaning could be achieved if the analysis of language were to be made the methodological core of philosophy. Following Moore, a relatively finegrained descriptive approach to linguistic analysis, often (and for some controversially) described as the ‘‘linguistic turn,’’ characterized one strand of analysis while a revisionary approach, using the formal logic of Russell, came to characterize another strand. Of the five phases identified by Preston (2006), the third is represented by the so-called Vienna Circle. It was a major and sustained attempt to develop a revisionary approach to the analysis of language and is probably best known to theorists of organizations and administrative science. It is associated with philosophers such as Schlick, Neurath, Feigl, Waisman, Carnap, and Hempel, collectively known as the logical positivists. (Feiglis particularly interesting because as well as having been a logical positivist, within a group of scientifically minded philosophers, he saw, first, its weaknesses and explicitly transitioned to logical empiricism, a view more consonant with a realist ontology, and second, he applied this framework to social science.) This Austrian–German philosophical perspective has been championed in the British context by A. J. Ayer whose book Language, Truth and Logic, published in 1936, and continues to be influential in organization theory to this day. It expressed the most extreme form of the revisionist doctrine, categorizing whole continents of human discourse as meaningless. From 1945 until about 1965, the fourth phase can be identified as a rebound to descriptive styles of analysis with the turn to ordinary-language analysis. Amongst the most prominent advocates are [the later] Wittgenstein (1953) and Gilbert Ryle (1949). The later Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that there is no ideal language, and that each language system is like a game that plays by its own rules. Language understood as an intrinsically social phenomenon cannot be studied in abstracto but only in the human communities in which it is embedded and used. Indeed, language games are wholes whose parts, such as utterances, only have meaning in virtue of a role they play within the total form of life of a linguistic community. Hence, meaning is use. Importantly, language does not have to refer, or correspond, to anything at all. It only has to play a role in a form of life. Accordingly, philosophical analysis became a matter of looking at how people routinely use language and seeing the philosophical muddle we get into when we depart from that use. The 1960s saw the beginning of the demise of linguistic philosophy, while leaving intact its legacy of epistemological relativism in the form of Winch’s


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views, and, more powerfully, Kuhn’s views on the paradigmatic nature of large-scale theories. Ironically, while critics external to academic philosophy such as Ernest Gellner in his Words and Things (1959) were attacking descriptive analysis, Kuhn’s work, as well as the works of philosophers of science such as Hanson ([1958] 1971, 1981) and Popper (1959) expressed attacks on the most prominent models of revisionary analysis – those used by logical empiricists in science. And at about this time, Quine launched major attacks on both traditions as they were then conceived. In his classic paper ‘‘Two dogmas of empiricism’’ ([1951] 1963), he first argued against the analytic/synthetic distinction, thus depriving descriptive analysis of recourse to nontrivial claims that were meant to be true purely by virtue of the meaning of their terms. Quine had no problem with sentences such as ‘‘if X is a bachelor then X is a bachelor’’ because it was true by virtue not of the nonlogical terms ‘‘X,’’ ‘‘bachelor,’’ ‘‘is,’’ and ‘‘a,’’ but by virtue of the purely logical terms ‘‘if y then .y’’ His worry was about sentences like ‘‘if X is a bachelor then X is an unmarried adult male,’’ whose truth relies on the meanings of the nonlogical terms. Meaning analysis is too frail a support for logical truth. And, second, through his defence of holism, he denied all the formal machinery of scientific theory formulation any simple way of matching up its statements with a reduction to discrete packets of evidence, such as particular observations. From the sixties to the present day, the philosophical landscape is characterized by philosophical as well as methodological diversity and has spawned many subfields. While the clarification of concepts, by whatever means, can be a useful exercise, it does not independently tell us what the facts about the world are. These need to be supplied by the background assumptions of whatever analysis is undertaken and by the theories being analyzed (e.g., Churchland, in McCauley, 1996, p. 291). We return to this point later. While analytic philosophy, as we saw, is primarily concerned with the analysis of meaning, approaches to meaning, however, have had wider implications, affecting the framing of issues in, for example, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, and even in logic (Searle, 2003). The important distinction for our purposes, in classifying methods of analysis, is that between descriptive and revisionary methods. (See Strawson, 1992, who applies the distinction to metaphysics.) Roughly speaking, as we noted above, descriptive approaches involve the understanding of meaning as it resides in ordinary discourse. It is language as it is used that is the locus of analysis. Because of the complexity of usage and its contexts, revisionary approaches attempt to answer questions about meaning by examining

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formal systems. Revisionary analysis informed the early Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, lay at the heart of Logical Positivism, and Logical Empiricism, continued with the work of W. V. Quine, and formed the basis of Donald Davidson’s truth-theoretic analysis of meaning. Descriptive analysis flourished as Oxford-style ordinary-language philosophy whose practitioners included Ryle, the later Wittgenstein, Strawson, Austin, and Grice, but was developed much further in intentionalistic theories of meaning, such as speech act theory as proposed by Searle. Because of their differing methodologies, revisionary and descriptive approaches have had a profound effect on the way issues in social science in general and organization studies in particular have been framed. For example, the study of organizations as systems owes much to the revisionary tradition that seeks to cast such knowledge in terms of law-like generalizations. On the other hand, the study of organizations as entities constructed out of meanings, understandings, and interpretations, where these are in turn read off from linguistic representations, as is often the case with Giddens’s work (e.g., The Constitution of Society, 1984) owes much to the descriptive tradition, particularly Wittgensteinian notions of ‘‘rule following.’’ Thus, the logical machinery of revisionary analysis, first used to formulate problems and their solutions within the study of scientific theories, for which it seems more suited, came to be associated with the research project of blurring the distinction between natural science and social science to produce a science of organizations. Its metaphysical focus was realism and it saw good theory as providing a representation of reality in much the way that a good street map provides a good representation of a city’s road system. On the other hand, descriptive analysis, taking its cue from Wittgenstein’s analysis of language games, developed a shift to relativism, best exemplified in Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and its Relationship to Philosophy (1958), that was later reaffirmed in the work of Kuhn ([1962] 1970) where different worldviews were viewed as different paradigms, each with their own internal standards of justification. As a forerunner to postmodernism, the question of realism was relativized to particular worldviews, as was the matter of whether a good theory can be said to be a representation of the world. The notion of ‘‘good theory’’ had become problematical. This broad-brush overview to analysis has its exceptions. For example, Searle is a critic of relativism in epistemology, and Rorty, a defender of postmodernism, was well schooled in the technicalities of revisionary analysis. But it does provide an orienting context with which to view ideas in organization theory and research. These approaches are sometimes thought to reflect the difference between explaining what goes on in organizations


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and understanding what goes on, with explanation making use of revisionary concepts and understanding making use of descriptive concepts. To see how this works, consider organizational analysis from two different levels. Viewed holistically as a functioning entity, there is a traditional empiricist science perspective that sees organizations as systems (e.g., von Bertalanffy, 1973; Boulding, 1956). Systems theory has its attractions because at that level of generality, it purports to sustain the kind of law-like generalizations demanded by explanations in natural science. Within organization theory, Katz and Kahn ([1966] 1978) are eloquent advocates of the systems view. (For general discussions see Hatch, 1997; Perrow, 1973.) But the task of understanding organizations holistically places demands on concepts to do with culture, with shared ways of interpreting and acting. (A classic statement of these alternatives can be found in Greenfield, 1975. See also the Special Issue of Administrative Science Quarterly, 1983, on culture and organizational analysis.) At the individual level, revisionary analysis often makes use of concepts concerning individual rationality and choice making. Herbert Simon’s Administrative Behavior (1945 and subsequent editions), methodologically committed to logical empiricism, is a case in point, with its thesis about bounded rationality. This highly influential concept carried over into March and Simon’s book Organizations (1958) and Cyert and March’s A Behavioural Theory of the Firm (1963), described as one of most influential management books of all times (Argote & Greve, 2007). Descriptive approaches often favor the study of subjective meanings. (See Hollis, 2003, for further discussion of this taxonomy of issues.) Karl Weick, although far from being the only representative concerned with meaning and meaning making, is an important scholar to mention in this context. Again, the literature is more diverse than this overview implies, but it will nevertheless help in seeing the main areas of difference and philosophical influence. Embedded in the discussion that follows is an argument that the current pluralism, or paradigm proliferation in the field, while usefully opening up new areas for investigation underexplored or simply absent in empiricist organization theory, is nevertheless detrimental to the growth of organization knowledge. In making this claim, we therefore take sides in favor of a revisionary approach, since in our view, the paradigms framework is not a neutral forum for framing discussion about competing views. As a theory that sought to explain the large-scale change of scientific discoveries, paradigms, or simply, P-theory, reflects the influence of descriptive analysis. Furthermore, the assertion that ‘‘science has run out of steam’’ and is no longer a viable contender for defining, explaining, and understanding organizations is in our view based on a mistake. This claim is premised on

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the systematic and ongoing conflation of science with a specific conception of science, logical empiricism, so prominent in the social sciences and education (Evers & Lakomski, 1991, 1996a, 1996b, 2000; Lakomski, 1991); it is this conflation, we argue, that accounts for much of the present-day state of organization theory. Specifically, contemporary approaches to organization theory – from interpretive–hermeneutic to postmodern – define themselves in opposition to ‘‘science’’ by which they mean positivism, which they rightly reject. This antiscience stance entails rebutting or simply denying the fundamental tenets of science, such as representing the social world objectively, a feature nevertheless accepted as appropriate for natural science. As organizational actors are meaning creating beings, the argument goes, the meanings, intentions, and beliefs that guide their actions are not amenable to scientific ( ¼ positivist) methodology (e.g., Tsoukas & Knudsen, 2005; Hatch & Yanow, 2005). The methodology of verstehen is required as it gets at what is hidden from view, that is, at our minds. As Weick (1979) so passionately argues, sense making is of the essence. A further feature of the interpretive as well as postmodern shift is the claim that we are talking about different organizational worlds (in an extreme reading), or that we move in different narratives without the ability to demarcate one from the other, or even considering it important to be able to do so. There is no touchstone, or common ground, between narratives that would allow evaluation, and no objective reality outside of the narrative. Kuhn’s arguments in particular have provided rich ferment for contemporary organization theory. Its strongest expression is arguably Burrell and Morgan’s (1979) famous book Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis that denotes a kind of watershed for organizational theorizing. Furthermore, in keeping with the notion of Kuhnian paradigms, a strong feature of current organization theory is its anti-representationalism (e.g., Chia, 2005; Tsoukas, 1998) that owes much to Rorty’s (1980) scepticism with regard to the possibility of justifying knowledge claims and the specific role he advocates for analytic philosophy as conversation (see his defense of anti-representationalism in Rorty, 1992). This view is often expressed in the language-as-discursive practice argument that eschews any reality independent of language, following the late Wittgenstein, Taylor, as well as Gadamer. We do not believe, however, that it is necessary to give up on representation. Indeed the main form of attack, following Rorty (1980) has come from assuming it is defeated by successfully attacking foundationalist epistemologies. But these attacks are not successful against nonfoundational epistemologies. Moreover, we think the representational power of good


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theories helps to explain their value in abetting people’s navigation through their social worlds at better than chance, or what one would expect from making decisions based on coin tossing. Several moves are involved in making the point. The most important is uncoupling the empiricist version of science from science as understood in contemporary analytic philosophy of science and theory of knowledge. Rather than turning our backs on science, we embrace a postpositivist view of science that is both naturalistic and coherentist. To be quite clear on this point, we are talking about a new conception of science that supersedes traditional empiricism/positivism. The descriptor ‘‘postpositivism’’ is thus not to be read as denoting views alternative, or hostile, to science. The main reason for this combination of positions is that we think that armchair, or a priori, theorizing about the nature and dynamics of knowledge and human information processing is less warranted than theorizing informed by our best, current, science. Moreover, the strategy of using a less warranted epistemology in order to discount a more warranted body of claims such as science gets matters exactly the wrong way around. What we want is for an epistemology to cohere with our best claims to knowledge. This pushes us in the direction of naturalism – appealing to natural science – and coherentism. Coherence criteria for theory choice include both empirical adequacy and what are called superempirical virtues of good theory, such as consistency, simplicity, comprehensiveness, explanatory unity, and fecundity (Churchland, 1985). These criteria are commonly and uncontroversially used to determine the quality of a theory – its virtues. We would claim that these are also the sorts of criteria that are used in interpretive social science and postmodern approaches. That is, interpreting texts, situations, or other people’s minds and behaviors, and being able to sort well-defended statements from those that are not, can be accomplished by applying coherence criteria. Simply put, the general aim is to see how well our beliefs ‘‘hang together’’ (BonJour, 1985), what sense they make, or how well (or poorly) they cohere. In this conception of science that we advocate, we distinguish a coherence theory of evidence that is employed for justification, from a correspondence theory of truth, which we use to read off the nature of the reality being represented. As in our view, the field of contemporary organization theory reflects the progression of philosophical argument in the analytic tradition, especially with regard to the problems of logical empiricism and ordinary-language philosophy, it is necessary to present some of the most important debates to understand how organization theory got to its current state. Obviously, the magnitude and complexities of this task go well beyond the confines of a single chapter, and we have to be content to present broad outlines of

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arguments, supplemented by relevant philosophical references the reader may wish to pursue. Essential to the current argument are (1) an understanding of the nature and problems of foundationalist epistemology as it underpins both traditional and contemporary versions of organization theory; (2) the twin results of philosophy of science: the theory-laden nature of observation, and the underrepresentation of data by evidence (the Duhem–Quine thesis); (3) Kuhnian paradigms, or P-theory, including incommensurability and the conceptual role theory of meaning, followed by some comments regarding postmodernist assumptions and the consequences for organization theory. To begin the discussion, an elaboration of our earlier remarks on analytic philosophy will set the scene.

LOGICAL EMPIRICISM AND THE PROBLEM WITH FOUNDATIONS IN ORGANIZATION THEORY Donaldson’s (2005) defence of organization theory ‘‘as a positive science’’ follows his much debated book In Defence of Organization Theory published in 1985 (see the symposium published in Organization Studies in 1988), followed by his For Positivist Organization Theory in 1996. All of these discussions are the successors of the possibly most famous and influential of all positivist treatments of administrative science, Herbert Simon’s Administrative Behavior. So while the main game in organization theory has shifted, positivism having become a much less prominent player, a player it remains still. This is not the place to rehearse all the major theoretical shifts and developments in the study of organization and organization theory. (See Walsh et al., 2006; Augier, March, & Sullivan, 2005; Tsoukas and Knudsen’s 2005 Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory presents an excellent overview of the main perspectives in contemporary organization theory, especially in Part 1; Starbuck, 2003; also Clegg, Hardy, and Nord’s (1997) comprehensive Handbook of Organization Studies, especially the chapters by Reed, Burrell, Marsden and Townley; Hatch, 1997.) The publication dates of the above positivist discussions serve to indicate the longevity of this tradition in organization theory, especially in the North American context. Despite different emphases in the works referred to, fundamental commitments to empiricism are shared and are subject to the major problems of foundationalist theories of knowledge and conceptions of science, as is shown in the following text.


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Interestingly, one of the most central figures originally part of the Vienna Circle, Herbert Feigl, who gave the Circle’s central doctrines the name of Logical Positivism (Blumberg & Feigl, 1931) later changed his mind following his critique of the more austere logical positivist doctrines of the verificationist theory of meaning and induction. In his 1931 paper on logical positivism, Feigl (Blumberg & Feigl, 1931, p. 287) initially formulated the central problem of epistemology as ‘‘To know the meaning of a proposition is to know what must be the case if the proposition is true.’’ By the application of logic, complex propositions can be broken down into simple or atomic propositions by showing what experiences verify them, that is, make them true. However there is some ambiguity in this formulation for ‘‘experience’’ can be taken to refer to such different items as sense data, the subjective content of our perceptions, or it can refer to physical objects. For a reductive phenomenalism, our claims are true because we have certain kinds of sensations. For an empirical realist they are true because this is the way the world happens to be. Feigl inclined to the latter, realist, view while the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle tended to side with the antirealist phenomenalist view (Feigl, 1974a, 1974b). A second reason contributed to Feigl’s change of heart. He was much taken by Popper’s arguments on the growth of knowledge, which are in part a critique of logical positivism, and encouraged him to publish his insights in a book, LogikderForschung (1934), later expanded and translated as The Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1959. Popper’s attack on the problem of induction was the essence of the fatal blow to logical positivism. The details need not concern us here, but the basic problem, stated by Hume, is the problem of justifying the shift from

To

All observed X are Y All X are Y

The problem is that no finite number of observations can ever confirm, in the semantical sense of verify, a universal statement. For logical positivists this posed a real dilemma as the meaning of a statement was seen as residing in its method of verification. But the law statements of science cannot even in principle be verified as universal generalizations, and so are meaningless. Or at least their meaning depends on the soundness of some principle of induction that Popper (1959, p. 40) claimed does not exist: ‘‘This inference to theories, from singular statements which are ‘verified by experience’ (whatever that may mean), is logically inadmissible. Theories are, therefore, never empirically verifiable.’’

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In the well-known Popperian view, scientific knowledge consists of networks of singular as well as universal hypotheses that imply observations that can be tested (an excellent discussion on empiricism is found in Churchland, 1989, pp. 259–276; also her 2002 text, chap. 6; also GodfreySmith’s (2003) splendid introduction to the philosophy of science). The principle of falsification means that at best hypotheses can be falsified but they cannot be confirmed. Popper’s noninductive, hypothetico-deductive model of the growth of knowledge consists of series of conjectures and refutations, and those theories that survive the most severe tests are accepted as the best for the time being. Although Feigl did not accept Popper’s critique of induction, he did accept the hypothetico-deductive model as a powerful device for hypothesizing physical objects. Feigl’s account of scientific knowledge, method, and theory, written in 1953 (see especially pp. 11–12), is easily recognizable today, in that it has served, and continues to serve as the foundation for research in (educational) administration (Evers & Lakomski, 1991), organization theory and behavior (see Pugh et al., 1963), as well as leadership studies (Lakomski, 2005). Briefly, there are three main elements to empiricist theories: 1. A theory is a hypothetico-deductive structure where less general and singular claims, including expected observations, are deduced from more general claims. 2. Theories are justified by meeting certain conditions of empirical testability. If the deduced states of affairs are actually observed, the theory is confirmed. Otherwise it is disconfirmed. Justifying a theory is a matter of showing it has more conformations and fewer disconfirmations than its rivals. 3. All the theoretical terms of a theory must be able to be given operational definitions, that is, admit of some defining measurement procedure. – Evers and Lakomski (1996b, pp. 383–384). The insights developed by Popper regarding scientific theories as composed of networks of hypotheses, and the principle of falsification, were deepened by W. V. Quine (1960, 1963) who argued that falsification is far more complex than presumed by empiricists. Incorporating Pierre Duhem’s earlier insight that hypotheses can never be tested on their own as they are always embedded in a whole theoretical network in which they figure, Quine, in his attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction, argued that the idea that ‘‘crucial experiments’’ would provide decisive answers as to which hypothesis to eliminate was mistaken. The upshot of this is that interpreting experimental results relies on more than the application of simple logical principles, a fundamental problem


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for empiricists regarding confirmation and explanation. The radical implications of what has come to be known as the Duhem–Quine thesis maintains that ‘‘given sufficient imagination, any theory y can be permanently saved from ‘refutation’ by some suitable adjustment in the background knowledge in which it is embedded’’ (Lakatos, 1977, p. 184; Quine, 1963, pp. 42–43). If correct, Quine thought, it makes little sense to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement – especially if it is a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field. Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements, which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system y Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. (Quine, 1963, p. 43)

The direct consequence of the Duhem–Quine thesis for the empiricist theory of meaning is dire in that empirical statements do not have empirical consequences of their own. It is whole theories that have empirical consequences rather than individual terms or sentences. Theoretical terms, importantly, acquire their meaning from within the network of theories and laws in which they figure. Simplified though the argument is, it suffices to indicate the manner in which the empiricist dogma of the presumed sharp distinction between analytic statements, deemed true by virtue of meaning (e.g., ‘‘an unmarried man is a bachelor’’), and synthetic statements, deemed true in virtue of the facts (e.g., ‘‘whales are mammals’’) came to founder. As can also be seen now, it raised substantial problems for what were presumed solid epistemological foundations for science. An essential feature of logical empiricism was the assumption that observation sentences are the secure foundations upon which the edifice of knowledge could be erected. Indeed, the Justified True Belief (JTB) account of knowledge, assumed by logical empiricism, is easily conflated with foundationalism in epistemology because the traditional notion of justification, deriving from Plato, assumes justification takes the form of a regress of reasons, in this case a regress back to empirical foundations (unlike Plato’s regress back to innate ideas) (Armstrong, 1973). Foundationalism (or foundationalist theories of justification) comprises a number of theories of knowledge that assume that there are secure foundations to knowledge from which we can confidently derive all knowledge (for critical discussion, see Williams, 1977). Such foundations were believed to range from sense data, firstperson sensory reports, to observation statements. These had to be secure for if they were not then no knowledge could be derived from them. (For an

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overview see Evers & Lakomski, 1991, 2000, pp. 1–8.) As we saw in the preceding, given that observation sentences themselves contain theoretical terms, and given Quine’s argument that even sentences at the observation level may need to be revised for overall coherence and explanatory power, then observation sentences are not the secure foundation they were believed to be. Therefore, they cannot serve as the bedrock of science since any doubt about the security of the foundations serves to undermine the theoretical superstructure of science built upon it. This realization, further explored by philosophers of science such as Feyerabend (1963), Churchland (1989, 2002), Hanson ([1958] 1971, 1981), and Hesse (1970), is commonly acknowledged as confirming the collapse of the empiricist conception of the structure of knowledge. There is no theory-free way of seeing the world (e.g., Quine, 1951, 1969; Sellars, 1968; Hooker, 1975; Williams, 1977; Quine & Ullian, 1978; BonJour, 1985; Churchland, 1987). As Hanson (1981, pp. 6–7) expressed it, ‘‘People, not their eyes, see. y That Keppler and Tycho do, or do not, see the same thing cannot be supported by reference to the physical states of their retinas, optic nerves or visual cortices: there is more to seeing than meets the eyeball’’ (italics added). In the face of these arguments, the question of how to determine which revisions are justified and which are not is not one that could be answered by empiricism. There are no foundations to knowledge as conceived in empiricism, and the principle of empirical adequacy is insufficient to ‘‘pin’’ any empirical claim. So the philosophical ground was prepared for a new approach to the study of the growth of knowledge.

PARADIGMS AND THEIR POSTMODERNIST COUSINS IN ORGANIZATION THEORY Accepting the results of the Duhem–Quine thesis, Kuhn’s paradigms approach, or P-theory, was formulated specifically as a systematic critique of empiricism, as well as an argument against both logical empiricist and Popperian claims about the growth of scientific knowledge being a rational process. It is this perspective that has increasingly been used to underwrite attacks on objectivity in the sciences, and has furthermore been used to advocate varieties of subjectivism and relativism in organization theory, amongst other disciplines. As noted above, the most famous application of the Kuhnian paradigms perspective in organization theory is Burrell and Morgan’s Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis in 1979. Its impact spread across disciplinary boundaries and it was much admired in educational administration (e.g., Griffiths, 1985), for example.


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Burrell and Morgan identified four paradigms – the interpretive, functionalist, radical structuralist, and radical humanist – that were said to enable the world to be examined ‘‘in terms of four sets of basic assumptions’’ (Burrell & Morgan, 1979, p. 24), each one mapping on to a separate social scientific reality. On this view, A synthesis is not possible, since in their pure forms they are contradictory, being based on at least one set of opposing meta–theoretical assumptions. They are alternatives, in the sense that one can operate in different paradigms sequentially over time, but mutually exclusive, in the sense that one cannot operate in more than one paradigm at any given point in time y. (Burrell & Morgan, 1979, p. 24)

The nature of the relationship between paradigms is clearly oppositional rather than complementary (Evers & Lakomski, 1991, Chap. 9). Looking back to the heated debates their book engendered, Burrell (1997, p. 648) notes somewhat wryly that while the text served to give a voice to all those who opposed the functionalist perspective, it also ‘‘articulated a procrustean approach to stabilizing the field in a somewhat extreme form.’’ Of particular concern to the critics, Burrell notes, was the notion of paradigm incommensurability in the absence of any specified ‘‘translation rules.’’ As late as 1997, he defends the incommensurability thesis that is at the ‘‘very centre of the issue of organizational paradigms’’ (Burrell, 1997, p. 650). His reasons are instructive. Not only are the functionalists offended by paradigm incommensurability, but also all those who ‘‘believe in the values of debate, argument, and compromise’’ y What they ‘‘fail to understand is that one of the few lessons of history, in things epistemological, is that despite the best endeavours of many able minds the dream of translation remains just that’’ (Burrell, 1997, p. 650). And indeed it does, not because of the impossibility of devising translation rules but because it is the very notion of a paradigm that is the problem. As has often been noted, the term ‘‘paradigm’’ has been used freely and often indiscriminately in social science discussions, in part aided by the fact that Kuhn himself used it in at least twenty-two different ways (in his original 1962 text The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), as Masterman (1977) has pointed out. Following various critical discussions, Kuhn published revisions, some substantial as regards his original theory (Kuhn, 1970, 1974; Lakatos & Musgrave, 1977, present many of the central debates). Nevertheless, paradigms remain (strongly) incommensurable (Kuhn, 1962, pp. 109–110). They are claimed to contain within themselves both substantive theories but also the very standards and criteria for their evaluation, that is, paradigmspecific epistemologies. It follows that there is no privileged independent epistemic vantage point from which different paradigms could be assessed.

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Attempting to evaluate the merits of paradigm rivals, Kuhn (1962, p. 150) notes, means that their advocates ‘‘practise their trade in different worlds.’’ Particularly instructive is his view on the transfer of allegiance from one paradigm to another that he describes as ‘‘a conversion experience that cannot be forced’’ (p. 151), and that happens ‘‘like a gestalt switch just because it is a transition between incommensurables’’ (p. 150). So what accounts for the growth of scientific knowledge is, in the end, just a change of heart. There has been much criticism of the paradigms theory, and while it continues to flourish in social science research such as education and organization theory, in contemporary postpositivist philosophy of science the paradigm theory is widely regarded as false (see Suppe´, 1974). The view that paradigm diversity in organization theory is its ‘‘normal state’’ (Burrell, 1997, p. 648) rather than a ‘‘y zoological garden [of organizational theorists] y crowded with a bewildering variety of specimens’’ (Perrow, cited in Marsden & Townley, 1997, p. 659) simply amounts to an act of faith. But now suppose we changed our minds and came to believe the opposite, for example, that the functionalist paradigm is right after all. If so, we would have come by this new view as the result of a conversion experience. The upshot of that is that neither view can be judged to be any better or truer than the other; each incommensurable paradigm is reckoned equally legitimate; any choice is a matter of subjective taste. It follows, inter alia, that the paradigms view is hardly in a position to challenge a competitor, such as a realist view of organization theory. Paradigm or theory choice, in the idiom of contemporary youth, turns out to be a case of ‘‘Whatevery.’’ As Kuhn rightly saw, there is no theory-free way of seeing the world, and interpreting our experience is what we need to do to get around. But he overshot the mark in his conclusion that therefore there is no adequate objective standard of reality, and that all theories are evidentially equivalent, or equally reasonable. Just as there is ‘‘more to seeing than meets the eyeball’’ (Hanson), there is more to evidence than observation (empirical adequacy). As we noted earlier, empirical adequacy is only one epistemic virtue among others that together constitute coherence criteria, which in turn establish global excellence of theory. It is the resultant theory itself that tells us what there is and whether the theory’s sentences match up with posited reality (Quine, 1960). This is an important point that needs emphasizing: the coherence theory of evidence needs to do its work first, and only after it has done that can any correspondence between the theory’s sentences and the posited reality be established. It is in this manner that the coherence theory of evidence is differentiated and separated from a correspondence theory of truth that is not some kind of a priori construct, as stipulated in


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foundationalist theories of knowledge, and apparently accepted as valid by theorists of Kuhnian or postmodern persuasion. It is now possible to see why the theory of paradigms drew too radical a conclusion from the theoryladenness of observation. But there is another serious objection to P-theory regarding incommensurability. On its own account, terms and concepts are paradigm specific, that is, their meaning is determined by the role they play within a network of theories that is specific to a paradigm. In other words, P-theory assumes a conceptual role theory of meaning. So when conceptual schemes and theories differ substantially, it is not possible to compare concepts or terms because they mean different things in each paradigm. Although terms such as ‘‘truth’’ or ‘‘validity’’ are orthographically identical across paradigms, their meaning is equivocal given the different conceptual schemes in which they function. Hence a comparison is not possible. The trouble is that Kuhn entertained an extreme version of the theory. If the meaning of terms and concepts is completely determined by the embedding theoretical framework, that is, by conceptual role, then incommensurable theories cannot be learnt. The key here is a modest and often overlooked evolutionary fact: humans are finite learners who have to begin learning somewhere. We need a ‘‘way in’’ to some complex interconnected vocabulary like a theory. But on Kuhn’s account there is no way of doing that. In order to learn some modest expressions of the theory, P-theory requires that we already understand the whole paradigm and therefore know what conceptual role the expressions play. But we cannot know the whole without first knowing the parts, and it is here that the theory of meaning outruns its own epistemological resources: ‘‘it posits learned antecedents of learning that cannot themselves be learnt’’ (Evers & Lakomski, 1991, p. 230). To put the matter differently, the conceptual role theory of meaning, firstly and correctly, implies a theory of the mind, but, secondly and incorrectly, assumes that the mind possesses superhuman powers. P-theory comes out unknowable on its own account of knowledge, lacks explanatory power in relation to its rivals, and is inconsistent. Of course, one may choose to ignore such lack of theoretical virtues. But it turns out that theorists of any ilk, postmodern ones included, have tended to refrain from playing fast and loose with such virtues as consistency, for instance, since inconsistent arguments sanction just about any conclusion whatsoever and therefore seriously undermine their own points of view. Although we offer different reasons, we side with Pfeffer (1993) that paradigm diversity equals fragmentation and needs to be overcome (also McKelvey, 1997, 1999). But unlike him, we urge continuing debates about

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basic philosophical–epistemological issues for, as we have seen, their foreclosure in the paradigms perspective actively prevents the growth of organization knowledge. This can be seen even more clearly in the diverse collection of perspectives gathered under the heading of postmodern organization theory. Postmodern organization theory, so called, is often described as the most radical version representing the contemporary antiscience (‘‘science’’ ¼ positivism) stance in the social sciences including organization theory. What marks this perspective as extreme is that while Kuhn maintains a notion of empirical justification albeit relative to paradigms, postmodernist theoreticians follow Rorty (1980, chap. 4) who goes further than Kuhn and rejects the very idea of empirical justification altogether. As a result, the conception of theory as representing something real in the world disappears. The shift from Kuhnian paradigms to postmodernism is thus a shift from multiple truths to no truth at all. As we noted earlier, representation disappears, as does the fiction/nonfiction distinction. Like Joseph’s multicolored dream coat, postmodernism is difficult to describe. Indeed, there seem to be as many accounts as there are advocates writing under this banner (see Chia, 2005; Hatch & Yanow, 2005; Deetz, 2003; Gergen, 2003; Alvesson & Deetz, 1997; Hatch, 1997; Marsden & Townley, 1997; Burrell, 1997; Clegg, 1990; Cooper & Burrell, 1988). Despite different emphases, there are a number of shared commitments we take to be characteristic of the postmodern position, such as the philosophy of presence, the rejection of representation, essentialism and foundationalism, as well as the idea of metanarratives. To be added are Foucault’s argument for the power/knowledge nexus, the primacy of discourse, deconstruction, and the so-called ‘‘death of the subject’’ (Baack & Prasch, 1997; Foucault, 1978). Here we want to draw attention only to some problems that betray analytic philosophical roots. (1) Simplifying a complex set of issues the postmodernist position holds that an object only exists for us insofar as we have a word for it and a set of constitutive practices and social relations. Hence, what matters is the relational nature of object construction, rather than the object itself and its properties. Anything can be constructed as many different objects, meaning is never fixed. Language is not, as Rorty (1980) pointed out, ‘‘the mirror of nature,’’ and science is just one story among many, possible ones, without any privileged standing. We might just note the unexceptional fact here that words (and what they denote) first have to be learned. This humble point applies to learning about our social–organizational and natural environments as much as it does to our


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inner states, such as our beliefs, intentions, and purposes. The notion that words, and discourse itself, are just ‘‘given’’ reflects a particular epistemic notion that appears in many guises and includes both the foundationalist notion of knowledge discussed earlier as well as the idea that humans have privileged, that is, unmediated, access to the contents of their own minds (for extended discussion of introspectivism see Churchland, 1988; on the notion of the ‘‘given’’ see Sellars’ 1968, famous critique). However, our knowledge even of the mundane rests on a rich network of background theories, a vast amount of prior knowledge that we first had to acquire. Postmodernism’s theory of mind simply postulates learned antecedents of learning that cannot themselves be learned. (2) The concept of the decentered self is developed in opposition to the Cartesian notion of an autonomous self, a human actor in possession of meanings and intentions, able to make rational decisions; that is, a being with a mind. This ‘‘atomistic view’’ (Chia, 2005, p. 120) has been split asunder in postmodernism as language has displaced the structure of the Cartesian unconscious in its emphasis on textual and discursive fields. It is by means of language that the actor is positioned in the world, and it is the discourses in which actors always find themselves that determine their human subjectivities and identities at any given time in history (Foucault, 1972, 1977, 1980). Constituted thus, the self is decentered and fragmented. As Baack and Prasch (1997, p. 139) declare, ‘‘The ‘atom’ of the human subject, like the atom of physics, has been found not to have a hard shell at all.’’ Let us note for the moment that it is a big leap from ‘‘no hard shell’’ to no shell at all, a leap we address later. The postmodernist thesis that the subject is constructed entirely by discourse, what we might call the strong thesis of discursive construction, we believe to be false. There is, however, nothing objectionable about a weaker version of discursive construction. We gendered beings all grow up in one, or perhaps several, languages, in one or several countries, regions, socioeconomic groups or classes, political systems, and in this way form our identities, or our ‘‘theories of the world,’’ as Quine put it. These in turn both facilitate and set limits to what we know and what we can say. The strong thesis is quite odd in denying any inner dimension, and even more odd in negating a person’s physical body. Such treatment amounts to reducing a human being to ‘‘a creation, construct, or ‘effect’ of social discourses,’’ as Strauss and Quinn (1997, p. 28) put it. This view of the decentered subject does little to overcome the Cartesian notion of the autonomous ‘‘thinking thing,’’ rooted in the primacy of

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language, more specifically the manipulation of the symbol systems of mathematics and logic, that were reckoned the essential feature of being human, and being radically separate from body and world (for critical discussions see Clark, 2001, 1997; Dennett, 1996; Fetzer, 1996; Churchland, 1995). While Descartes at least maintained the distinction between mind, body, and world, albeit in the form of substance dualism (Churchland, 1988), in postmodernism there is no inner dimension and thus no distinction to be maintained; identity, following Foucault, is performance. Better, that is, more coherent ways to explain the postmodernist claim of the decentered subject that acknowledge humans as skilled language users and restore to them their inner domain of feeling, wanting, and thinking, are provided by contemporary neuroscience that is building explanations concerning the plasticity and durability of the mind/brain, and thus the construction of the self over time (e.g., Clark, 2008, 2001; Damasio, 1996; Le Doux, 2002; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Churchland, 1993).

PHILOSOPHICAL ANSWERS AND SCIENTIFIC SOLUTIONS: NATURALISM AND ORGANIZATION THEORY In the previous section, we have endeavored to show why the paradigms perspective and its postmodernist successor stand in direct line of descent from the descriptive tradition of analytic philosophy. In this tradition philosophy ‘‘leaves everything as it is’’ as Wittgenstein remarked (Philosophical Investigations, Section 124). Despite its radical pretensions, postmodernism is deeply conservative in that it implies a strong form of epistemological relativism. This relativism, however, is the familiar artifact of taking logical empiricist foundationalist modes of knowledge justification as the only game in town for objectivity, and finding them wanting. Taking our cue from Quine’s work, we have endeavored to demonstrate why this view is mistaken. The theoretical fragmentation in organization theory, we argued, is largely attributable to its continued reliance on both strands of analytic philosophy: the more prominent, descriptive mode via paradigm proliferation, and the less overt, revisionist strand, as continued in Donaldson’s work, for example. Therefore, the cause of theoretical fragmentation is not located in ‘‘the complex, idiosyncratic nature of organizational phenomenon,’’ as McKelvey (1997, p. 35) claims, but in the philosophical, especially epistemological, machinery applied to study it. This is one important way in which we differ from McKelvey. However, as a most outspoken advocate for a naturalistic


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science of organizations, at a time when such a quest is viewed with suspicion, we applaud his concern with a naturalistic approach to the study of organization. At the same time though, we have reason to doubt that he is able to accomplish this in light of his theoretical commitments that are rooted in the same analytic tradition that has given rise to the antiscience perspectives he rightly rejects. McKelvey’s views (e.g., McKelvey, 1999, 2002) on organization theory are complex, wide ranging, as well as controversial and deserve discussion in their own right. For present purposes, however, we restrict our comments to a central distinction in his work that documents a lingering attachment to empiricist doctrine: the distinction between intentionally and naturally caused behavior, which leads him to postulate the study of firms as quasinatural phenomena (McKelvey, 1997, p. 351). This is one major point of difference between his views and the view advocated here, naturalistic coherentism, that eschews any dualism and offers a robustly naturalist rather than an ‘‘as if’’ account of human and organizational behavior. In order to come to grips with what he calls the idiosyncrasy problem characteristic of organizations, McKelvey suggests that organization theorists have to understand better the tension between the intentionally and naturally caused effects, as well as the transition phenomena that link them. What the latter are awaits specification. In generally accepting Campbellian realism and evolutionary epistemology (Baum & McKelvey, 1999; McKelvey, 1999; McKelvey & Baum, 1999), McKelvey’s commitment to naturalism is evident. But in championing Campbell’s perspective, he also appears committed to what is a fundamental tension in the latter’s conception of science. Campbell, the philosopher, steadfastly held on to the analytic–synthetic distinction (Campbell, 1987, p. 165), a hallmark of empiricist science, while Campbell (1988) the social scientist accepts naturalism via his descriptive evolutionary epistemology (see the collection of some of his most important papers in Methodology and Epistemology for Social Science, especially his 1959, 1974, and 1988 articles; also Campbell, 1991; Lakomski, 1993). Holding both positions simultaneously makes Campbell’s position incoherent and his naturalism incomplete. Insofar as McKelvey accepts it, his position suffers the same fate. To see more clearly what the problem is, consider the example of juggling that McKelvey (1997, p. 351) introduces as ‘‘a perfect example of quasi-natural phenomena.’’ The ‘‘natural’’ part of the juggling act is said to set in once the balls have left the juggler’s hands and are in the air where they obey ‘‘well understood Newtonian laws’’ while the ‘‘intentional’’ part lies in the movement of the hands, which are under the (intentional) control of the juggler.

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The claim of intentionality, or more generally, of the nature of mental (internal) phenomena as in principle different from natural, external, phenomena is a complex one, has a long and distinguished history, and does not admit of easy answers (e.g., Godfrey-Smith, 2004; Clark, 2001, chap. 3; Churchland, 1988). Broadly speaking, what is at issue are two sets of facts, as Godfrey-Smith (2004, p. 149) encapsulates them: (1) Facts about wiring and organization of behaviorally complex organisms, and the connections between their wiring and the world around them y (2) Facts about our actual practices of interpretation and ascription of content y How these two sets are connected is an issue to which different answers can, and have been, given. One of the reasons for why we opt for a naturalistic (neuroscientific) rather than folk psychological account of our internal structure is to do with the notion of evidence for nonobservables, such as mental phenomena. In McKelvey’s example, what would possibly count as evidence for the claim that ‘‘the movements of the hands’’ while passing balls from one to the other is attributable to, or caused by, intention? McKelvey’s account of scientific method is in principle incapable of answering this as it relies on the (empiricist) justification logic (including prediction, generalization, and falsifiability, inter alia drawing on Hempel, 1965) with its attendant principle of empirical adequacy that stipulates that evidence ¼ observation. The claim that intentions (or any other mental, folk psychological item) may be the relevant causal agents that ‘‘make’’ the balls move from hand to hand outruns the scientific machinery McKelvey has available to support it. No matter how commonsensical or intuitively true the folk psychological items of beliefs and intentions may appear to be, they don’t stack up in light of current neuroscientific accounts of what goes on in our heads, or minds/brains, as the case is sometimes put. Physical bodies, complete with juggling hands, are enmeshed in and subject to the physical forces that determine the ways they are able to behave, and there is no inprinciple distinction to be drawn between internal states and external behaviors. In other words, the explanation of mental phenomena – the structure of the mind – is not quarantined from a naturalistic scientific account of all human behavior (e.g., Evers & Lakomski, 1991, pp. 130–134). Indeed, the folk psychological account of mental phenomena has been described as a ‘‘radically false account of the cognitive activity of humans y a thoroughgoing misrepresentation of what really takes place inside us’’ (Churchland & Churchland, 1998, p. 40). We are inclined to concur.


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While we agree with the naturalist-realist direction McKelvey pursues, a quasi-naturalistic approach, as briefly discussed, neither redresses paradigmatic fragmentation, nor does it establish a coherent science of organization. It is not surprising that McKelvey finds it difficult to account for ‘‘idiosyncratic organizational events’’ by application of empiricist justification logic. Indeed, idiosyncrasy will not disappear since even same-type organizations differ subtly ‘‘on the ground’’ in their everyday lives. On a thoroughgoing naturalistic theory of science that is not beholden to the tenets of empiricist conceptions of prediction and generalizability and any form of hypothetico-deductive procedure, organizational phenomena generally are studied from the ground up, where generalizations (if and where they can be had) only happen after the event, that is, after empirical work has been done. Importantly, idiosyncrasy is not sidestepped in our approach but is accepted as the unavoidable (normal) condition of organizational life. Building ‘‘empirically corroborated idealized models’’ (McKelvey, 1997, p. 5) avoids the issue in abstracting from the very problem that is in need of explanation. In contrast, naturalistic coherentism, the position we advocate, does offer a way forward in rethinking the issues that gave rise to McKelvey’s anomalous naturalism. Methodologically, the distinction between intentionally caused behaviors and naturally caused behaviors follows the distinction between descriptive and revisionary analysis. We propose a revisionary approach that can deal with intentionally caused behavior. We begin, by considering another distinction that tracks this divide between understanding and explanation. Traditionally, revisionary accounts of explanation have been heavily influenced by Hempel’s covering-law model. On this model, a phenomenon is said to be adequately explained when its description can be logically derived from a statement of some initial conditions, together with a law-like generalization. Thus, you can explain the pot of water boiling at 1001C on your kitchen stove by deriving it from (1) under conditions, C, all water boils at 1001C and (2) conditions C (e.g., the water is at sea level, it contains no impurities, etc.) obtain. Also known as the deductive-nomological, or D-N, model, it eventually came to grief for a simple logical reason. Here’s the problem. Using the D-N model, we can explain the length of a flagpole shadow by logically deducing it from information that includes the length of the flagpole, the position of the sun, the laws of optics, and some trigonometry (Godfrey-Smith, 2003, p. 193). However, the D-N model equally allows us to explain the length of the flagpole from information about the length of its shadow, optics, sun’s position, and trigonometry. Since most people see an asymmetry between

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these cases – you can explain the length of the shadow by appeal to the flagpole’s length, but not the length of the flagpole by appeal to the length of its shadow – the D-N model came to be seen as flawed, or at least in need of further augmentation. But notice that once we move away from logical derivability and toward additional contextual information, for something to count as an explanation looks more like showing how it fits as a claim within some theory, where the criteria for degree of fit are matters to do with overall coherence. Thus, explaining the length of the flagpole would presumably involve consideration of manufacturing specifications and causal processes, whereas explaining the length of the shadow would be simpler and would, more closely, resemble the reasoning in the D-N model. Notice, further, that as we move toward invoking more global considerations in explanation, the distinction between explanation and understanding blurs. We end up with scientific understanding. This is a consequence of a coherentist view of knowledge and its justification. It is revisionary only in the sense that science, where it differs from commonsense understandings, forces revisions on these usual ways of thinking about the world. It is also the source of our naturalism, which is simply scientific naturalism. What then becomes of McKelvey’s intentionally caused behaviors? Our naturalistic response is to follow Dennett’s (1991) advice, at least part of the way. Human behavior, both inside and outside of organizations, is highly patterned rather than largely random. Evidence for nonrandom behaviors exists where we can find a description of the behaviors that is briefer than a description of each individual item of behavior; where we can summarize or compress information about behavior. The most basic, commonsense, or folk-theoretical compression device, is to adopt the ‘‘intentional stance’’ and to see human behavior as deriving from the rational coordination of beliefs and desires. This is an extremely powerful framework for predicting what people will do in many situations. For example, in explaining why X got up and went to the fridge, it suffices for most purposes to say that X desired a beer and X believed that the beer was in the fridge. The main trouble with the intentional stance is that although it is in many cases empirically adequate, it is theoretically shallow. Scientifically minded naturalists want to know more about the causes of beliefs and desires, how they are represented in the brain, what are their causal dynamics as they manifest as rational behavior. The naturalistic coherentist therefore takes an instrumental view of folk-theory, valuing it for its empirical adequacy where it leads to useful predictions of behavior, but seeing its ontology of beliefs and desires as needing to be cashed out in naturalistic terms of the kind that neuroscience is now developing. The distinction between intentionally


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caused and naturally caused behaviors is therefore artificial, pragmatic, and subject to change over time. In ancient times a great many natural phenomena were explained in intentional terms. However, science has gradually dethroned the gods thought responsible for weather, climate, seasons, and the like. Biology dispensed with the ‘‘vital force’’ once thought to be the difference between living and nonliving things, and now neuroscience is beginning to impose its explanatory understanding on ourselves – our thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions, reasonings, affections, and emotions. Over time, a revisionary language will no doubt emerge for these phenomena too, although whether it passes over into commonsense usage and becomes the new descriptive language is another matter again. It is one of the great strengths of a naturalistic coherentist perspective on methodology that it is able to take advantage of the growth of scientific knowledge rather than to compartmentalize the study of organizations so as to insulate these studies from this source of knowledge.

CONCLUSION In this chapter we have endeavored to map out critically, and in as much detail as was feasible, the contribution of analytical philosophy to the understanding and definition of organization theory and studies. Although philosophy has largely been ‘‘A Connection Untended,’’ as Zelda (1996) observed in his assessment of forty years of ASQ, it has been present from the beginnings of administrative science and organization studies, and has shaped its theoretical and empirical agenda up to the present state. In particular, what has had most impact on the study of organization was the analytical distinction between descriptive and revisionary methods, with the former being characteristic of the understanding of meaning in ordinary discourse, and the latter attending to the complexities of meaning by examining formal systems. As is evident from the literature both analytical approaches still feature in contemporary organization theory. Our solution is to adopt a revisionist approach, following and extending Quine’s double-pronged argument against the analytic/synthetic distinction of classical empiricism and for the theory-ladenness of observation and holism in theorizing. Quine opened the door to more powerful approaches to science in the revisionary tradition, forcing theories to cohere not just with the methods of science but with the content of science as well; such is the consequence of naturalistic coherentist epistemologies. Having the freedom to use knowledge from wherever it can be got, we turn to cognitive

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neuroscience especially that delivers knowledge hand over fist regarding the enormous capacities of the embodied, embedded, and extended human brain (Clark, 2008; Quartz & Sejnowski, 2002; Hutchins, 1996) that, inter alia, is able to acquire language and develop a conception of a self. The advantage we see in such naturalism for organization theory is that claims made for, say, organizational change may not outrun our knowledge of human (and nonhuman) capacities to effect change. If the latter outruns the former, our claims are inconsistent and therefore not justified. This seemingly modest methodological principle exerts a powerful discipline over theorizing while remaining in principle open ended. It has much in common with Dewey’s notion of the ongoing growth of knowledge and adapts Popper’s idea of theory competition. While we have sympathy with Pfeffer’s and others’ request for paradigmatic consensus in the sense of offering a more productive solution to the current theoretical fragmentation in organization theory, we advocate a nondoctrinal, open-ended methodological approach, naturalistic coherentism (Evers & Lakomski, 2000), that supports theory competition (including our own), incorporates the postpositivist superempirical virtues, and remains compatible with the naturalistic constraints imposed by the capacities evolution bestowed upon us. The only commitment initially required is to accept some touchstone, some common ground, whether practical or theoretical, and begin the process of theory evaluation. The theory that satisfies the most number of superempirical virtues is accepted as valid for the time being. Organizational theorizing thus conceived remains principled but open ended, and there is no privileged vantage point from which theory competition is assessed. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, that is in the actual matching up of theories or claims, and no claim or theory is quarantined from the process. It is fair to say that this methodological approach is radically different from any of the approaches we discussed. In our view, it is the one that holds most promise for generating better, more coherent, explanations for organizational phenomena, including the very nature of organization itself.

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Gabriele Lakomski is a professorial fellow in the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne. Her main research interests are in the philosophy and theory of educational administration, administrative science, and in management and organization studies. She is best known for her critical work on leadership and organizational learning, which issued in her book Managing without Leadership (Oxford: Elsevier, 2005). Her research is based on the most recent scientific understanding of how humans acquire information and learn as developed by connectionist cognitive science. Her research program includes the analysis of knowledge management (KM) as a new tool for managing organizational development and change, which draws on the insights of recent cognitive (neuro)science. A member of the Academy of Management, Gabriele Lakomski is a member of the Academy’s Management Education Division. She was a Senior Editor of Organization Studies, and is a member of a number of editorial boards of education and management journals, including Management Learning. She is currently working on the relation between emotion and cognition and how recent neuroscience might contribute to more realistic accounts of decision making. Colin W. Evers is professor of educational leadership at the University of New South Wales, having previously worked at The University of Hong Kong, Monash University, and the University of Sydney. He studied mathematics, philosophy, and education before taking his PhD in philosophy of education at the University of Sydney. His teaching and research interests are in educational administration, philosophy of

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education, and research methodology. He has coedited and coauthored six books on educational administration, including Knowing Educational Administration, Exploring Educational Administration and Doing Educational Administration (all written with Gabriele Lakomski and published by Pergamon/Elsevier), and many papers in his areas of research interest. He serves on numerous editorial boards and has also been coeditor of the journal International Studies in Educational Administration, the official journal of the Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration and Management. His main ongoing research project has been the application of a naturalistic, coherentist epistemology to the development of a systematic view of theory in educational administration. Ideas from this research project have been discussed in detail in Special Issues of the journals Educational Management and Administration, Journal of Educational Administration and Educational Administration Quarterly. His most recent research is about leadership.

PRAGMATISM: A LIVED AND LIVING PHILOSOPHY. WHAT CAN IT OFFER TO CONTEMPORARY ORGANIZATION THEORY? Bente Elkjaer and Barbara Simpson ABSTRACT In the past, critics have dismissed American Pragmatism as intellectually naı¨ve and philosophically passe´, but in this chapter we argue that it still has much to offer the field of organization studies. Pragmatism is especially relevant to those organizational scholars who are concerned with understanding the dynamic processes and practices of organizational life. This chapter lays out the historical development of Pragmatism, recognizing the originating contributions of Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead. Although each of these writers developed unique philosophical positions, their ideas are all permeated by four key themes: experience, inquiry, habit and transaction. The interplay between these themes informs a temporal view of social practice in which selves and situations are continuously constructed and reconstructed through experimental and reflexive processes of social engagement. We then use organizational learning theory as an example to illustrate the relevance of these four themes, contrasting the anti-dualistic stance of Pragmatism with the work of Argyris and Scho¨n. Finally we turn to consider Weick’s organizing and Philosophy and Organization Theory Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 32, 55–84 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2011)0000032005

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sensemaking, suggesting that Pragmatism offers three potential foci for further development of these theories, namely continuity of past and future in the present, the transactional nature of social agency and reflexivity in social practices. Similarly we see potential for Pragmatism to productively inform the theorizing of other organizational practices such as identity work, strategy work, emotion work and idea work. Keywords: Pragmatism; practice; organizational learning; sensemaking.

INTRODUCTION Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. – Charles Sanders Peirce (1878, p. 293)

With these words, Peirce heralded a sea change in the philosophy of human thought and reasoning that not only dominated American philosophy for the ensuing half century or so, but also had profound influence in the practical domains of law, education, politics, religion, social theory and the arts. This statement, which has come to be seen as the originating maxim of Pragmatism, suggests that the meaning of ideas resides in the actions that they lead to rather than in their antecedent causes. This principle was subsequently picked up and further developed by William James, who proposed ‘The ultimate test for us of what a truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates or inspires’ (1898, p. 259). Similarly, John Dewey, whose central interest was the nature of knowledge and knowing, emphasized the consequential character of knowledge as ‘an instrument or organ of successful action’ (1908 [1977], p. 180), while George Herbert Mead’s focus on the social dynamics of meaning-making lead him to suggest that if ‘the gesture of a given human organism y indicate[s] to another organism the subsequent (or resultant) behavior of the given organism, then it has meaning’ (1934, p. 76). In all of these, the explicit link between knowledge (or meaning) and action suggests that ideas are more than mere accretions of past experience, but rather, their importance lies in their projected influence on future experiences. Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead are widely regarded as the originators of classical Pragmatism. They were all committed to finding practical ways of accounting for human conduct and meaning-making in all of its dynamic and social complexity. They sought practical solutions to the myriad

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practical problems that arise in lived human experience. By linking knowledge and action, they departed dramatically from the prevailing rationalism of their philosophical times, which they saw as too abstract and too academic to be of practical value. Not surprisingly then, their ideas were greeted with howls of derision from the more rationalist members of the philosophical community. Famously, G. K. Chesterton (1908, p. 62) wrote ‘Pragmatism is a matter of human needs y and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist’, while Bertrand Russell (1961, p. 782) issued the following warning against Pragmatism: y I feel a great danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety. The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness y this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and y any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.

For the Pragmatists, however, these criticisms simply served to confirm their assertion that what people believe to be true is what they find to be useful. James observed: When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer [to experience], the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractionist fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler. (1907, p. 68)

As with any frame-breaking shift in thinking, Pragmatism has been exposed to endless reinterpretation, its ‘new wine’ often becoming tainted by the ‘old bottles’ of more established paradigmatic perspectives. Many commentators have suggested that Pragmatism’s day in the sun has long gone (e.g. Thayer, 1982), dismissing it as philosophically passe´ and politically naı¨ ve. Others have associated it negatively with the excessively liberal optimism and economic progressiveness of American big business, while a persistent critique has been that Pragmatism lacks sufficient coherence to be deemed a distinctive doctrine or ‘school of thought’. Indeed, Lovejoy distinguished 13 logically independent meanings of Pragmatism from his reading of Peirce, James and Dewey, concluding that ‘the pragmatist is not merely three but many gentlemen at once’ (1963, p. 1). This confusion was further exacerbated by the originators themselves, who never could quite agree on what to call their way of thinking – after James (1898) coined the term ‘pragmatism’, Peirce set about

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distinguishing his ideas from James by calling his own approach ‘pragmaticism’, which he suggested would be a name ‘ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers’ (1905, p. 105). Meanwhile, Dewey preferred the terms ‘experimentalism’ or ‘instrumentalism’ to capture his notion of ideas as playful instruments for experimental action (1925 [1984]), while Mead adopted ‘social behaviourism’ to label his perspective on Pragmatism. In Lovejoy’s view, this lack of a clear and stable definition, let alone a single unifying label, was a fatal flaw that doomed Pragmatism to philosophical insignificance. It has to be said, however, that the originators of Pragmatism never set out to establish a doctrine or a school of thought. Rather, they saw their ideas as a movement or a turn in philosophy that offers a method of inquiry as an empirically grounded way for accessing fresh insights. This movement continues today, as evidenced by a steady stream of new collections and anthologies that have continued to develop Pragmatist ideas through constructive debate and application to real problems (see, e.g. Haack & Lane, 2006, and the international journal Contemporary Pragmatism). This ongoing inquiry is what makes Pragmatism a living, evolving philosophy that is still very much a work in progress. In this sense, it is no different from other relatively recent developments in philosophy, such as phenomenology or analytical philosophy, which are equally difficult to pin down to a clear and unambiguous doctrine. We suggest, therefore, that there is still much to be gained by revisiting the works of the classical Pragmatists and their legacy. This is particularly so in the field of organization studies, which is in the throes of seeking new and creative engagement with the ways that people conduct themselves in organizations and account for their lived experiences of organizational life. What we aim to do in this chapter is to elucidate those aspects of Pragmatist thinking that are particularly relevant to the field of organization studies. In undertaking this task, we must declare that our specific knowledge of Pragmatism is informed primarily by the works of Dewey and Mead. Although we will, of necessity, write from this position, we do not wish to imply any ranking or prioritization of these writers above the others. They are, in our view, all productively mutually informing, and in many ways it makes little sense to make hard distinctions between their ideas. We also acknowledge that our research interests revolve specifically around issues of organizational learning and creativity, which we will draw upon to illustrate our arguments. We will further argue that Pragmatism has great potential to inform organization studies more generally, especially in the theorizing of organizational practices.


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In the next section we begin by laying down an understanding of the context and influences that contributed to the original development of Pragmatism. Then we move on to elaborate four key themes that, we suggest, can usefully inform understandings of the lived and living aspects of organizations and their members. The practical utility of these themes is then discussed in relation to organizational learning theory, where we consider not only learning as socialization but also learning as creative practice. The chapter then moves on to explore the extent to which the influence of Pragmatism can be seen in contemporary organization theory. In particular, we focus on the groundbreaking work of Karl Weick and suggest ways in which his theories of organizing and sensemaking might be further elaborated using Pragmatist thinking.

THE CLASSICAL PRAGMATISTS IN CONTEXT Pragmatism, of course, did not simply spring out of nowhere. The seeds of its emergence can be traced to Anglo-European traditions of philosophy and literature, stretching from Heraclitus and Aristotle to Descartes, Kant and Hegel. The original Pragmatists were also deeply influenced by the scientific developments of their time, including Darwinian evolution and Einsteinian relativity. The intellectual soil that then nurtured these seeds, and which also gave rise to such literary giants as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Jefferson, was distinctively American in its theological practicality and democratic common sense. America looked forward to a new world of possibilities and backwards at the class-divided social structures of Europe, which privileged traditions and family ties ahead of actions and abilities. The country’s boundaries towards the West were open and fascinating, while at the same time, industrialization and mass production were transforming society. Philosophically, this period was characterized by a multiplicity of contradictions that set science against religion, positivism against romanticism, intuition against empiricism and the democratic ideals of Enlightenment against the traditions of aristocracy. In this context, Pragmatism served as a consensual method of doing philosophy that sought to transcend these many dualisms (Scheffler, 1974). The common ground occupied by the original Pragmatists was sceptical of absolutes and wholes, and of certainties and finalities. They challenged universalist and foundationalist assumptions, suggesting pluralism and evolutionary emergence as more fruitful explanations of our contingent and changeful world. For them, ‘pure experience’ (James, 1912 [2006], p. 19) was

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the source of practical, actionable knowledge. It is through our experimental and reflexive engagement with each other and the natural and social worlds of which we are a part that over time we affirm habits and uncover new insights to inform our ongoing conduct. By these means, we continuously construct and reconstruct meanings of both our worlds and our selves. These characteristic themes frame Pragmatism as a distinctive system of philosophy, which we denote throughout this chapter with a capital ‘P’, to distinguish it from more common parlance in which pragmatism is simply an everyday matter of getting the job done. A pragmatist in this latter sense is someone who is less concerned with meanings and explanations than with results (at whatever cost). This common ground aside, there were significant and persistent differences between Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead. Each made a unique contribution to the emerging philosophy of Pragmatism, leading to a contest of ideas that is still very much alive in the contemporary literature. Let us now briefly examine the distinctiveness of each of these four originators of Pragmatist thinking. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was educated as a chemist and worked for much of his life as a scientist, but it is for his extraordinarily innovative contributions to philosophy and logic that he is best remembered. His intellectual reach encompassed philosophical issues as diverse as scientific metaphysics, theology, cosmology and aesthetics, and he is recognized as the founder of modern semiotics, in which the interpretation of signs provides the medium for meaning-making. Although the breadth of his thinking extends beyond Pragmatism, Talisse (2007) argues that Pragmatism nevertheless lay at the heart of his philosophy. Unlike James, Dewey and Mead, however, Peirce never conceived Pragmatism as a philosophy in its own right. Rather he saw it simply as a method to clarify thinking by clearing away obstacles and diversions along the pathway of meaningful inquiry. As is evident in the Pragmatist maxim with which we opened this chapter, Peirce’s method explicitly connects meaning to the conceivably practical consequences of our actions. It is by reflecting on these consequences that we clarify our meanings. For Peirce then, clear reasoning is a continuously evolving process that is inherently creative and aesthetic (Anderson, 1987). He developed the idea of abduction as a way of distinguishing this spontaneous, creative action from deductive and inductive forms of reasoning. Whereas deduction probes the boundaries of thought within a closed system, and induction structures evidence to support the formation of opinions, the abductive process involves the imaginative creation of explanatory hypotheses, generating alternative ‘may-bes’ in response to ‘what if’ inquiries. Ultimately, he argued that all scientific reasoning is dependent upon abductive processing as this is the only


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possible source of novel ideas (Anderson, 1987). In sum, Peirce’s focus on the consequences of action, the abductive generation of alternative futures and the semiotics of meaning-making processes is his abiding contribution to Pragmatist thinking. William James (1842–1910) also began his career as a natural scientist, receiving his PhD in medicine in 1869. His dual interests in psychology and philosophy led him to holding university chairs at Harvard in both disciplines at different times in his career. His intellectual contributions include Principles of Psychology, which is still regularly cited today, and his Essays on Radical Empiricism, which set out a comprehensive critique of the rationalism that dominated philosophical thinking at the turn of the twentieth century. Throughout his work, however, the threads of Pragmatist thinking are always evident. He is often credited as the founder of Pragmatism, having introduced this term in a lecture he delivered in 1898. Although he openly acknowledged Peirce’s work of 20 years earlier as the source and inspiration for his ideas, it was James rather than Peirce who captivated philosophical imaginations. He extended Peirce’s Pragmatist maxim beyond a method of doing philosophy, to become a complete, systematic philosophy that incorporates its own metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Within this, the connection between ideas and actions as coconstituting aspects of human conduct represents a radical departure from the prevailing idealist, rationalist and empiricist trends in philosophy. James argued that the process of apprehending alternative futures to inform actions in the present necessarily engages the human mind, both cognitively and emotionally (Barbalet, 2004). In effect, James psychologized Peirce’s original conception of Pragmatism, shifting away from the notion that the meaning of a proposition lies purely in its practical consequences to the view that meanings are a matter of believing them to be true (Talisse, 2007). Peirce was vehemently opposed to this revision of the Pragmatist maxim, arguing that it is empirical experience, not belief, that clarifies meanings (1905). The third of the original Pragmatists was John Dewey (1859–1952), who was strongly influenced by Hegelian thinking in his training as a philosopher. His ideas have been influential in many fields, not least education, where he pursued questions relating to the nature of learning and knowledge, and ethical judgement in the formation of moral ideals. Like Peirce, he saw Pragmatism as a method of doing philosophy rather than a solution to philosophical dilemmas. And like James, he also extended Peirce’s Pragmatism, but in quite a different direction. Specifically, Dewey took the embryonic model of inquiry proposed by Peirce (1877) and developed this into a comprehensive theory that frames inquiry as a continuously unfolding

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social process in which meanings are constructed as people engage with each other (Dewey, 1933 [1986], 1938 [1986]). He made much of the continuity of lived experience that links the past and the future through the actions of the present. Reminiscent of Peirce’s notion of abduction, Dewey argued that critical thinking, or inquiry, is a method of generating working hypotheses or ‘warranted assertabilities’, the consequences of which may be tested through either imagination or concrete action. Whereas Peirce saw an individual’s doubt as the starting point for critical thinking, Dewey insisted that it is doubt in the situation that initiates inquiry (Talisse, 2007). In Dewey’s hands then, Pragmatism became a method to think and act in a creative and insightful manner in social situations. George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) was a close colleague and lifelong friend of John Dewey, and also another foundational contributor to the Pragmatist project. He was a social psychologist whose efforts were directed towards developing a philosophically grounded theory of sociality that incorporated the key concepts of process, emergence and evolution (Mead, 1934). Although his intellectual contributions are often conflated with those of Dewey, his unique legacy lies in the elaboration of Peirce’s ideas about the nature of mind, language and signification in understanding the construction of meanings. He argued that people simultaneously construct both their sense of self and their sense of situation in ongoing, symbolically mediated processes of social engagement. He described these processes as cycles of gestures and responses by means of which we come to understand each other’s conduct, and to better anticipate how others might respond to our own actions (1913, 1925). The self that engages in these gestural conversations is ineluctably social and comprised of two interrelated aspects: the objective ‘me’ is the embodied behavioural norms and values of the social groups to which a person claims membership, and the subjective ‘I’ is a person’s spontaneous, performative response to the social conventions and habits represented by the ‘me’. The ‘me’ permits a reflexive attitude towards the self, while the ‘I’ is the principle of action and impulse that introduces uncertainty and the potential for novelty into the processes of the self. It is in the continuous interplay between these two aspects of the social self that meanings are reinforced and constructed afresh. These dimensions complement and add empirical descriptiveness to Dewey’s notion of critical thinking. From the foundations laid down by these four originators, the Pragmatist project has continued to grow and evolve through the works of other early contributors such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jane Addams, Clarence Irving Lewis, Charles Horton Cooley and Mary Parker Follett. More recently, widespread interest was reignited by the publication of Richard Rorty’s


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(1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. What came to be seen as a neoPragmatist revival has been much criticized by followers of the classical Pragmatists as ‘an idiosyncratic, unorthodox, and, in many estimations, perverse vision of what [P]ragmatism is’ (Talisse, 2007, p. 3). Essentially Rorty abandoned experience, which the original Pragmatists had held to be the very stuff of philosophical theorizing, in favour of language and the linguistic turn, especially as it appears in the French literary tradition of Jacques Derrida. Talisse (2007) argued that Rorty’s provocation has created a veritable industry in philosophy to criticize and correct his ‘misguided’ conception of Pragmatism. Principal amongst Rorty’s critics, Hilary Putnam accused him of a cultural relativism that rejects the notion of truth, seeing it as mere self-deception. By contrast, Putnam, who is more informed by the analytical philosophy of science and technology than by literary criticism, emphasized a commitment to warrantable, justifiable forms of knowledge that emerge through the process of inquiry, which is so central to the Pragmatist agenda. This debate between Rorty and Putnam has served to reinstate Dewey as a legitimate contributor to contemporary philosophical discussion, while also reviving interest in Pragmatism more generally. Increasingly, contemporary philosophers are engaging with the important task of lifting Pragmatism beyond its very American roots by reinterpreting it in the context of more recent developments in European philosophy. So, for instance, in America, Richard Bernstein has extensively reworked Dewey’s ideas on practice, ethics and political theory, Mitchell Aboulafia has brought the thinking of Bourdieu and Habermas to bear on Mead, and Richard Posner has built on Oliver Wendell Holmes’ Pragmatist-inspired writings on jurisprudence, while in Europe Hans Joas has deepened understandings of Mead’s notion of creative action. All in all then, it seems that Pragmatism may still have much to offer in today’s world.

FOUR KEY THEMES IN PRAGMATISM In this section we introduce four key themes in Pragmatism, ‘experience’, ‘inquiry’, ‘habit’ and ‘transaction’, all of which have to do with what it means to be human, and how selves and social situations can be seen as mutually informing and co-constructing dynamics. As such, these themes transcend the conventional separation between individual and organizational levels of analysis. They are deeply interwoven and difficult to tease apart, but we must do so here in order to present them in a readable way.

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Our ultimate intention, though, is to consciously and deliberately bring them together as an integrated whole that offers a complete theoretical description of social practices in organizations. We begin with the notion of experience as both active and passive rather than as a mere accumulation of past actions. Then we move to consider inquiry, in which experimental thinking and action develop ideas and concepts that reconstitute the present situation. Next we turn to habits, which are defined in Pragmatism as dispositions towards specific actions. And finally, we discuss the notion of transaction, which is concerned with the social actions that constitute experience and habit and out of which inquiry is derived. Experience Experience is a consistent theme amongst all of the classical Pragmatists. James (1912 [2006]), for instance, rejected the notion of ‘consciousness’ as too diaphanous to have any meaningful function in the development of philosophical first principles. Rather, he argued for a radical empiricism based on the temporal processes of ‘pure experience’ in which the experiential tissue of life is continuous in time. Similarly, Dewey had already laid down the ideas for his later, more mature notion of experience in his 1896 paper, in which he critiqued the way the reflex arc concept in psychology deals with the relationship between knowledge and action (Bernstein, 1966 [1967]; Dewey, 1896 [1972]). He rejected the possibility of understanding human conduct as a mechanistic sequence of sensation, idea and response, which contrives to separate thinking from doing rather than taking both as ‘functional elements in a division of labor which together constitutes a whole’ (Dewey, 1896 [1972], p. 100). He preferred to talk about ‘organic behaviour’ as a basic unit of conduct in which knowledge and action are inseparable processes. Dewey further argued that Darwin’s theory of evolution demanded a complete reconceptualization of experience, not as a mere accretion of past impressions, but as ‘the intercourse of a living being with its physical and social environment’ (1917, p. 6). He saw experience as the experimental activities of organisms as they adapt to, and within, their environments. That is, experience comprises both the passive effects of situations upon selves and the active influences of selves on situations. Dewey elaborated his distinctive notion of experience as follows (1925 [1981]). Firstly, experience is more than just knowledge, and indeed, if experience is defined in purely epistemological terms, then there is a risk of losing sight of the transactional and social dimensions of experience as


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everyday living. Secondly, he strongly refuted the notion that experience is a purely subjective and private affair, which was a prevalent attitude in philosophical circles after Descartes. Dewey argued that all experience has an objective dimension but that ‘sharing experiences’ must be more than a metaphor because shared objective situations are always interlaced with subjective experiences. Thirdly, experience serves a projective and anticipatory function in linking present actions to future expectations; in other words, we live life forwards by projecting our past experiences into our anticipations of the future. It is this connection to the future that underlies all intelligent activity. Fourthly, emphasizing the temporality and continuity of experience, Dewey claimed that it evolves through a continuous series of situations. And finally, although experience is not primarily an epistemological term, it is not possible to think of experience without reasoning because ideas and concepts will always be part of experience. Mead’s contribution to this theme was firstly to elaborate Dewey’s second point of definition above by arguing that experience is necessarily social. From Mead’s perspective, experience can only be understood in terms of sociality: Meaning y arises in experience through the individual stimulating himself to take the attitude of the other in his reaction[s]. (1934, p. 89)

That is, we gain insight into situations by attempting to see them through the eyes of others. In the absence of such common, or shared, experiences of social situations, social order cannot develop. Like Dewey, Mead emphasized the combination of, and interplays between, both passive and active aspects of experience. Further, he argued that because selves are socially constructed, it is not possible to objectively experience the self without social engagements that offer a mirror to reflect the objective self. Experience, then, is the process of constructing and reconstructing meanings of both selves and situations. Recognizing the importance of these social dimensions, Dewey later regretted the many misunderstandings that his description of experience had engendered. In 1951 he wrote to Arthur Bentley (with whom he authored the book Knowing and the Known, 1949 [1991]) that he would have used the term ‘culture’ had he been able to rewrite his book Experience and Nature (Boydston, 1981 [1925]). Consequently, when we use the notion of experience here, we intend it in this broader sense as clearly social, cultural and historical. Mead’s second contribution to this theme was to recognize experience as a temporal flux that is located in the living present, and is informed by both the interpreted past and the projected future. It is in the now that lives are

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lived and meanings are enacted by drawing on the past to anticipate future consequences. The inherently temporal and narrative qualities of social participation cannot be adequately addressed by theories that see time as a mere succession of discrete moments, or what Bergson (1919) referred to as spatialized time. The ‘veritable mountain of fragments and writings’ (Joas, 1997, p. 167) that Mead left on this subject demonstrates the extent to which his later thinking was directed towards the problem of temporality and how it might be integrated into a comprehensive theory of sociality (see, e.g. Mead, 1932, 1938). The key insight for the purposes of our argument here is that experience is constituted through events that emerge in the present out of the continuity of social actions. As people find themselves located between the past and the future, they are obliged to construct new meanings, reconstruing their histories in order to understand the emergent present. These new understandings are projected forward into the future to anticipate and shape the outcomes of present actions, while at the same time themselves being shaped by these anticipations. Ultimately then, experience arises in the continuous interplay between past and future, which informs and gives meaning to social actions in the living present.

Inquiry Both Peirce and Dewey located a certain sort of logic, which they called ‘inquiry’, at the heart of their respective versions of Pragmatism. Peirce described inquiry in terms of a model of doubt and belief, where doubt signals some form of disruption to thinking and action, while belief is the state of resolution that is gained once doubt has been clarified (1877). It is belief that guides us into habitual actions, while doubt raises uncertainties as to the appropriateness of specific actions. Dewey elaborated the notion of inquiry as a response to a specific type of experience, that which arises as an inevitable consequence of the continuous, self-correcting process that he called ‘the experimental habit of mind’ (1910, p. 55): Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole. (1938 [1986], p. 108)

Dewey argued that inquiry in everyday life has the same structure as scientific inquiry. He saw it as a process that starts with a sense that something is wrong and that the normal course of activity cannot proceed uninterrupted. This invites a phase of deliberation that endeavours to


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understand what it is that is wrong, what is the nature of the obstacle to continuing action and what resistance needs to be overcome. Then there is a phase of analysis and diagnosis of the conditions that are creating the impediment to continuing action, followed by thought experiments in which possible solutions are abductively proposed (Dewey, 1933 [1986]). It is in this process that Mead’s subjective ‘I’ comes into play. This is the spontaneous, performative principle of action that introduces variation and novelty into experience. Without the ‘I’, the self’s habits of mind would be entirely determined and bound by collective norms of conduct. Thus, inquiry involves the probing actions of the ‘I’, which are the source of creative potential in human actions (Joas, 1996). The final phase in the inquiry process is to implement the preferred working hypothesis, the results of which then inform another cycle of inquiry (Dewey, 1938). Mead (1938, pp. 3–25) articulated a very similar model of reflexive thinking that comprises four dynamically interdependent phases: an impulse arrests ongoing action when a difference is perceived between the anticipated results of this action, and the results that actually occurred. In other words, there has been a failure to adequately anticipate the consequences of these actions. Then there is a phase of perception, where this mismatch between anticipation and actuality is explored to reveal the conditions that need to be resolved. This is followed by a phase of manipulation during which alternative hypotheses are formed and evaluated. Mead’s cycle then closes with a phase of consummation, in which modified actions are enacted. These models of Dewey and Mead are complementary, both capturing the temporal interweaving of social agency, reflection and experience, and demonstrating the creative potential for new thinking in all social actions. They challenge teleological assumptions that outcomes of actions are, or can be, predetermined; indeed, in a predesigned world there is no space for the expression of human creativity. Inquiry cannot be reduced to a response to purely abstract thoughts because it is anchored in everyday situations. It is part of life to inquire, mull things over, come to conclusions and make evaluations. We do it all the time whether we are aware of it or not. This is how we learn and become cognizant of our world and who we are in this world.

Habit All four of the original Pragmatists were concerned with habit, especially as it relates to inquiry. Peirce (1878) saw habit as a type of action that is repeated in response to recurring situations. It is when these habitual actions

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are disrupted that inquiry may be invoked. James recognized the social significance of habit, describing it as ‘the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent’ (1891 [1952], p. 79). Dewey’s notion of habit can be traced to his critique of the reflex arc (1896 [1972]), where his term ‘organic coordination’ may be read as organic habitual conduct. Later, especially in his Human Nature and Conduct, Dewey unfolds his notion of habit as: ‘‘y that kind of human activity which is influenced by prior activity and in that sense acquired; which contains within itself a certain ordering or systematization of minor elements of action; which is projective, dynamic in quality, ready for overt manifestation; and which is operative in some subdued subordinate form even when not obviously dominating activity. (1922 [1988], p. 31)

Habit may be understood then, as ‘a readiness to act overtly in a specific fashion whenever opportunity is presented y [Thus,] the essence of habit is an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response (y)’ (Dewey, 1922 [1988], p. 32). In other words, habits are acquired dispositions to respond in certain ways in certain circumstances; they allow us to anticipate our own and other persons’ conduct in a given situation, as well as how a situation may unfold. In Mead’s terms, habits are the dispositions that come to be embodied in that aspect of the self he called the objective ‘me’. As such, habits are expressions of social norms of conduct, but at the same time, they are dynamically emergent, admitting the possibilities of mutability and change over time. This position contrasts significantly with more conventional views of habits as rigid and fixed. Mead’s ‘significant symbols’ are also relevant in the context of habits. He defined significant symbols as actions that call out the same response in the gesturer and the responder: they are ‘y nothing but the stimulus whose response is given in advance’ (1934, p. 181). Habits of behaviour make it easier for others to anticipate our actions in given situations, and as such, they contribute to the construction of sociality. It is sociality that provides the insight necessary to be able to anticipate someone else’s responses to our own actions, and thereby to regulate our own conduct in terms of likely outcomes. Significant symbols, then, allow us to see our actions as others might, and to consciously shape the roles that we adopt in different social contexts. In Mead’s view, all human sociality is based on significant symbols and symbolic behaviours such as habits. Dewey further proposed that customs are habits expressed more or less uniformly within any social group in which members are engaged with the same environmental situations. The socialization of new members into a


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group requires these newcomers to incorporate the group’s customs and established modes of transaction into their own habits of action. It is these customs that guide us in terms of acceptable codes of social behaviour including ethical distinctions between virtue and vice, and aesthetic considerations in social activities. In effect, customs are symbolic forms of action by means of which we can communicate cultural expectations of conduct within social groups. Transaction The notion of the social self as a being that is continuously in the making, in effect a becoming, is central to Pragmatism. Both Dewey (1949 [1991]) and Mead (1934) wrote extensively about the intersubjective processes of social engagement by means of which becoming emerges. This is well illustrated by Mead’s discussion of gestural conversations wherein one person’s gesture calls out a response in another person, which in turn calls out a further response, and so on in an ongoing cycle of communication. It is through these communicative processes that we become socialized to any given group of people, we form mutual expectations of conduct, and at the same time we come to understand both self and situation. The social meaning of any given gesture is reflected in the response that it engenders, and as the cycle of gesture and response proceeds the meanings that we construe are either reinforced, challenged or completely disrupted. In other words, our social interactions may be seen as both expressions of habitual conduct and creative, improvisational processes of making new meanings. In his later writing, Dewey sought to make finer distinctions in this process by differentiating between interactions (actions between entities) and transactions (actions across entities) (Dewey & Bentley, 1949 [1991], pp. 112–115). Bernstein explained this distinction as follows: Transaction is a refinement of interaction. In a transaction, the components themselves are subject to change. Their character affects and is affected by the transaction. Properly speaking, they are not independent: they are phases in a unified transaction. Thus transaction is a more rigorous formulation of the category of the organic which is embedded in Dewey’s earliest philosophic writings. Transaction is a generic trait of existence. (1960, p. xl)

When the relation between self and situation is understood in terms of interaction, this implies physically and mentally separated subjects who interact on the basis of specific regularities or principles by means of which they can influence each other. Alternatively, when selves and situations are

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related to each other on the basis of a trans-actional understanding, they may be seen as mutually constituting aspects of an integrated unity. Dewey’s purpose in making this distinction was to separate this Pragmatist notion from the more common usage of ‘interactionism’ in the literature. Returning to Mead’s work, it is now clear that when he used the term ‘interaction’, he was in fact referring to what Dewey later termed a ‘transaction’. The interactants in a gesture/response cycle both shape and are shaped by their interaction. Rather than constructing meanings between themselves, they actually are the emergent meanings. Mead further argued that in any system of inquiry, transactions are not limited to the intersubjective domain. For instance, transactions between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ function intrapersonally to construct the social self, and once significant symbols arise in a social situation, they facilitate and mediate an extrapersonal level of transactional engagement and meaning-making. Thus, the notion of transaction challenges the more conventional view of social systems operating at various, more or less discrete levels, by promoting instead an understanding of social practices as the continuously emergent weaving together of social selves and social situations. In the next section, we demonstrate how these four key themes in Pragmatism may be used in developing a transactional approach to organizational learning. Then, in the following section, we explore more broadly how Pragmatism might enrich processual understandings of organizations, such as that offered by sensemaking theory.

PRAGMATISM IN ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING The literature on organizational learning has for many years contained an unfinished debate on whether organizations are able to learn, or whether individuals must learn before their knowledge is somehow transferred to the organization (Cook & Yanow, 1993). In the early literature, organizational learning was defined as individuals’ acquisition of information and knowledge, and later as analytical and communicative skills (Argyris & Scho¨n, 1996; March & Simon, 1958). Scholarly reaction to this understanding has been to take learning out of the purely cognitive domain of individuals’ minds, locating it instead in the processes of participation in organizational communities of practice (Elkjaer, 2003; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Whereas the former is focused upon mental representations, the latter is concerned with the maintenance of organizational practices, in which learning is associated with socialization and the institutionalization of knowledge (Gherardi, 2000).


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From this perspective, however, it is difficult to understand how organizational learning can be creative, innovative and generative of new knowledge and action. An understanding of learning as participation in communities of practice tends, in other words, to overlook the conservativism, protectionism and the tendency to recycle knowledge in organizations, rather than critically challenging and extending it (Fenwick, 2001). A Pragmatist definition of learning (and organizational learning) encompasses all four of the themes outlined above (experience, inquiry, habit and transaction) to frame learning as a social practice that is both creative and habitual, and in which knowledge is necessarily open-ended and fallible. Learning, then, is the acquisition of more varied and complex predispositions to act, through which the world becomes more differentiated and ‘infused with meaning’ (Biesta & Burbules, 2003, p. 37). In other words, Pragmatism has potential to offer new insights into some of the problems in the current literature on organizational learning by conceptualizing learning as: transactional, encompassing all levels of the learning system, rather than one (individual) and then another (organizational); derived from inquiry in which knowledge and action are continuous and co-constituting rather than knowledge/participation followed by action/ practice; not only about socialization (habit) but also about creative practice, where the two are intertwined in real-time experience. To illustrate the benefits of Pragmatism in understanding organizational learning, we now examine a classical piece within the international organizational learning literature, namely the works of Argyris and Scho¨n, who themselves claim to have Pragmatist roots (Argyris & Scho¨n, 1996; Elkjaer & Wahlgren, 2006). Their central concern with ‘actionable knowledge’ is very much in line with Pragmatism (Argyris, 2003). In our view, however, they depart from Pragmatism by retaining a fundamental dualism between knowledge and action, which, in turn, generates an avalanche of further dualisms. For instance, Argyris and Scho¨n see organizational learning as first and foremost a task of individuals because: Organizational learning occurs when individuals within an organization experience a problematic situation and inquire into it on the organization’s behalf. (1996)

When individuals make an inquiry, it can lead them to modify their understanding of the organization. If this individual learning is to turn

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into organizational learning, it must become part of how other individuals understand the organization in terms of organizational routines and stories. Argyris and Scho¨n resolve the problem of transfer between individual and organizational levels by defining the organization as a political entity in which individuals act and learn on behalf of the organization. In our Pragmatist understanding, the relationship between individual and organization is not guided by individuals’ choices but by the transactional interplay between the two. The meanings attached to individuals and organizations are, therefore, highly interdependent and continuously evolving. This transactional approach draws together subjects (individuals), objects (knowledge) and situations into a mutually constituting, dynamic whole. To see organizational learning as fundamentally transactional is to focus on the interplay between selves and situations rather than treating them as discrete levels in the social system. If these levels are treated separately, then we are left with the intractable problem of having to glue them together again. We propose that learning does not begin with either individuals or organizations, but with uncertainties about the situations in which people find themselves. Responses to these uncertainties are guided by habit and the playful experimentation of social selves exploring new ways of defining and solving uncertain situations. The second major dualism in the Argyris and Scho¨n account of organizational learning is the separation of knowledge and action, whereas Pragmatism sees both as integral aspects of inquiry. Argyris and Scho¨n do use the term inquiry but in a way that holds knowledge and action apart rather than integrating the two together. This interpretation of inquiry is underpinned by their understanding of predispositions to act (i.e. habits) as based upon individuals’ ‘theories of action’, which are mental models or representations of actions. In other words, they see selves as theories of action (knowledge) that then guide the actual actions taken. Argyris and Scho¨n further differentiate between theories of action as ‘espoused’ or ‘theories-in-use’, which are, respectively, those theories of action that can be expressed in words and those that can only be inferred from observation of individuals’ actions. Theories-in-use may remain tacit because they are either indescribable (the individuals who enact them are unable, rather than unwilling, to verbally describe the knowledge embedded in their everyday actions) or undiscussable (any attempt to reveal their incongruity with the espoused theory of the organization would be perceived as threatening or embarrassing and, as such, best kept in the quiet). Again, we think that this focus upon mental models fails to show how knowledge (‘the mental’) is always linked to action, and that knowledge


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encompasses action not as a representation but as a disposition towards certain ways to act. If knowledge is conceived in these representational terms, it becomes difficult to see where creativity comes from (i.e. where is the experimental and instrumental playfulness with different solutions to defined problems?). This cognitivist approach implies that it is within humans rather than between humans (and materialities) that problems are solved and new knowledge is generated. This is very different from the Pragmatist approach that situates learning and knowledge production in transactions between selves and situations rather than within selves and outside situations. In a Pragmatist take on organizational learning, the predispositions to act are habits, which are much more than mere mental models. The cultural and historical dimensions of habit suggest that organizational learning is a situated social practice rather than merely a social technology to be implemented. The notion of habit reminds us of the gradual transition between organizational routines and organizational change; it reminds us that organizational learning may be both reproductive, by producing more of the same or similar experience, and innovative, by producing novel experience. It is precisely in maintaining habit as disposition to act in open-ended and creative ways that experience and inquiry are linked in Pragmatism. Inquiry is ‘how we think’; it is the method through which learning takes place and reasoning is nurtured by guidance (e.g. teaching). Inquiry in a Pragmatist sense cuts across description and normative guidelines because it involves both emotion and judgement. It is initiated by an uneasy situation, an unsettled or disturbed situation (experienced as emotion) that requires resolution (involving judgement), and which, in turn, produces learning. The notion of inquiry also alerts us to the open-endedness of experimental, creative and innovative reasoning. Now turning to the third issue that we highlighted above, the intertwining of socialization and creativity, Pragmatism alerts us to learning (and creation of knowledge) as experimental and instrumental. In other words, it invites us to see ideas and concepts as tools to play with and to use in reasoning. This helps us see how expansion and transformation of organizational routines can happen through inquiry and anticipatory reasoning. To learn in a Pragmatist sense is to infuse uncertain situations with meaning, which involves firstly defining the situation as a problem. This means that learning is a process of constructing selves and situations, resulting in actionable knowledge. In Pragmatism, this creation of meaning can never be predicted by any a priori assignment of power because it is always relative to a situation.

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Organizational learning through inquiry is, in other words, opening learning to the playfulness of how concepts and ideas are intertwined with actions not only in a reflective and backward-looking sense but also in a forward-looking way. Routines and habits (i.e. predispositions to act in certain ways) will always prevail in organizations but Pragmatism stresses how experimental and instrumental ways of using ideas and concepts in a forward-looking, abductive way helps us to see how creativity and innovation are also inherent in organizational learning. Understanding experience as the lived and living processes of selves engaging with the natural and social situations changes the focus from patterns of access and participation in the organizational communities of practice to ways in which participation unfolds (Gherardi, Nicolini, & Odella, 1998). Possible questions to ask then are: Do these ways of participation allow for inquiry into interruptions and challenges of the status quo? Is it possible to maintain an open-ended understanding of solutions to organizational problems? How is it possible to create, recreate and even transform experience? In sum, our Pragmatist version of organizational learning starts from an understanding of organizations as lived and living organisms, which consist of certain habits (i.e. habitual dispositions to act). These are learned through experience by inquiring transactionally into uncertain situations. The trigger for inquiry is a felt uncertainty or tension, which produces experience that sometimes can turn into knowledge (‘warranted assertabilities’) in the sense that it can be communicated through language (signs and symbols), and thus shared. Creativity lies in the abductive orientation towards the future, which is explored by the ‘I’ as it plays with and puts together new ways of engaging with social situations. Argyris and Scho¨n’s view of organizational learning starts from the assumption that action is guided by theories of action, where this appears to be their interpretation of the Pragmatist notions of habit, and inquiry. They do not speak of transaction but ‘interaction’ between individuals and organizations, and mental models appear to have replaced experience. To us this means that it is not possible to understand organizational learning across levels and across the knowledge–action divide, but most importantly it prevents us from understanding socialization and creativity as inherent in all transactions and not to be tied into systems of different loops of thinking. By contrast, a Pragmatist take on organizational learning alerts us to socialization and learning as relational practices; it alerts us to the connection between knowledge and action and to learning as transactional (involving both selves and situations). Pragmatism sees organizational learning as a temporal continuity, having a certain rhythm that is not only


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process or ‘flow’ but also rest and repose. The anticipatory outlook on knowledge and action makes organizational learning creative and nonintentional, and it allows us to transcend the problems associated with the traditional separation of levels of analysis. When initiating organizational learning, we look for disjunctions, relocations and tensions because it is here that we find the seeds of creativity and innovation embedded in the organizational habitual knowledge and actions. This view of organizational learning encompasses emotion, ethics and aesthetics alongside ideas and concepts as mutually informing aspects of experience.

PRAGMATISM, PRACTICE AND SENSEMAKING We now turn to consider what Pragmatism has to offer the wider field of organization theory. Philosophically speaking, there is a fundamental cleavage in the contemporary scholarship of this field that separates entitative and processual orientations towards scholarship and inquiry. This distinction is thoroughly articulated, for instance, by Tsoukas and Chia (2002), who contrasted two distinct ontologies: ‘being’, which locates reality in substances, things and events, and ‘becoming’, which approaches reality through flux, flow and continuity. The limitations of the entitative, or ‘being’, perspective in organization studies were recognized by Weick (1979, p. 44) when he exhorted us to ‘stamp out nouns’. He argued that the language we use shapes the ways in which we think about, and engage with, the organizational world. ‘If students of organization become stingy in their use of nouns, generous in their use of verbs, and extravagant in their use of gerunds, then more attention would be paid to process and we’d learn more about how to see it and manage it’ (Weick, 1979, p. 44). In response to this call to action, there has been a veritable explosion of ‘-ing’ words in the organizational literature, such as organiz-ing, learn-ing, know-ing, do-ing and strategiz-ing. But because gerunds can function as both nouns and verbs, this semantic device has not produced as radical a shift in thinking as perhaps Weick might have hoped. Indeed, this same literature continues to be relatively uncritically peppered with dualistic distinctions between, for instance, individual and collective levels of analysis, or contrasting states of stability and change, revealing the resilience of entitative thinking in organization studies. The adoption of a processual, ‘becoming’ ontology really does require a radical rearrangement of the ways in which we talk about the dynamics of our social world, but in shifting to this alternative position, much of what an entitative view can offer is lost. A more complex approach to organization

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would require us to transcend this dualistic separation between entitative and processual ontologies. Challenging such dualisms was very much part of the Pragmatist agenda. Dewey in particular railed against the artificial separation of body and mind, and knowledge and action, arguing that these dualisms cut across dynamic processes, disrupting their continuity. Both Mead (1932) and Whitehead (see Bakken & Hernes, 2006) argued that a more comprehensive view of society (and therefore organization) must draw upon both verbs and nouns, but without privileging either. This implies a different philosophical paradigm in which the interplay between verbs and nouns produces an ontology of practice (Simpson, 2009) that is located in the lived experience of organization and the ways in which meanings interact with people’s conduct. Working in an alternative paradigm like this implies a shift not only in ontology but also in other philosophical dimensions such as epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. We propose that Pragmatism offers just such a well-elaborated system of philosophy that allows us to understand organization as an ever-changing movement of meanings and actions punctuated by events that signify the socially constructed understandings arising out of the otherwise undifferentiated flux of experience. To illustrate this potential, we now focus specifically on the organizational theorizing of Karl Weick, who is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary organization studies (Sutcliffe, Brown, & Putnam, 2006). He is best known for his theories of organizing and sensemaking, and is much cited for his provocative, and often counterintuitive, turns of phrase that oblige us to pause, inquire and make new sense from his words. Throughout his very considerable oeuvre, the influence of William James is abundantly evident. Weick’s work is threaded through with James’ imagery of the world as ‘a buzzing, pulsating, formless mass of signals, out of which people try to make sense, into which they attempt to introduce order, and from which they construct against a background that remains undifferentiated’ (Czarniawska, 1998, p. 1). Equally, Weick regularly cites Mead, albeit as seen through the eyes of the symbolic interactionists and the Chicago School more generally (e.g. Blumer, 1969; Goffman, 1969; Strauss, 1956). However, he only rarely cites Dewey, and even less frequently Peirce. It would seem likely then, there may be more that Pragmatism could offer to Weick’s already fertile theorizing. In particular, we consider there are at least three areas for potential development: continuity as the interplay of past and future in the present; the transactional nature of social agency; reflexivity as an explicit element in the theorizing of social practices.


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In many ways, Pragmatism and Weick’s theories are very synergistic, but he deviated from Pragmatism in his basic recipe for sensemaking, which he expressed in his signature question: ‘How can I know what I think until I see what I say?’ (1979, p. 133). That is, we come to know the meaning of our actions only after the event. Meaning is, therefore, constructed retrospectively, or as Weick said ‘[m]uch organizational sensemaking consists of writing histories’ (1979, p. 200). Equally, however, ‘[t]he person is able to understand an event only after imputing both a history and prospects to the puzzling enacted display’ (Weick, 1979, p. 200). In this, Weick hints at the importance of future prospects as part of sensemaking, but although he does discuss ‘future perfect thinking’ (1979, pp. 197–200), this future orientation remains under-theorized and is not integrated into his theories of organizing and sensemaking (see, e.g. Gioia & Mehra, 1996; Patriotta, 2003). By contrast, the Pragmatist maxim with which we opened this chapter (Peirce, 1878) points directly to anticipated future consequences of actions as the source of meaning in the present moment. These future anticipations may be understood in terms of Peirce’s notion of abduction (Anderson, 1987), in which hypothetical actions are projected forward into the future. Past histories are used as resources in constructing these hypotheses, but it is their imagined consequences that inform the actual actions taken in the present moment. Sensemaking, then, may be seen more fully as a continuous process of reconstruing meanings that are drawn simultaneously from the past and the future. It is this interplay between past and future that gives temporal continuity to actions in the living present (Mead, 1932). The abductive possibility of anticipating different and alternative futures eases the bonds of our histories and opens up novel opportunities for further action. Without this future orientation, sensemaking is necessarily constrained to a convergent, retrospective process that perpetually reproduces history. Pragmatists would argue that this denies the inherent creativity of life and living, and without this, our understandings of people’s conduct in organizations will be impoverished. The second area where we think Pragmatism might usefully enhance Weick’s theorizing is by embracing more fully the implications of a transactional, rather than merely interactional, view of social engagement (Dewey & Bentley, 1949 [1991]). Weick (1979, chap. 4) initially defined interacts and double interacts in terms that are consistent with Mead’s (1934) notion of the ‘conversation of gestures’. However, he went on to argue that double interacts are constituted as ‘stable subassemblies’ of interlocked behaviours involving two or more individuals, where these subassemblies are the building blocks of organizational structures. This formulation

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tends to reduce interlocking behaviours to a somewhat mechanistic interpersonal exchange that focuses rather too narrowly on the cognitive and representational aspects of organizing and sensemaking, while denying the creative potential of our social engagements. By contrast, the Pragmatist approach seeks to transcend the entitative distinctions that set cognition and structure apart from bodily sensation and agency, respectively. It emphasizes the social nature of agency whereby the meanings of both selves and situations are co-constructing and immanent within each other. By focusing on actions rather than actors, the transactional perspective offers a more holistic view that is not restricted to any specific level of analysis. Indeed, this capacity to transcend levels of analysis is a defining quality of the Pragmatist notion of transaction, which is also inclusive of emotional and aesthetic actions as well as the influencing dynamics of power in social situations. We suggest that many current topics in organization studies, such as identity work, emotion work, idea work and strategy work, might usefully be elaborated in these transactional terms. Finally we turn to consider reflexivity in organizing and sensemaking. Weick (2006, p. 1731) recently declared ‘Order, interruption, recovery. That is sensemaking in a nutshell’. While this summary statement highlights the key events of sensemaking, it leaves unspoken the human experience of this process. By comparison, Dewey’s more elaborated process of inquiry (1933 [1986]) locates critical reflexivity and human transactions at its centre as it proceeds from habitual action to a disturbance or interruption, and then on to an analysis of the causes of the disruption, the abductive generation of options for further action and finally the selection and testing of a preferred course of action to overcome the immediate causes of the interruption. Reflexivity arises in transactions because it is here that sociality is constructed as we attempt to see the world through the eyes of others. Mead (1925) argued that transactions are the site where the self can appear to itself as an object of reflection and inquiry. Self-awareness is not generated in circumstances where habitual actions continue uninterrupted; rather, it is when unanticipated eventualities demand new meanings that a reflexive response is called out. Every gesture made during this transactional process is made in anticipation of some specific response or outcome, and every response invites reflection on the extent to which the anticipated outcome was realized. This incremental, experimental process of constructing new meanings out of unexpected events is thus dependent upon the human capacity to reflect not only on past events but also on the repertoire of alternative futures that can be creatively imagined. So, for instance, the indigenous Maori people of New Zealand talk about ‘walking backwards into the future’, which means


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that as their lives unfold forwards, they are ever conscious of the function of history not only in shaping their present actions but also in guiding them into the future. This relentless dynamic of anticipation and action is what provides continuity in practice, and it is reflexivity that admits this temporal experiencing of time and the possibilities of change as emergent and evolutionary. In this way, then, Pragmatism demystifies reflexivity, making it a normal and natural part of all social practices. The three themes that have focused our discussion here were prompted by our reading of Weick’s theories of organizing and sensemaking. We do not intend to suggest that our analysis of these theories is exhaustive; it is merely illustrative of the potential for Pragmatism to bring new and subtly nuanced insights into the domain of organization studies. Nor do we intend to suggest that Weick’s ideas are the only ones that might benefit from some Pragmatist insight. We propose that Pragmatism has considerable potential to contribute to better understandings of the social dynamics of organizational practices more generally. In this, we frame Pragmatist thinking as a complete system of philosophy that transcends the common distinctions between entitative and processual ontologies by focusing on practice as the intricate interweaving of social agency and temporality. In this way, the meanings of events and objects in the present moment are inseparable from the continuity of experience, where this experience arises in social transactions.

CONCLUSION Organization theory today is increasingly faced with seemingly intractable problems as scholars struggle to find adequate ways of engaging with the multi-site, multi-cultural complexities of globalized business, and the at best, only partially predictable social dynamics of organizational practices. In this chapter, we have proposed Pragmatism as a way forward that offers a potentially radical alternative to the currently dominant paradigms of organizational scholarship. Entitative and processual philosophies each provide valuable insights into the nature of organization, but equally, each has its own limitations. The Pragmatist alternative seeks to transcend this entitative/processual dualism by understanding organizational practice as the continuous and emergent weaving together of social selves and social situations. Its focus is very much upon the social nature of real-time actions that constitute living and lived experience. This perspective, then, offers a way of approaching ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions that remain difficult to address by more conventional means.

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The distinctiveness of Pragmatism can be traced back to the originating maxim first articulated by Charles Sanders Peirce in 1878. In this, he suggested that the meanings we ascribe to events and actions in the present moment can be understood entirely in terms of the future consequences that we anticipate arising from these events and actions. This future orientation sets Pragmatism apart from philosophies that account for meanings solely in terms of retrospective interpretations of past experiences. Pragmatism recognizes retrospection to the extent that it informs what we imagine will happen next, but it is this future anticipation that actually gives meaning to our actions in the present. In this way, Pragmatism acknowledges the constitution of both agency and structure in social practices, but without privileging either. At the same time, it theorizes the temporal continuity of present moments as both anchored in the past and thrusting into the future. This approach to temporality as a continuously emergent social process of meaning-making invites new ways of engaging with the dynamics of organization. In addition to these broad defining themes, we have identified four theoretical concepts that are potentially very useful to organizational scholars. These four concepts, ‘experience’, ‘inquiry’, ‘habit’ and ‘transaction’, are mutually informing and interdependent aspects of all social practices. Unlike the everyday notion of experience as the knowledge gained from doings, the Pragmatist use of this term relates very specifically to the dynamic relationship between knowledge (or meaning) and action in the conduct of the living present. Inquiry is the social process of critically reflecting upon and questioning the taken-for-granted order, which is every bit as relevant in day-to-day conduct as it is in more specialized forms of knowledge production, such as scientific work. Habit is seen as the predisposition to act in certain ways; inquiry is stimulated when these habitual ways of acting prove inadequate for any given situation. Habits are what makes it possible to live within society, but importantly, the Pragmatists did not see habits as rigidly fixed. Indeed, it is the mutability of habits that admits the possibilities of creative change in social practices. And finally, transactions are the site where the interplay between experience, inquiry and habit is continuously explored and regenerated across all levels of the social system. We have demonstrated the use of these four Pragmatist concepts in the context of organizational learning, suggesting that this field is an obvious target for some fresh theoretical thinking. In particular, we chose to take a closer look at the work of Argyris and Scho¨n because they claimed Pragmatism as the point of departure for their theory of organizational


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learning. We suggest, however, that they have not fully embraced the potential of Pragmatism as their work continues to reflect dualistic distinctions between knowledge and action, and individuals and organization. These constraints limit the extent to which their theory can accommodate the creative as well as the socializing aspects of learning. We then extended our argument to show that Pragmatism offers tools that are much needed in contemporary organization theory. Using Weick’s theories of organizing and sensemaking to illustrate our argument, we proposed that the Pragmatist formulations of continuity, transactional engagement and reflexivity offer useful ways of further developing organizational scholarship. Ultimately though, organization and management studies is an intensely practical domain where practical problems demand practical solutions. To paraphrase Kurt Lewin, we suggest that there is nothing so practical as a good philosophy that provides the intellectual tools to challenge assumptions and to understand issues in new and deeper ways. From its inception, Pragmatism has always been a very practical philosophy, although we acknowledge that its diversity of ideas has created difficulties for scholars who might wish to come to grips with it. Nevertheless, a slow trickle of papers informed by Pragmatist thinking is beginning to emerge in the organizational literature (e.g. Cohen, 2007; Locke, Golden-Biddle, & Feldman, 2008; Weick, 2008), which we see as a positive sign for future developments. What is needed now is a concerted effort to develop methodologies that are true to the principles of Pragmatism, and which can better inform empirical inquiries into the practical problems of organization as a dynamic and emergent process of meaning-making. The experimental, instrumental and anticipatory aspects of Pragmatism as a lived and living philosophy offer a rich vein of inspirational themes, which in our view will reward further exploration and elaboration in the field of organization and management studies.

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Simpson, B. (2009). Pragmatism, Mead, and the practice turn. Organization Studies, 30(12), 1329–1347. Strauss, A. M. (Ed.) (1956). The social psychology of George Herbert Mead: Selections from his works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sutcliffe, K. M., Brown, A. D., & Putnam, L. L. (2006). Making sense of organizing: In honor of Karl Weick. Organization Studies, 27(11), 1573–1578. Talisse, R. B. (2007). A pragmatist philosophy of democracy. New York: Routledge. Thayer, H. S. (Ed.) (1982). Pragmatism: The classical writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Tsoukas, H., & Chia, R. (2002). On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13(5), 567–582. Weick, C. W. (2008). Issues of consequence: Lessons for educating tomorrow’s business leaders from philosopher William James. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 7(1), 88–98. Weick, K. E. (1979). The social psychology of organizing. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. Weick, K. E. (2006). Faith, evidence, and action: Better guesses in an unknowable world. Organization Studies, 27(11), 1723–1736.

Bente Elkjaer (BA, MA and PhD) holds a chair in organizational and workplace learning at the School of Education, Aarhus University, Department of Learning, which she is also the current head of. She has within her research taken a special interest in developing a theoretical perspective on organizational learning inspired by American Pragmatism (particularly the works by John Dewey), which she has called the ‘third way’. Further, Bente Elkjaer was for five years (2005–2009) the editor-inchief of Management Learning, and she is also the head of the Doctoral School of Organizational Learning (DOCSOL) at the university. Barbara Simpson (BSc, MSc (Hons), PhD (Auckland)) is a senior lecturer in organization studies in the University of Strathclyde Business School, Department of Management. Her research, supervision and teaching interests revolve around the topics of organizational change, innovation and creativity, which she approaches from a constructivist orientation that seeks to uncover the dynamic nature of organizational practices. In this context, she has drawn particular inspiration from the classical Pragmatist philosophers, especially George Herbert Mead. Her work is published in Organization Studies and Organization.

MACINTYRE, NEO-ARISTOTELIANISM AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Ron Beadle and Geoff Moore ABSTRACT In this chapter, we set out to demonstrate how organizational theory and analysis can benefit from the work of the distinguished philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. In the first part of the chapter we show how MacIntyre’s conception of how rival traditions may move towards reconciliation has the potential to resolve the relativist conclusions that bedevil organization theory. In the second part, we show how MacIntyre’s ‘goods–virtues– practices–institutions’ general theory provides a framework for reconciling the fields of organization theory and organizational ethics. In the third part, we provide a worked example of these two strands to demonstrate the implications of MacIntyre’s philosophy for organizational analysis. We conclude with a research agenda for a distinctively MacIntyrean organization theory. Keywords: MacIntyre; neo-Aristotelianism; organization theory; organization analysis; hermeneutics; Bristol Royal Infirmary.


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INTRODUCTION The inclusion of a work on Alasdair MacIntyre in this volume is appropriate not least because MacIntyre has always taken organizations seriously as objects of philosophical attention. How then can organizational analysis benefit from his work? To answer this question we make two distinct but mutually supporting cases. First that MacIntyre shows how organization theory need not draw relativist conclusions from hermeneutic premises and second that MacIntyre’s ‘goods–virtues–practices–institutions’ framework overcomes the division between organization theory and organizational ethics. We proceed in three parts. Firstly, we will contextualize MacIntyre’s project in relation to a philosophical tradition whose impact upon organization theory is indubitable – hermeneutics. This case will involve a consideration of MacIntyre’s use and transformation of hermeneutics through his conception of tradition. Secondly, we will review MacIntyre’s ‘general theory’ of goods, virtues, practices and institutions. This part will include a brief comparison with ‘old’ institutional theory (Selznick, 1996; Stinchcombe, 1997) and introduce the concept of ‘reasons for action’. In the third part, we will draw together these strands to demonstrate the difference between MacIntyrean organization analysis and an alternative hermeneutical/institutional approach through a worked example – Karl Weick and Karen Sutcliffe’s analysis of the Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI) as a culture of entrapment (2003). A conclusion will present a case for a research agenda for MacIntyrean empirics in organization studies.

PART ONE: PRACTICES – HERMENEUTIC AND MACINTYREAN MacIntyre in Context One way of locating Alasdair MacIntyre’s philosophical project is in relation to the recovery of Aristotelian practical philosophy in the neoAristotelianism of the twentieth century. Whilst the incautious reader may see MacIntyre only in terms of his proximity to this movement, more can be learned if we also attend to his disputes with it. From Heidigger onwards neo-Aristotelian practical philosophy has influenced philosophical genres from literary criticism to political philosophy. It is a tradition that seeks to rescue Aristotelian texts both from what it sees as their errors, particularly their metaphysical theoria and from the later historicism through which

MacIntyre, Neo-Aristotelianism and Organization Theory

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Aristotle is seen through the lens of modern philosophical figures or concepts (Knight, 2007, p. 89). In place of a universalizing theoria of being is juxtaposed a philosophy of praxis in which it is the living activity of human beings that both creates and delimits human understanding. From such a premise Heidegger renders Aristotle as the philosopher of praxis and nothing else – for there is nothing else. Figures including Strauss, Arendt and Gadamer extend this reduction of the Aristotelian tradition to variants of practical philosophy whilst the unhappy relation of such projects to anything that can be reasonably labelled Aristotelian is a case made by Riedel’s teleology in one way, and Ritter’s institutionalism in another (Knight, 2007, pp. 92–93). According to Knight such neo-Aristotelianism is inherently conservative whether in its hermeneutic or more explicitly political form, in three ways. Firstly its exclusion of theoria bounds all practical judgments in the ethos of the present – thus removing the basis for radical critique or action; secondly its institutionalism provides philosophical grounds for a permanent elite and thirdly its celebration of praxis involves a denigration of production (ibid., pp. 100–101). By contrast MacIntyre recovers both Aristotle’s practical and theoretical philosophy through his notion of tradition, overcomes the division between praxis and production through his distinctive conception of practice and provides a critique of institutions qua institutions in his general theory of ‘goods, virtues, practices and institutions’. MacIntyre thus rejects all three neo-Aristotelian positions whilst assimilating many of the insights of neoAristotelian hermeneutics. The prudence of introducing the implications of Alasdair MacIntyre’s work through its relationship to hermeneutics has already been argued (Smith, 1999, p. 327) but if our summary of Knight’s argument is accurate then this also accounts for its relationship with neo-Aristotelianism. This project is aided by the prodigious quantities of MacIntyre’s work about and in conversation with hermeneutics. Having been producing philosophical material for over 55 years, MacIntyre has, since the 1981 publication of After Virtue,1 developed an Aristotelian and subsequently Thomistic account of moral philosophy. His uniqueness in this endeavour is in his association of the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions with Marxism. This combination, described by Knight as ‘Revolutionary Aristotelianism’ (Knight, 2007) might have little chance of success given that the only thing that Marxists and Thomists can agree about is their mutual incompatibility. And yet MacIntyre remains one of the great figures of twentieth century moral philosophy, the subject of a veritable mini-industry of publications (Murphy, 2003; D’Andrea, 2007; Knight, 2007; Blackledge & Davidson,

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2008), with an international academic society devoted to pursuing his project2 and use of his work made across the social sciences. The Self-Images of the Age, The Self-Images of Organization Theory In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 thriller ‘Frenzy’ the psychopathic leading character visits Duckworth’s London Bookshop. The camera pauses over the window display of multitudinous copies of Against the Self Images of the Age, a collection of 1960s essays by Alasdair MacIntyre (1971). Legend has it that this shot was deliberate. MacIntyre’s title for the collection reflects his ongoing concern with the intimacy of the relationship between agents’ behaviour, self-understandings and the social structures they inhabit. In line with the hermeneutic tradition, he holds that it is an error, but an important error, to believe that the idioms and theoretical insights upon which our selfimages depend, constitute a neutral representation of some external reality:3 there is no way for the historian or social scientist to locate himself outside some tradition of interpretation, the very language he speaks and writes is so shaped by tradition that he cannot evade it’. (MacIntyre, 1980, p. 177)

The narratives through which agents understand their lives are profoundly affected by the extent of their participation in and commitments to particular tradition-informed social practices, those which enable agents to answer questions such as ‘What are you doing?’ and ‘Why are you doing that?’ Intelligible answers to such questions are available only to those who share narrative traditions. MacIntyre’s definition is disarmingly simple: A living tradition y is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition. Within a tradition the pursuit of goods extends through generations, sometimes through many generations. Hence the individual’s search for his or her good is generally and characteristically conducted within a context defined by those traditions of which the individual’s life is a part, and this is true both of those goods which are internal to practices and of the goods of a single life. (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 222)

How does this differ from the hermeneutic understanding of our boundedness by historically situated interpretations? The hermeneutic tradition maintains that Understanding can never really be grounded because it is itself the ground, the floor on which we are always already standing. (Grondin, 2003, p. 284)

For hermeneutics our inability to move beyond language dissolves the distinction between truth and rational justification. Hence for Gadamer we must ‘get away from objectivist naı¨ vete´ and destroy the illusion of a truth


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that is separate from the standpoint of the one doing the understanding’ (2001, p. 46) and for Habermas the limits of any radical intent involve the creation of spaces for ideal speech acts involving the recognition that we cannot move beyond speech to any notion of truth.4 In Organization Theory, leading authorities such as Burrell and Morgan (1979), Smircich (1983), Martin (1992) and many others offer us collections of paradigms distinguished by ontological and epistemological assumptions between the merits of which we may rationally offer no argument. The differences between paradigms are so fundamental as to entail mutual exclusivity (Burrell & Morgan, 1979, p. 25) and thus the argument entails relativism. Even Tsoukas and Cummings’ (1997) sympathetic call for neoAristotelianism in organization studies shares this perspectivist–relativist position. Neo-Aristotelianism merely provides a ‘helpful’ (p. 672) turn in the project of thinking differently (p. 676) about organizations, particularly those in which a certain type of phronetic work predominates (pp. 663–668). They recognize that their claims will have force only for those who share ‘the assumption that thinking differently is something that management theory takes to be important’ (p. 676, emphasis retained). As to why this is important and why its helpfulness provides a reason for action, Tsoukas and Cummings can provide no answer. From a MacIntyrean perspective their reduction of neo-Aristotelianism to just another set of methods and foci for empirical research is intimately related to their inability to make a case for any method in terms of truth. Tsoukas and Cummings’ Foucauldian project misrepresents the nature of MacIntyre’s claims, not least of which are those that address the implications of Aristotelianism for truth and for its relationship to method. As Porter (2003, p. 46) notes, for MacIntyre, beyond the perspectivist and relativist positions ‘there is a third alternative, the possibility that the development of traditions, both internally and in relation to one another, can itself be considered to be a genuinely rational process that, if it goes well, moves in the direction of an ever-fuller grasp of reality’. So, for MacIntyre, arguments towards conclusions, such as those of Tsoukas and Cummings towards the conclusion that organization studies would benefit from a re-appropriation of neo-Aristotelianism, are intelligible only if arguments as such can be construed as better or worse, and this is intelligible only in the context of movement towards or away from some perfectable understanding (MacIntyre, 1990b). Reames summarizes MacIntyre’s position well: The metaphysical good norms all traditions, and hence in a sense one might want to say that it transcends traditions. But because the good would be perfectly understood in a

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RON BEADLE AND GEOFF MOORE perfected tradition, and because such a perfected tradition is already the telos of traditional rationality itself, there is no need to posit some sort of mysterious source of extra- or non-traditional rationality. In other words, what is required is a distinction between metaphysics and epistemology: the metaphysical good as such norms all traditions (and indeed all thought and action), but we can only think about the good and come to know it in and through traditions. (1998, p. 443, emphasis retained)

For MacIntyre, unlike other realists,5 the pragmatic refutation of relativism (i.e. what is the status of the claim that there is no truth?) is correct but insufficient in its neglect of the truths to which relativism itself points: relativism y is one of those doctrines that have been refuted a number of times too often. Nothing is perhaps a surer sign that a doctrine embodies some not-to-beneglected truth than that in the course of the history of philosophy it should have been refuted again and again. Genuinely refutable doctrines only need to be refuted once. (1987a, p. 385)

What are the truths to which relativism points? The first is the limits that our historic situatedness imposes on our claims to truth. MacIntyre agrees that we do not have the resources a priori to judge, for example, between such constructions as objectivity and subjectivity in their relation to ontology, but this does not entail that we could never so judge, and it is this latter error into which the perspectivism so prevalent in organization studies falls. In contrasting his own position to Gadamer’s, MacIntyre argues: to have become aware of the historically conditioned character of our philosophical enquiries and interpretations is not to have escaped from it. There is no standpoint outside history to which we can move, no way in which we can move to some presuppositionless stance, exempt from the historical situatedness of all thinking y It is not incompatible, however, with a recognition of this truth to argue that a great deal turns on the nature of our awareness of the contingencies of our historical situatedness and that a certain kind of standpoint outside history, can transform our relationships to that history. (2002, p. 158)

If, as he argues in line with hermeneutics, agents’ understandings are constituted within traditions of language and practice, it is also true (and in this he departs from hermeneutics and from relativism) that we may distinguish intelligibly between claims made for truth within the traditions which shape language and practice over time. This effort enjoins us to engage in two distinct but related types of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least key parts of those fundamental agreements, and those internal, interpretative debates through


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which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted. (MacIntyre, 1988, p. 12)6

It is only if MacIntyre can show that conflicts of the former type are resolvable that we have grounds to reject the type of incommensurability that constitutes the self-image of so much contemporary organization theory. The challenges of this task are difficult to underestimate however. MacIntyre holds, alongside hermeneutics, that traditions are the bearers of the substantive rationalities on which intelligibility and judgment depend (MacIntyre, 1987a, 1987b, 1987c, 1988). We cannot turn to a system of rationality through which to decide between the claims of traditions because rational justification is itself tradition constituted. We can only claim that we have reason to believe in quarks, for example, by seeing how the argument for their existence has gone so far and judging the evidential and theoretical claims made in their favour against those standards by which we judge such claims, standards that themselves have a history against which to judge whether they are the best standards against which to judge. The intelligibility of our claims is also such that what is intelligible at an earlier point in a tradition may become unintelligible – the tradition may suffer an ‘epistemological crisis’ (Porter, 2003, p. 47) – or at least bear a significantly different meaning later on (MacIntyre, 1986, p. 76): For an individual either to be or to appear to be rational is then for that individual to participate in the norm-governed transactions and relationships of a particular institutionalised social order. Hence ‘‘rational’’ is not a predicate to be applied to individuals qua individuals but only to individuals qua participants in particular social orders embodying particular conceptions of rationality. (MacIntyre, 1987b, p. 4)

The intimate relationship between intelligibility in everyday exchange and adherence to some tradition of judgment and enquiry is no small point.7 Not to be understood is a form of social death that befalls those who step outside some tradition of rationality or whose social circumstances bring them into the milieu of an alien tradition. MacIntyre maintains that it is only the ability of one tradition to provide better understandings of those conflicts and failings of other traditions than they can provide for themselves that enables us to judge (by historically established traditional standards) its rational superiority (MacIntyre, 1988). This can happen only through learning the language and rationality of the other tradition against which one aims to make one’s claims. As Porter comments, ‘We might say that, on MacIntyre’s view, the necessity for standing outside of any tradition whatever is obviated by the possibility of standing within two traditions at once in order to move between them in a comparative assessment of their

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claims’ (Porter, 2003, p. 53). Without such a ‘second first language’ (MacIntyre, 1988, pp. 370–388, 403) the prosecution of such an argument is as fruitless as relativists hold – but theirs too is not a position from nowhere. This argument can barely be made in such abstract terms as we have used and in and of itself will convince no one. We instead require narratives that demonstrate the ways in which encounters between traditions turn out. For this reason, MacIntyre constructs precisely such narratives (1967, 1988, 1990a, 2007) and in his intellectual biography of Edith Stein (2004a) recounts the conversions of Stein and a number of her phenomenological associates (Reinach, Rosenzweig and Lukaćs). Conversions require those who undertake them to understand at least two traditions (despite sometimes more and less permeable and precarious boundaries between them) and the always open possibility that they might be brought together in the foundational acts and testaments of some new tradition. Examples include (supremely for MacIntyre), Aquinas’s creative combination of Christian doctrine and Aristotelian teleology and MacIntyre’s own creative assimilation of both the Marxist analysis of capitalist society and the historic and hermeneutic turn in philosophy within Thomism. MacIntyre suggested in his contribution to the Festschrift for Gadamer’s 100th Birthday that ‘modern Thomism only exhibited an awareness of the historical and hermeneutic turn in philosophy relatively late in its history’ (MacIntyre, 2002, p. 157). The modern Thomist whose life work has best exhibited this turn, is MacIntyre himself. As Lutz (2004, pp. 28–29) argues, MacIntyre’s own history of creative engagement with traditions itself constitutes an argument for such engagement. Let us summarize the case we have made so far. Against what Knight (2008) terms the conservative phenomenology of practices maintained by hermeneutics which claims that: philosophy is a human experience that remains the same and that characterises the human being as such, and that there is no progress in it, but only participation (Gadamer, 1986, p. 6)

and against its adherents in organization theory, stands MacIntyre’s progressive notion of practices and the traditions which co-constitute them. These include but are not limited to philosophical traditions that provide us with the schemes of rational justification which enable us to move towards truth. These traditions can attempt to demonstrate their rational superiority over their rivals, however, only if they are capable of maintaining dialogue with them such that learning might result (MacIntyre, 1988, p. 388, 2002, p. 166) in the same way that an agent can learn only by being accountable,


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thereby ‘rendering him or herself vulnerable to dialectical refutation’ (MacIntyre, 1990a, p. 200).

Implications for Research Methods If the foregoing argument is well founded we should not be surprised to learn that a set of philosophical commitments unite MacIntyrean and hermeneutic attitudes towards research methods. The intimacy between social structures, social roles (particularly when conceived as distinctive characters)8 and the tradition-constituted framework through which notions as fundamental as agency and context are understood provides distinctive boundaries around the conduct of research. McMylor summarizes this well: The key to MacIntyre’s argument, for the sociologist in particular, lies in the view that there is no such thing as ‘‘behaviour’’ that can be identified independently of intentions, beliefs and settings. (2009, p. 4)

In Chapters 6–8 of After Virtue, MacIntyre argues from this position to critique both the idea of social science and the bureaucratic rationality whose claims it attempts to legitimize.9 However, this is liable to cause some confusion in readers, as Higgins observes: It may be MacIntyre’s special distinction to strike half of his readers as an old fashioned universalizing metaphysician (since he defends a version of tradition and teleology) while striking the other half as a dangerous relativist. (2004, p. 35)

Such readings err by maintaining conventional usage of both terminology and the constructs through which elements of that terminology (e.g. ‘tradition’ and ‘relativism’) are to be inter-related. For MacIntyre however tradition is an evolving set of debates and relativism is (among other things) a falsely derived epistemological conclusion from empirical observations. Nevertheless methodological limits are incontestable from what has remained almost unchanged in MacIntyre’s writings on epistemology and the conduct of enquiry10 and these point to the centrality of considerations of intelligibility, narrative, social structure and agency. In earlier collaborative work one of us described these limits in terms of a series of systematic exclusions (Coe & Beadle, 2008, p. 10): enquiries which do not relate themselves (including the possibility of critically relating themselves) to a tradition-constituted community of enquiry;

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enquiries seeking to create law-like generalizations through the testing of hypotheses about causation through measurement of a defined list of variables;11 enquiries which do not report their findings in a narrative form; enquiries which exclude agents’ self-understandings in attempting to account for their behaviour; enquiries which exclude either features of institutions (structure) or the agency of subjects in their explanations; enquiries which do not recognize the ineliminable presence of the enquirers’ judgments in the accounts they present. The success of our enquiries depends on our ability to account for the limits imposed by both social structure and the self-understandings which social structures characteristically exhibit. Ruling out only ‘positivist conceptions of observability and verifiability’ (MacIntyre, 2004b, p. 6) whilst encouraging other forms of empirical research offers a wide range of choice for researchers in the MacIntyrean tradition. Both primary and secondary work is allowable, participant and non-participant observation, and even the presumption against positivist hypothesis testing does not preclude quantitative work as such. When we consider the empirical work that has specifically cited MacIntyre as its inspiration, an emphasis on ‘thick descriptions’ created through narrative is evident. These include Smith (1999), Dunne (1993) and Erben (2000) in education studies, Williams’ (1984) biographical narratives with the chronically sick, Coe’s biographical narratives exploring conflicts between goods at a major music venue (Coe & Beadle, 2008), Crockett’s (2008) structured interviews with entrepreneurs, Finchett-Maddock’s (2008) ethnography of squatting, Salter’s (2008) ethnography of alternative media, Nicholas’s (2008) auto-ethnographic reflections Eucharistic ceremonies and Dungeons and Dragons, Beadle’s (2003) circus auto-ethnography and follow-up storytelling narrative (Beadle & Ko¨nyo¨t, 2006; Beadle, forthcoming), Moore’s (2009) use of Crockett’s framework in his study of Alliance Boots and his study of churches as organizations (forthcoming), Beabout’s (2008) work on management in monasteries, Dawson’s (2009) master-narratives of British healthcare and Martin’s (2009) narratives of organizational identity. Some of this work promises empirical applications of a distinctively MacIntyrean organization theory. How would such a theory work and what does it offer organization studies? In Part Two, we consider MacIntyre’s ‘general theory’ of goods, virtues, practices and institutions and consider


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briefly its relationship with ‘old’ institutionalism. In Part Three, we will illustrate this discussion with a worked example to show the impact of a distinctively MacIntyrean reading of a case study that exemplifies hermeneutic work in organization studies.

PART TWO: MACINTYREAN ORGANIZATION THEORY Goods, Virtues, Practices and Institutions Having shown what constitutes demonstrable victories and defeats for traditions and the importance of these encounters for a defensible account of rational justification, we now move to outline the tradition which MacIntyre claims to have demonstrated superiority through engagement with its rivals, that of the virtues (2007). In After Virtue MacIntyre provides his definitive account of their essential features – goods, virtues, practices and institutions.12 We began the first part of this chapter by distinguishing between the hermeneutic and MacIntyrean understandings of practice. In this part, we begin again with practice, for it is in the relationship between our participation in social practices and the discovery of our good, but also in the essential institutionalizing of such practices, that MacIntyre’s potential contribution to organization theory lies. For MacIntyre a practice is: Any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (2007, p. 187)

Four central concepts inhere in this definition. Firstly, practices are social and co-operative activities. Secondly, the outcome of engagement in practices is the achievement of internal goods. MacIntyre later identifies internal goods with both the excellence of the products that result from the practice, such as ‘the excellence in performance by the painters and that of each portrait itself’ (2007, p. 189), and the perfection of the individuals in the process of such production (1994, p. 284). Thirdly, these standards of excellence have ‘been determined by the historical community of practitioners’ (Kallenberg, 2003,

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p. 21) – ‘practices always have histories’ (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 221). So, fourthly, practices are systematically extended (are ‘transmitted and reshaped’ (ibid., p. 221)) through traditions comprising the successive rounds of internal conflict about, amongst other things, its own standards of excellence. Practices are widespread, indeed it could be argued that we spend much of our lives in them, since they include inter alia ‘arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life’ (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 188). The virtues find their essential place in this schema because their deployment is the sine qua non for the achievement of the goods internal to practices: A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods. (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 191)

Goods internal to practices include not only the generation and delivery of genuinely excellent products or services, but also the deployment of the virtues themselves – first to attain these goods and later, as desires are transformed, the exercise of the virtues becomes constitutive of the agent’s own good; the virtues thus become both means and ends and hence undermine that distinction. When developed in this way, virtues that find their initial constitution within practices find wider and wider applications within agents’ lives considered as a whole such that their self-image becomes a narrative quest for the good. Goods internal to practices, however, are not the only kind of goods and MacIntyre contrasts them with goods external to particular practices such as status, money and power. When achieved these are ‘always some individual’s property and possession. [They are] characteristically objects of competition in which there must be losers as well as winners’ (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 190). With internal goods, however, although there is competition in one sense, this is competition to excel and so benefits all members of the community engaged in the practice (ibid., pp. 190–191). In order for internal goods to be realized it is clear that practices need to flourish. To do so, however, they require institutions. And institutions are: characteristically and necessarily concerned with y external goods. They are involved in acquiring money and other material goods; they are structured in terms of power and status, and they distribute money, power and status as rewards. Nor could they do otherwise if they are to sustain not only themselves, but also the practices of which they are the bearers. For no practices can survive for any length of time unsustained by institutions. Indeed so intimate is the relationship of practices to institutions – and


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consequently of the goods external to the goods internal to the practices in question – that institutions and practices characteristically form a single causal order in which the ideals and the creativity of the practice are always vulnerable to the acquisitiveness of the institution, in which the cooperative care for common goods of the practice is always vulnerable to the competitiveness of the institution. In this context the essential feature of the virtues is clear. Without them, without justice, courage and truthfulness, practices could not resist the corrupting power of institutions. (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 194)

MacIntyre’s description of institutions and their relationship with practices can be applied in almost any context, including those to which MacIntyre refers generically as ‘productive crafts’ (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 284). The particular practice may be fishing, or producing beef or milk, or architecture, or it may be, as we shall discuss below, providing services such as medicine. The common feature, however, is that all such activities fall within MacIntyre’s definition of a practice as ‘any coherent and complex form of socially established co-operative human activity’. But all such practices are institutionalized and MacIntyre provides both a warning and some exemplification as follows: ‘Practices must not be confused with institutions. Chess, physics and medicine are practices; chess clubs, laboratories, universities and hospitals are institutions’ (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 194). A key point for organization studies, then, emerges – that, whatever the mode of institutionalization (a point we will return to below), any organization may be re-described as a practice–institution combination.13 But this leads us to another important point in MacIntyre’s framework: the making and sustaining of forms of human community – and therefore of institutions – itself has all the characteristics of a practice, and moreover of a practice which stands in a peculiarly close relationship to the exercise of the virtues y. (2007, p. 194, emphasis added)

In other words, there is a second practice in any organization which is the practice of making and sustaining the institution. And hence those who have, in one sense, outgrown the core practice and now represent the institution that houses it, also have the same opportunity to exercise the virtues through engaging with that second practice.14 Fig. 1 represents an organization as a core practice situated within an institutional framework in which the smaller circle labelled ‘P’ is the practice of making and sustaining the institution.15 Both the practice at the core of the practice–institution combination and the practice of making and sustaining the institution that houses it have to be managed.16 Fig. 2 (based upon Moore, 2008) shows managerial engagement with both. Managers’ participation in the core practice declines with progression in organizational hierarchies, a distancing which potentially undermines both their achievement of the internal goods of the core practice and the

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P

INSTITUTION Concerned with the achievement of external goods

PRACTICE Concerned with the exercise of virtue and the achievement of internal goods

Fig. 1. An Organization Represented as a Practice–Institution Combination Together with the Secondary Practice of the Making and Sustaining of the Institution.

relative attention such goods receive within decision-making. The compensating factor for managers, however, is their engagement with the practice of making and sustaining the institution from which they may, through the exercise of appropriate virtues, gain the internal goods thereby available. The Virtuous Organization Following this, we can identify various features of a virtuous organization and, associated with this, the responsibilities particularly of senior management for ensuring that these features exist and are nurtured. The first requirement of a virtuous organization, in conformity with Aristotelian teleology, would be that there is a good purpose for the particular practice– institution combination that it comprises. Secondly, the institution would be aware that it is founded on and has as its most important function the sustenance of the particular practice that it houses and following from this the organization would encourage the pursuit of excellence in that practice whatever that may mean for the particular practice in question. Thirdly, it would focus on external goods (such as survival, power, profit, reputation or success) as both a necessary and worthwhile function of the organization, but only to the extent necessary to the sustenance and development of the practice. Which particular virtues would characterize virtuous organizations? Although we might consider a wider list it is clear that justice, courage and truthfulness (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 194, cited above) are the sine qua non


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Core practice

Institutional practice

Increasing level of management Increasing concern with ends Decreasing concern with means

Fig. 2.

The Relationship of Different Levels of Management with the Core Practice.

of MacIntyre’s schema, together with the virtues of integrity and constancy (MacIntyre, 1999b, pp. 317–318) which refer to their consistent application across practices and over time. The virtuous organization would require courage in order to resist the corrupting power of institutions with which it relates and to minimize the effects of the environment on its character where these might be damaging.17 It would require justice in order to distribute external goods appropriately, to weigh its own advantage with that of the wider community, to foster its own excellence through (for example) an allocation of roles that ensures that those who are truly best at particular tasks are appointed to do them, and to generate internal harmony through ensuring that subordinates accept the justice of their place (Klein, 1988, p. 60). Solomon’s (1992) emphasis on trust (by which we should infer the virtue of both offering trust to others and being trustworthy oneself) contains within its definition the necessity of truthfulness for organizational conduct. Such virtues would find their institutional embodiment in a number of features (Moore, 2005b). These are the development of a power-balanced structure that would ensure that the views and desires of particular constituencies are not privileged over those of others, and decision-making systems and processes that enable rational critical dialogue to have the effect of countering biases and enabling the questioning of the hitherto unquestioned (MacIntyre, 1999b, p. 313). While to some extent outside of its control, the encouragement of a supportive culture will also be a feature of the character of a virtuous organization.18

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For our purposes here more needs to be said about two of these requirements of the virtuous organization. In relation to purpose MacIntyre is clear, as we noted above, that the virtues enable the achievement of a person’s telos of eudaimonia (2007, p. 148) at the individual level. But this telos always needs to be re-evaluated (2007, pp. 218–219) because it is only partially known – and hence what MacIntyre calls a narrative quest (a storied exploration) is involved (MacIntyre says that ‘the good life for man [sic] is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is’ (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 219)). This narrative quest is necessarily communal and historically extended, a point made well by McCann and Brownsberger: y the normative character of MacIntyre’s definition of a social practice y is secured within a larger account of the moral life as a whole. There must be some telos to human life, a vision anticipating the moral unity of life, given in the form of a narrative history that has meaning within a particular community’s traditions; otherwise the various internal goods generated by the range of social practices will remain disordered and potentially subversive of one another. Without a community’s shared sense of telos, there will be no way of signifying ‘the overriding good’ by which various internal goods may be ranked and evaluated. (1990, pp. 227–228)

Translating this to the organizational level, we are left with an empirical question in judging the goodness of purpose of a particular organization. And the goodness of purpose is the extent to which the internal goods of the practice at the core of the organization contribute to the overriding good of the community and the extent to which there is a continuing debate within the organization as to what the community’s good is and how goods internal to practices contribute to it. The second requirement that we need to explore further here is the interrelationship between internal and external goods. MacIntyre makes the point that we must rank such that goods internal to practices (goods that are valued for their own sake) should be prioritized. External goods should be valued only insofar as they enable the achievement of internal goods (MacIntyre, 1988, p. 35). But this does not mean that external goods are not goods (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 196). This also leaves us with an empirical question as to the extent to which an organization prioritizes between the practice and the institution or, in other words, prioritizes between internal and external goods. But we should note that the virtuous organization is not one which prioritizes internal goods to the exclusion of external goods, but one that maintains an appropriate balance between them.


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Preconditions for Virtuous Organizations In previous work (Moore & Beadle, 2006), we have identified three preconditions for such virtuous organizations. Space precludes a detailed consideration of these here, but in summary they are as follows. The first precondition is the presence of virtuous agents at the level of both the practice and the institution, for without agents who possess and exercise the virtues the practice itself would no longer be fostered internally through the pursuit of excellence, and at the institutional level the corruption of the institution and the consequent distortion of the practice would seem to be inevitable. This is particularly the case for those agents who hold decisionmaking authority in the institution. But the presence of such agents at both practice and institutional (managerial) level is clearly insufficient to guarantee the presence of organizational virtue. The second precondition for a virtuous organization is the mode of institutionalization which distributes both decision-making authority and decision criteria within institutions. It is clear that the same practice may be institutionalized in different forms and MacIntyre notes that, ‘practices are often distorted by their modes of institutionalization, when irrelevant considerations relating to money, power and status are allowed to invade the practice’ (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 289). In other words, we would expect that different institutional forms will support to different extents (and possibly even exclude, though see further below) the practices which they house. The third precondition for a virtuous organization relates to the environment in which it is situated. It is clear that MacIntyre regards organizations as open systems that are both affected by other organizations and able (in both positive and negative ways) to compartmentalize themselves from them. It is apparent therefore that a particularly significant factor in any organization’s ability to maintain and exercise the virtues is the extent to which the environment is more or less conducive to the practice it houses. MacIntyre warns: ‘We should therefore expect that, if in a particular society the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound’ (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 196). Hence, we would expect that an unconducive environment, and in particular one that was focused to too great an extent on external goods, would threaten organizational virtue. Empirical questions also arise from this discussion of the three preconditions for organizational virtue, for example: the extent to which one or another precondition predominates, whether strength in one can offset weakness in another and the extent to which the preconditions are mutually reinforcing.

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MacIntyrean and Institutional Theory, and Reasons for Action The ‘goods–virtues–practices–institutions’ framework points to two central and symbiotically related tensions inhering in organizational life: those between practices and institutions; and those between the pursuit of goods internal to practices and the pursuit of external goods. The common goods of the practice cannot survive for any length of time unsustained by successful institutional pursuit of external goods, but practices are also and always vulnerable to the competititveness and acquisitiveness of the institution which houses them. In capitalist business organizations institutionalized in the AngloAmerican mode MacIntyre has argued that such vulnerability is endemic, to the extent that the institution has, in effect, ‘won’ over the practice – its justification is the pursuit of external goods – such that ‘much modern industrial productive and service work is organized so as to exclude the features distinctive of a practice’, and in such a way that this type of activity is ‘at once alien and antagonistic to practices’ (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 286). Despite this, however, the counter argument has been made (Moore, 2005b) that all business activities, irrespective of their form of institutionalization, must contain the vestiges of a practice and the virtues to some degree, for if they did not – that is, if the institution had ‘won’ so completely that the virtues had suffered ‘something near total effacement’ (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 196, cited above) – then the institution would have, in effect, killed itself from the inside by failing to sustain the practice on which it itself is founded. In other words, while in Anglo-American capitalist forms of business organization the practice may be potentially and continually under threat from the acquisitiveness and competitiveness of the corporation, it still exists.19 This counter argument, of course, suggests that MacIntyre is overly pessimistic in his assessment. Similarly, Keat (2008b) has argued that in other forms of capitalism, notably in ‘coordinated’ market economies such as Germany and Japan, industrial organization is such as ‘to be highly conducive to the internal goods and standards of excellence central to MacIntyrean practices’ (ibid., p. 77). And Moore (2002) notes that it may be necessary for institutions to observe and take corrective action when the practices that they house become so introverted and self-satisfied that they no longer set out to achieve ‘those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity’ – as we shall see in Part Three.


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Hence, in a variety of forms the essential and unavoidable tension between practices and institutions persists and plays out as a similar drama. MacIntyre highlights the tension as follows: the ability of a practice to retain its integrity will depend on the way in which the virtues can be and are exercised in sustaining the institutional forms which are the social bearers of the practice. The integrity of a practice causally requires the exercise of the virtues by at least some of the individuals who embody it in their activities; and conversely the corruption of institutions is always in part at least an effect of the vices. (2007, p. 195)

The tensions between practices and institutions are evidenced in a wide range of organization theory with ‘old’ institutional theory (a distinction from ‘new’ institutionalism outlined in Selznick, 1996) demonstrating particular sensitivity both to its features and to its own value commitments in ways which appear to us to be particularly resonant of MacIntyre’s framework.20 Selznick’s summary is especially revealing in this regard. The aim of the ‘old institutional theory’ is nothing less than: the quest for more effective and humane cooperative systems, including better ways of delegating responsibility and insuring accountability. (Selznick, 1996, p. 276)

Stinchcombe (1997, p. 17) similarly argues that ‘the trouble with the new institutionalism is that it does not have the guts of institutions in it. The guts of institutions is that somebody really cares to hold the organization to the standards and is often paid to do just that’.21 It is in and through organizations so conceived that practitioners, possessing and exercising the virtues within the core practice (and, for managers, within the institutional practice), realize the internal goods available and so are enabled on their narrative quest towards their true telos. These are organizations, as Stinchcombe puts it, with guts. Mapping the terminology of the old institutionalism onto MacIntyrean categories is problematic (a reading of Selznick, 1992, particularly Part 3, is instructive in this respect) but it is clear that they share similar concerns. MacIntyre’s use of the term institution is not identical with either old or new institutional theory,22 because his identification of the practices–institution nexus offers a new way of conceptualizing organizations (and, indeed, practice–institution combinations more generally). In identifying the embeddedness of social relations in practices, in defining the essential relationship between practices and virtues and in identifying institutionalization as one more practice, MacIntyre opens up organizations as essentially moral spaces – locations of moral action by moral agents operating both

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individually and collectively. This identification offers to the ‘old’ institutional theory a philosophical foundation which will provide, amongst other things, a surer underpinning of its critique of ‘new’ (or as Stinchcombe (1997, p. 2) alleges ‘Durkheimian’) institutionalism in its failure to acknowledge its own value orientation. As we have seen there are potentially wide variations in the ways in which we might undertake distinctively MacIntyrean organizational analysis, but if the foregoing argument is correct none of these could ignore the ‘for the sake of’ (MacIntyre, 1988, p. 131) relationship in respect of reasons for action. Rational action is always accountable such that answers to ‘Why did you so act?’ questions (ibid., p. 131) take the form of a recounting of deliberations (which may have been implicit at the time of action itself) in which the actor moves from a notion of the good to be pursued to a (series of) judgment(s) about which actions best move the agent towards that good. Divorce action from the concept of the good and action is divorced from rationality and hence intelligibility: The application of the concept of intelligibility thus presupposes the application of the concept of a good, and a good reason is most adequately specified as a reason for doing something which will be or achieve some good. (MacIntyre, 1986, p. 75)

Our ability to provide reasons for action is learned, however, and one of the important features of modes of institutionalization is therefore the extent to which those who inhabit them may learn to become intelligible so that they can offer answers not only to questions such as ‘Why did you do that?’ but also to such questions as ‘Why is the reason you gave for doing that a good reason?’ It is in this latter type of question that the importance of both being able to distinguish between reason-affording arguments and the relevance of different types of context becomes apparent. These abilities are fostered by some and undermined by other institutional arrangements and participation in practices is itself the sine qua non for developing the ability to reason adequately.23 Institutions may present agents operating within them with formal statements of purpose, schematics for decision-making and informal routines (some of which we may call cultural) to direct their members in their decision-making and these to varying extents determine both a range of intelligible reasons and intelligible actions. MacIntyre’s own work on organizations (particularly 1964, 1977 and 1979a) has focussed on formal decision-making in which utilitarianism dominates such routines as Cost– Benefit Analysis and Job Evaluation. His critiques here as elsewhere (1967, pp. 207–208, 1999b, pp. 325–327) emphasize the reliance of such routines on


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a series of denials and in particular the denial of reasoning about ends.24 Managers in such contexts bind their reason within the confines of institutionally determined purposes; borrowing from Hegel, MacIntyre’s (1964) paper describes this as ‘the spiritual zoo’ in which managers ‘live in separate cages and choose not to ask why there are bars or what lies outside them’ (1964, p. 13).25 It is not only utilitarian decision-making routines that impact upon organizational agents’ reasoning abilities. MacIntyre cites a number of studies emphasizing cultural power vested in authoritative figures and peer groups that disable agents’ abilities to report their reasons for action (1986, p. 72). He notes that none of these studies involved individuals ‘engaged in or developing the abilities acquired in practices’ (ibid., p. 72), an open invitation for empirical work to be undertaken involving just such individuals. Distinctively MacIntyrean empirics, holding to a notion of the organization as an essentially moral space, attempts to determine the relationship between reasons for action directed towards the achievement of goods internal and/or external to practices. In one example of such work, a decision to elongate the interval between two halves of a circus performance was determined to have been taken for the sake of optimizing the earning potential of the interval despite the damaging consequences of this to the achievement of goods internal to the practice of the circus arts (Beadle & Ko¨nyo¨t, 2006, p. 134). It is not only, however, in the relative weight given to the pursuit of internal and external goods that we can judge the extent to which the practice–institution combination is being held in an appropriate balance. It is of considerable importance to the virtues that to be moved by appropriate reasons for action is also to be able to give an adequate account of those reasons for action. It is only inasmuch as we are moved to action by the power of the good reasons themselves that we become practitioners whose desires are appropriately ordered. Such practitioners are able not only to practice but also to account for their reasons for action and therefore to become those from whom others can learn within the practice. Contrariwise, not only is it the case that our failures as moral agents are failures to be guided by the right reasons26 and that our inability to account for our decisions is a sure sign of our failure as moral agents, but also that practice–institution combinations which do not require us to participate in the type of reasoning in which we are mutually accountable themselves fail in one of their principal educative tasks. As we saw above it is only through a certain type of constrained conflict that traditions develop and it is only through engaging with the critical and argumentative resources of our traditions that individual practitioners can come to know what they are doing.

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A central question for MacIntyrean organizational analysis will therefore be the extent to which practice–institution combinations encourage the types of participative enquiry through which we learn how to give, receive and question accounts in ways that extend our understanding of the goods at which we aim and thereby enable us to take better decisions. Sometimes these may be difficult decisions such as withdrawing ourselves from a sports team when we have a minor injury or admitting to error or lack of knowledge. It is in our failures to recognize that we have good reasons as practitioners to be moved by reasons for action which guide the practice, whether through pride, lack of understanding, venality and so on, that we fail. Systems of mutual accountability, in which such reasons are unacceptable within the accounts we routinely give of our actions, are critical institutional protections from the weaknesses and errors of practitioners themselves. In the first part of this chapter we showed how MacIntyre is both a friend and critic of the hermeneutic endeavour. In the second, we outlined his schema for understanding organizations and made some arguments for its proximity to the ‘old’ institutionalism, which led to a discussion of reasons for action. In the third part, we attempt to demonstrate how a MacIntyrean analysis would alter organizational analysis conducted within the hermeneutic/institutionalist tradition. The purpose for conducting this exercise would not be served by choosing a poor example of this form of work. Instead, we choose what we consider to be a very good example of such.

PART THREE: MACINTYREAN ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS: A REWORKING OF WEICK AND SUTCLIFFE ON THE BRISTOL RVI The ‘Bristol Babies’ case, as it came to be known, is that of a preventable tragedy. It concerned the conduct of the paediatric cardiac surgery programme at the BRI, a teaching hospital in the south west of England, between 1981 and 1995. By the end of this period mortality rates rose to become significantly higher than the national average. A number of attempts by outside professionals, whistleblowers and parents to raise concerns about the unit and the hospital were met with denial and a refusal to investigate by senior managers. Eventually, following press and public outcry, the unit’s work was suspended and, following a lengthy and detailed public enquiry (Secretary of State for Health, 2001), a number of surgeons and senior managers were dismissed from their posts and subsequently


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removed from their profession (‘struck off ’) by the General Medical Council.27 The Inquiry claimed that hospital management operated a ‘club culture’28 (thereby using Handy’s, 1985 nomenclature) in which data that should have been used to establish significant weaknesses in the programme went unused and the status and relationships of senior surgeons, senior managers and bureaucrats at the Department of Health enabled them to go unchallenged. One factor in this was the decision to designate BRI as one of nine Supra Regional Service (SRS) centres largely on grounds of geography rather than clinical expertise (which was identified as being poor in some respects), the physical layout of the hospital (which was detrimental to good care) and the case load (BRI’s low case load was considered inadequate to maintain sufficient expertise) (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2003, pp. 74–75). One example of this unchallenging attitude was a Department of Health official who, having received a dossier of evidence detailing poor practice and avoidable deaths among infants, merely telephoned the Hospital’s Chief Executive, received a verbal assurance and took no further action.29 The combination of surgical practices which had not been updated in line with the development of procedures elsewhere and institutional forces that prevented effective questioning meant that mortality rates (and those of permanent brain injury following procedures) remained steady in the unit despite halving elsewhere over the decade from the mid-1980s. Parents believed that up to 150 children suffered death or serious injury over the period in question.30 A further factor in the organizational context was a CEO whose managerial attitude to clinical care was one of ‘hands-off’, if not downright abdication: ‘You fix it’ (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2003, p. 78). His dismissal of the concerns of principal internal whistleblower, the anaesthetist Dr. Stephen Bolsin, was similarly on the grounds that this was ‘a clinical matter’ (ibid., p. 76). Despite the threat he perceived to his own career, Dr. Bolsin, explained his actions in the following terms: In the end I just couldn’t go on putting those children to sleep, with their parents present in the anaesthetic room, knowing that it was almost certain to be the last time they would see their sons or daughters alive.31

Weick and Sutcliffe (2003) interpret the Public Inquiry’s 530-page report through an hermeneutic of enactment in which social structures persist as a result of ‘a cultural mindset about risk, danger, and safety that was anchored by a process of behavioural commitment that shaped interpretation, action and communication’ (ibid., p. 74). They refer to this as ‘cultural entrapment’.

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Drawing on the institutional theorists Salancik and Pfeffer’s (1978) notion of ‘behavioural commitment’ in which ‘behaviour becomes an undeniable and unchangeable aspect of the person’s world, and when he makes sense of the environment, behaviour is the point on which constructions and interpretations are based’ (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2003, p. 77), actors in these positions generate rationalizations which work only because they are regarded as culturally appropriate (ibid., p. 78). They cite as an example of this the Inquiry’s finding that at BRI explanations for poor performance were about case complexity rather than poor practices and these ‘tenacious justifications’ made it harder to learn, discontinue current practice and concentrate on evidence that supported rather than detracted from their position (ibid., p. 79). Drawing on Salancik and Pfeffer once more, the work of the surgical teams is characterized by high autonomy, visibility and irrevocability, whose combination required the creation of rationales for practices. When the rationales were put to the test they were found to be unsupportable, but for too long they persisted because ‘layers of bureaucrats above the surgical unit, people who had some say in the original choice to designate BRI as a centre of excellence, find their own judgments in jeopardy. The unintended consequence is that the whole chain of decision makers comes to support an explanation that makes it difficult for an underperforming unit to improve or to stop altogether’ (ibid., p. 80). Behavioural commitments thus entrap cultures through institutional processes of rationalization and protection. Weick and Sutcliffe draw three lessons from this. Firstly that those at the bottom of organizational hierarchies feel less pressure ‘to justify and construct acceptable errant reasons for errant actions’ (ibid., p. 80) because they were not involved in the choices that have led to them but, because they are dealing with those most affected, they are under immediate pressure to respond on behalf of the institution: ‘People at the bottom are torn between justification and candor’ (ibid., p. 81). Institutional support for candor and learning rather than justification and concealment will have a greater impact amongst those at the bottom of the institution because they are also not tempted to justify their own involvement in prior choices. Secondly, the professional autonomy of surgeons and CEOs ‘works against learning’ (ibid., p. 81). Justifications become self-perpetuating at higher levels. Thirdly, justificatory interpretation worked as it did due to the combination of autonomy, visibility and irrevocability in the ‘committing context’ (ibid., p. 82) and hence, ‘Accelerated learning, in this view, is more likely when the committing context itself is weakened’ (ibid., p. 82).


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They recommend two lessons for hospitals. Firstly that acceptable reasons for action should centre on a notion of learning in which fallibility and vulnerability are acknowledged and secondly that hospitals should deliberately weaken the ‘committing context’ of choice, visibility and irrevocability so that ‘people are not forced to justify inadequate performance’ (ibid., p. 82). In its place acknowledged interdependence can moderate behavioural commitment to enable problems to be identified, errors acknowledged and decisions changed: Thus choice is reframed as a collective responsibility, such that the buck stops everywhere. Publicity is reframed as a collective commitment to provide constructive feedback to one another in order to improve performance. Irrevocability is reframed as a collective responsibility to identify escape routes, contingency plans, and to mentally stimulate potential interventions in order to spot potential traps. When choice, publicity and irrevocability are treated as collective responsibilities necessitated by task interdependence, this spreads responsibility but it does not diffuse it y Dogma precludes learning, and it precludes improvement. This is what happened at BRI and it need not happen again. (ibid., p. 83, emphasis retained)

Weick and Sutcliffe’s article is an excellent example of the use of institutional theory informed by hermeneutic commitments, whose focus on the relationship between systems of interpretation and action is (to these authors) persuasive. In respect of institutional processes and their effects a MacIntyrean analysis would differ only in nomenclature. Where Weick and Sutcliffe write of choice, visibility and irrevocability, a MacIntyrean analysis would write of the balance of power in institutional structures and the systems and processes through which decisions are taken. How, then, would a MacIntyrean analysis differ? Firstly, a MacIntyrean analysis would identify the goods internal to the practice (in this case of medicine), what its purpose is held to be in the tradition which constitutes it and thus what good reasons for action must be if they are to serve these goods. This is not just a matter of language, for in the MacIntyrean view hospitals derive their point and purpose from and only from the proper practice of medicine. By contrast, point nine of the Synopsis of the Inquiry Report found that ‘vulnerable children were not a priority’ (Secretary of State for Health, 2001). What is absent from Weick and Sutcliffe’s study, but notably not from the Inquiry report, the submissions of the affected families and the subsequent actions of the General Medical Council, were the ways in which the surgeons themselves failed as practitioners in their ability to reason adequately towards this proper purpose. A further element of a MacIntyrean analysis would have drawn particular attention to the social and co-operative nature of any

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engagement in practices (the ‘interdependencies’ noted in Weick and Sutcliffe’s conclusion (2003, p. 83)), elements that were missing from the way the two key surgeons behaved in relation to their teams (ibid., p. 75). Attention to these issues would have sent early warning signals that all was not well. Secondly, a MacIntyrean analysis would draw a sharper distinction between the institution (the hospital) and the practice than Weick and Sutcliffe offer. Whilst agreeing with the examples given of the ways in which particular forms of institutionalization can undermine learning by corrupting the reasons for action that are legitimate within the practice, a MacIntyrean analysis would also consider the responsibilities of the institutional managers themselves for not providing systems and processes adequate to protect against poor performance; as noted above, it is partly their responsibility to identify ‘best practice’, potentially by comparison with other similar units, and this they signally failed to do. A MacIntyrean analysis would also suggest that, just because a particular organization has a good purpose, this does not prevent it from constructing a ‘mode of institutionalization’ which is less than supportive of organizational virtue. Weick and Sutcliffe’s conclusions address ways in which hospitals might create and support such systems, but their purpose is implicit – if we regard organizations as essentially moral spaces then it is clear that the institutional failures they describe were also moral failures exaggerated by an inadequate mode of institutionalization. Thirdly, the actions of the principal whistleblower, Dr. Bolsin, in resisting institutional pressure to conform, cannot be adequately theorized with the resources Weick and Sutcliffe have at their disposal because these neglect the critical role played by individual agency. Equally, the contrasting actions of the CEO in abandoning any responsibility for the core practice are highlighted by a MacIntyrean account. Such an account, within which individual virtue and vice always merits consideration, and in which the ‘standards of excellence’ of the practice and their systematic extension are always to the fore, is better equipped to provide an adequate explanation. In asking the ‘for the sake of what?’ questions of these two practitioners in relation to their reasons for action, it would identify and encourage the virtue inherent in Dr. Bolsin’s actions and his implicit concern for the internal goods of the practice, and it would identify and discourage the ‘for the sake of the institution’ approach of the CEO in which short-term expediency was privileged over a proper concern for the core practice. Fourthly, a MacIntyrean analysis would draw attention to the environmental setting. The decision to designate BRI as a SRS centre despite its


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lack of expertise, the failure then to put in place systems to monitor and support its development and the implication of bureaucrats above the surgical unit in the unit’s explanations, all suggest that the environment was not conducive to organizational virtue. A MacIntyrean analysis would have identified the moral hazard inherent in the organizational environment and, again, sent warning signals much earlier in the saga. It is the use of distinctively moral and evaluative language that separates such analysis from the contemporary space of academic discourse in which technicist neutrality is at home. A MacIntyrean analysis cannot but attempt to bridge and thus critique the disciplinary boundaries between organizational analysis and organizational ethics. The former without the latter is devoid of what Stinchcombe calls ‘guts’; the latter without the former is reduced to wishful thinking. McMylor (2001, p. 23) argued that MacIntyre’s neglect by sociologists reflected his opposition to the dominant liberal assumptions of their practice, including the fact/value distinction and the academic authorial voice. The same argument could be made of much organization theory. What then are the prospects for a distinctively MacIntyrean organization theory?

PART FOUR: CONCLUSION – AN AGENDA FOR MACINTYREAN ORGANIZATION THEORY In Part One of this chapter we outlined both the family resemblance and distinctiveness of MacIntyre’s project from that of philosophical hermeneutics. In Part Two, we provided the outline of a distinctively MacIntyrean organization theory and suggested resemblances to the tradition of ‘old’ institutional theory. In Part Three, we illustrated both these resemblances and distinctions through the example of Weick and Sutcliffe’s study of the Bristol Babies case. Does any of this matter, however? Is there any evidence that MacIntyre’s framework is being used by organizational scholars and what does MacIntyrean scholarship have to do to demonstrate its potential? What we do not lack is critical engagement with MacIntyre’s ideas in the literature. In organization theory a special edition of Organization on MacIntyre’s work appeared in 1995 (Vol. 2:2) and in 2006 a special edition of Organization Studies on organizations and virtue (Vol 27:3) contained significant consideration of his work. Within business ethics debate has been joined around MacIntyre and markets (Horvarth, 1995; Dobson, 1996, 1997; Wicks, 1996, 1997; Dawson & Bartholomew, 2003; Keat, 2000, 2008a, 2008b), in management studies the Weberian character of MacIntyre’s

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understanding of the manager has received attention (Anthony, 1986; Mangham, 1995; Brewer, 1997; Du Gay, 1998; Tester, 2000; Beadle, 2002; Holt, 2006; Moore, 2005b, 2008) and a variety of professional literatures have witnessed cases being made for their elevation to the status of ‘practice’ (Lambeth, 1990 for journalism, Sellman, 2000 for nursing, Leeper & Leeper, 2001 for public relations). Finally Beadle and Moore have debated whether business itself can be considered a practice (Moore, 2005a; Beadle, 2008b). What is more encouraging in our view (and more importantly MacIntyre’s, 2008a), is the development of empirical applications of his work (see section ‘Implications for Research Methods’ above for examples). Throughout this chapter we have indicated a wide range of empirical questions that arise and through which his particular blend of hermeneutics, tradition and ethics can be realized. But of all of these possibilities, where might a prioritized agenda for MacIntyrean research lie? We may be able to construct a range of classificatory schema through which to describe such work in terms of methods, subjects (critical or appreciative), storytelling genres, attempts to exemplify the virtues and attempts to test the relationships associated with them and so on, but any attempt to prioritize between categories would be fruitless because it would either rest on methodological commitments that undermine the breadth of work that can be legitimately undertaken under his auspices or it would presume a relationship between genre and quality that is itself unsustainable. In contrast, MacIntyre has suggested that what is important about such studies is their ‘directedness’ (2008a, p. 6); the work must be judged by its purposes in the same way as its objects are to be judged. The principal arbiter of directedness is the extent to which we can draw lessons for practice (ibid., p. 6). We cannot anticipate the success of our endeavours but the adoption of a MacIntyrean framework would fall hopelessly into the void of self-contradiction without an awareness of its own purpose. This then becomes the sine qua non of distinctively MacIntyrean research. Amongst the possibilities that this rejects is any suggestion that a chapter such as this, or empirical work supporting MacIntyre’s contentions, will convince those whose work is framed by other traditions. But such is not its purpose. This observation is pertinent because the condition of organization studies reflects closely the conditions whose critique is the object of After Virtue. This is of a contemporary social order in which distinctively moral utterance exhibits a cleavage between meaning and use such that its characterization as emotivism appears warranted. Debate is rationally interminable, viewpoints abound, reason as conceived and practiced is incapable of resolving any substantive matter and yet at the same time the


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standards to which appeal is made are held to be independent of those by whom appeal is made. In organization theory we need look no further than our text books, journals or even this volume to witness the same. The most convincing texts are those that present difference most cogently. In seeking to overcome, rather than to accept or enjoy this kaleidoscope (Tsoukas & Cummings, 1997), MacIntyre writes a particular genre of history, one which reconstructs the past to explain the fragmentation of the present. To apply such methods to organization studies would require a similar historic reconstruction, of the type which engaged the mind of that great early institution theorist Tom Burns in the final years of his life.32 In the absence of such an undertaking, our purpose in this chapter has been to invite readers unfamiliar with MacIntyre to seek him out. Inasmuch as our representations of his work have failed to meet the standards and meanings of the original, as they surely have, the error is ours, but inasmuch as this chapter encourages readers to consider or reconsider the work of Alasdair MacIntyre himself, the credit is his.

NOTES 1. We will hereafter cite from the third edition published in 2007. 2. The International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry (http://www. macintyreanenquiry.org 3. For example, MacIntyre demonstrates how different idioms used by translators of Homer in the sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries transform its meaning before remarking that, ‘Each translator uses an idiom familiar in his own time, the presupposition of whose use is some contemporary well-articulated account of the determinants of action and of the corresponding psychology imputed to the agent’ (MacIntyre, 1988, p. 17). 4. See Breen (2007) for a MacIntyrean critique of Habermas in the context of work organization. 5. Rand is one philosophical realist against whose Aristotelianism MacIntyre’s has been contrasted (Beadle, 2008a). 6. MacIntyre (2006, p. viii) has attested to his debt to Kuhn’s notion of scientific paradigms for the development of this conception. However the use to which Kuhn’s notion has been put in social science, as a motif for criterionless choice, is to be rejected. 7. In answer to a question at the Second International Conference of MacIntyrean Enquiry at St. Meinrad, Indiana in 2008, the theologian and sometime collaborator of MacIntyre’s, Stanley Hauerwas argued that the best argument against relativism was ‘Try living it’. The different traditions of substantive rationality to which relativists must point to make their arguments are always themselves universalizing traditions (MacIntyre, 1987b, p. 18). 8. See MacIntyre (2007, pp. 28–29).

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9. The argument has a long pedigree in his work – see MacIntyre (1973) for example. 10. See especially Turner (2003), D’Andrea (2007, pp. 165–197), MacIntyre (1973, 1979b, 1990c, 2004b [1958], pp. 1–38). 11. MacIntyre does not rule out hypothesis testing as such but the results of such testing fall into the general limits that social enquiry must understand itself as working within, such that their results must take the form of ‘characteristically and for the most part y’ (MacIntyre, 2004b, p. 14). 12. This account is supplemented but not amended in later work which clarifies its inherent metaphysics (MacIntyre, 1999a, 2008c). 13. It is worth noting here that drawing this equivalence between organizations and practice–institution combinations does not preclude non-organizational examples of practices being institutionalized. The making and sustaining of family life (one of MacIntyre’s example practices) is institutionalized through arrangements such as marriage (often referred to as an institution of course), taxation and other fiscal allowances, and cultural mores which support it, without it being in any sense an organization. 14. MacIntyre’s condemnation of the character of the distinctively modern and hence emotivist manager (2007, pp. 25–29) has been widely discussed (Anthony, 1986; Mangham, 1995; Brewer, 1997; Beadle, 2002; Moore, 2008) but less attention has been paid to the argument that decision-making in practice–institution combinations requires management of a specific kind. 15. It is quite likely that many institutions will house more than one practice. Universities as institutions, for example, house parts of many practices in all the different subject areas which are represented. It is also possible for practices to extend beyond particular organizations so that the organization houses only a part of the practice – the practices of physics and medicine, for example, are housed only partly inside universities. For simplicity, however, we assume here a single practice within any particular institution. 16. A similar point arose in debates over both business (Beadle, 2008b) and teaching with MacIntyre’s argument that teaching is ‘not a practice, but a set of skills and habits put to the service of a variety of practices. The teacher should think of her or himself as a mathematician, a reader of poetry, an historian or whatever, engaged in communicating craft and knowledge to apprentices’ (MacIntyre & Dunne, 2002, p. 5). See also Dunne and Hogan (2004) for a series of rejoinders. 17. It must therefore resist the very processes of environmental influence to which new institutional theory points. 18. See Moore (2005b) for more on the distinction and relationship between organizational culture and character. 19. For a somewhat polemical argument that even Anglo-American capitalism need not be antithetical to the pursuit of internal goods through practices, see Dobson (2009). 20. There is a keen debate as to whether institutional theory is itself hermeneutic. Both Stott (1987) and Jennings and Greenwood (2003, p. 199) offer evidence for the hermeneutic roots of institutional theory though both Lok and Willmott (2006) and Weick (2003) are heavily critical of new institutional theory’s neglect of language and interpretation. Nevertheless we cite Weick and Sutcliffe’s (2003) use of Salancik and Pfeffer’s (1978) institutional account of ‘behavioural commitment’ in Part Three below. 21. There are parallels here with Granovetter’s (1985) notion of ‘embeddedness’.


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22. We have noted briefly in previous work (Moore & Beadle, 2006, pp. 380, 384) the relationship of ‘new’ institutional theory to MacIntyrean organization theory, particularly in relation to the environmental precondition for organizational virtue. 23. MacIntyre’s fullest account of the conditions that are required for our development into independent practical reasoners is contained in Dependent Rational Animals (1999a). 24. MacIntyre’s analysis of this weakness in institutional decision-making has recently been echoed in his critique of rational decision theory as an account of individual decision-making (2008b). 25. We discuss both the effects of and responsibility for such compartmentalization in Beadle and Moore (2006). 26. It is important to note here that it is the narrative ordering of our lives that enables us to choose between practices – that is should one engage in the practice of writing an academic paper in preference to collecting one’s child from school? In a useful supplement to the discussion in After Virtue (2007), MacIntyre (1986) shows how we learn standards of reasoning within practice but must move beyond practice to the narrative ordering of goods in our lives considered as a whole. None of this negates the role of good reasons within practices as those generated by and through the tradition informing the practice and that have application to all practitioners qua practitioners. If in the course of setting up rigging on a boat or in a circus tent I have a good reason for checking the ropes, then so does everyone else setting up rigging. 27. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/05/98/the_bristol_heart_babies/ 115367.stm; date accessed 21 April 2009. 28. Point 8 within the summary (Secretary of State for Health 2001). 29. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1218149.stm; date accessed 21 April 2009. 30. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/05/98/the_bristol_heart_babies/ 149666.stm; date accessed 21 April 2009. 31. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/532006.stm; date accessed 21 April 2009. 32. Tom Burns is the organizational scholar to whom MacIntyre makes most frequent reference (e.g. 2007, p. 106) The manuscript of this unfinished work, which also references MacIntyre, can be found at http://www.tomburns.org.uk/manuscript. html.

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Dr Ron Beadle is Reader in Organization and Business Ethics at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, UK. His collaborative work with Geoff Moore has provided a heuristic for a distinctly MacIntyrean approach to organization theory. He has published empirical applications of theoretical defences and MacIntyre’s work in Organisation Studies, Analyse and Kritik, Culture and Organization, Philosophy of Management, Tamara – Journal of Critical Post-Modern Organization Science and the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. He is on the editorial board of Philosophy of Management and the executive of the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry. Geoff Moore is Professor of Business Ethics at Durham Business School, Durham University, UK. His collaborative work with Ron Beadle has provided a heuristic for a distinctly MacIntyrean approach to organization theory. He has published on the application of MacIntyre’s work to organizations in Business Ethics Quarterly and Organization Studies and has made various other contributions to business ethics and Fair Trade, in


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Philosophy of Management, Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics: a European Review, Journal of Strategic Marketing and Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal. He is on the editorial boards of Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics and Business Ethics: a European Review and is on the Executive Committee of the International Society for Business, Economics and Ethics, as well as being a member of the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry.

MARXIST PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES: MARXIST CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF SOME IMPORTANT ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS Paul S. Adler ABSTRACT This chapter aims to how Marx’s ideas and subsequent Marxist-inspired scholarship have contributed to the analysis of the various forms of work organization. It summarizes Marx’s basic philosophy, theory of history, and critique of political economy; it distinguishes more critical and more optimistic variants of Marxist theory; and it then shows how these ideas have been used in the analysis of key organizational forms, contrasting Marxist versus non-Marxist approaches and critical versus optimistic versions of Marxism. Keywords: Marxism; dialectical materialism; historical materialism; organization form.


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INTRODUCTION It is hardly obvious that Karl Marx, a philosopher, economist, and revolutionary activist who died a century and a quarter ago, should have much relevance to organization studies today. Surely, the skeptic says, too many important features of contemporary organizations postdate Marx. On closer inspection, however, it is clear that organizations today share many fundamental features with organizations of Marx’s time. In particular, we still live with a basically capitalist form of society and enterprise. Even so, the skeptic retorts, social science has surely advanced since Marx. Here too, the skeptic is off the mark: social sciences find continuous nourishment in their classics (Alexander, 1987), and Marx figures prominently among the classics that continue to inform both social science in general and organization studies in particular (Adler, 2009b; Marens, 2009). Since Marx’s time, the general matrix of Marxist theory has not remained fixed in doctrinaire rigidity: numerous variants of the basic theory have emerged (Anderson, 1979; Burawoy, 1990). This chapter’s goal, however, is to highlight the most basic and enduring of Marx’s insights, and to show how they have contributed to the analysis of the various forms of work organization.1 The following sections discuss, in turn, Marx’s basic theory, Marxist contributions to our understanding of organization forms, and finally Marxism’s critics. My survey is limited to English-language publications and focuses on organization studies construed rather narrowly, ignoring Marxist work in contiguous fields of research such as accounting (on Marxist-related work here, see, e.g., Bryer, 1999; Tinker, 1999) or marketing (Lee & Murray, 1995).

MARXISM: KEY IDEAS Marx’s ideas can be grouped under three headings: philosophy (‘‘dialectical materialism’’), history (‘‘historical materialism’’), and economics (‘‘critique of political economy’’). The following sections review them briefly in turn.

Dialectical Materialism Reading Marx is sometimes exhilarating – his prose can be very compelling, especially as polemic; but contemporary readers can also find long passages excruciatingly opaque. This opacity is often the effect of Marx’s commitment

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to dialectics as form of reasoning and presentation. The dialectical form is disconcerting to the unfamiliar reader; but it is rewarding once its assumptions are understood (see Ollman, 2003 for a particularly clear exposition of Marxist dialectics). Marx inherited and adapted the dialectical approach from Hegel. Hegel saw history as the progressive emergence of the Spirit (German: Geist), which can be understood either as the God-essence of the universe or as humanity’s understanding of itself. The Spirit evolves as a function of the contradictions among the key ideas governing successive periods (Zeitgeists): a thesis provokes the emergence of an antithesis, and the conflict between them eventually yields a synthesis. This synthesis abolishes the thesis and antithesis, but also conserves what was valid about them. The notion that the objective world embodies contradictions is rather foreign to the Anglo-American intellectual tradition: we often assume that contradictions obtain only between logical propositions, not between real things. However, this dialectical approach provides a fruitful heuristic device for characterizing the development of systems over time, especially social systems. Marx retained the ‘‘rational core’’ of Hegel’s dialectics, but turned it on its head, arguing that it is contradictions in the real world of human interaction that explain the evolution of ideas rather than vice versa. This mode of reasoning is visible right from the start of Marx’s magnum opus, Capital. Here Marx argues that the ‘‘germ’’ of capitalism – the inner core whose unfolding contradictions explain capitalist development – is the ‘‘commodity.’’ Marx uses this term to refer to any product or service produced for sale rather than for direct use. Commodities embody a contradictory unity of use-value and exchange-value. Unity because each pole of this contradiction presupposes the other: for the product to be created in the first place, the producer must believe it has exchange-value – power for the seller to command a determinate amount of money or goods in exchange; and to generate this exchange-value for the seller, the product must have use-value – usefulness to the purchaser. Contradictory unity because the two poles oppose each other: their disjointedness can put them in conflict with each other, and this in at least two ways. First, the producer anticipates the exchange-value of the product, but does not know until she reaches the market if this hope will be realized or if, on the contrary, the use-values that were consumed in producing the commodity will be wasted: pursuit of exchange-value can destroy use-value, for example, when new houses cannot be sold even at the builder’s cost, and when automobiles must be sold at a loss to move them off the lot. Second, when production is oriented to exchangevalue, there are many socially important use-values that will remain unmet,

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for example, clean environment, health care for all, and food and shelter for the homeless. This real contradiction embedded in the commodity form shapes both the structure and the historical trajectory of capitalism in multiple ways, of which I will discuss a few below. The notion of real contradiction has reappeared in mainstream organization studies as a kind of ‘‘paradox’’ (Lewis, 2000; Poole & van de Ven, 1989). The Marxian version locates the conflict that is at the heart of paradox in the real world, whereas many others use the notion of paradox to refer exclusively to theoretical conflicts created by inadequacies in our theories about the world. We should note in passing that among Marxists there is some debate as to whether the concept of real contradiction is of much use, or even preserves validity, in the study of the natural domain as compared to the social domain. Ollman (2003) offers a nuanced assessment, suggesting that the dialectical form of causality subsumes more ‘‘common sense’’ forms of causality as special cases, and that the dialectical form has proven powerful in analyzing social structures, most notably capitalism, but has proven less unhelpful in the natural sciences. In his ontological commitments, Marx’s dialectical materialism puts him in opposition both to ‘‘vulgar’’ materialism, which accords ideas no causal efficacy, and to ‘‘idealism,’’ which sees the world as driven entirely by ideas or, in the extreme versions, as composed only of ideas. Marx’s view is more consistent with ‘‘critical realism’’ as developed by Bhaskar (1975) and others (Brown, Fleetwood, & Roberts, 2002; Fleetwood & Ackroyd, 2004). Marx distinguishes between the knowledge that we have of the world and the knowledge-independent world around us. While all knowledge is provisional, the aim of science, including social science, is to discern the underlying forces that give shape to this latter, knowledge-independent world. These forces may not be immediately visible in the empirical world around us, but that fact does not negate their reality: invisible gravity explains the apple’s visible fall from the tree; the real contradictions hidden within the commodity form contribute to the persistence of economic cycles and crises. Science should aim to offer an account of the mechanisms that generate the more visible, empirical manifestations of these underlying forces. Marx thus has a ‘‘stratified’’ ontology, in which scientific explanation follows a path that ascends from the abstract, deepest, less visible structures to the visible, concrete, empirically observed world. In this, Marx is radically opposed to empiricism, which sees science as limited to discerning patterns in the visible world. And he is no less radically opposed to strong forms of social constructivism common in the discursive universe of postmodernism, for which the very pursuit of objective knowledge is illusory if not worse.


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Notwithstanding Marxism’s rejection of strong social constructivism, dialectical materialism embraces the social nature of knowledge. Mainstream management scholars often contend that politics should not enter into processes of knowledge creation: they believe that value-neutral objectivity is the hallmark of proper scientific work and that advocacy would undermine that objectivity. Marx argues that there are no facts without theories: our access to the knowledge-independent world is always mediated by our existing concepts, and in a class-divided society, these mediating concepts are shaped (at least in part, and even if only unconsciously) by political value considerations. To adopt the standpoint of the dominant elite inevitably encourages the development of theories that legitimize and naturalize the status quo: such theories cannot penetrate deeply into the structures that give rise to this domination. The Marxist argument is that the view ‘‘from below’’ has greater potential to generate more complete and more objective knowledge – knowledge that raises consciousness about exploitation and helps movement toward emancipation. This idea has been taken up and generalized by feminist scholars: as Harding puts it, research should begin with the concrete circumstances and lived experiences of the ‘‘systematically oppressed, exploited and dominated, those who have fewer interests in ignorance about how the social order actually works’’ (1991, p. 150). In a social world of exploitation and domination, we can learn more about deep structures and how they can be changed by adopting the standpoints of the subaltern (see also Adler & Jermier, 2005; Harding, 2004; Wedel, Shore, Feldman, & Lathrop, 2005).

Historical Materialism In The German Ideology (originally published in 1845), Marx and his lifelong collaborator Engels mark their distance from Hegel and the Young Hegelians. They advance three main ideas. First, human action is constrained and enabled by its historically specific conditions: generic transhistorical theorizing is therefore a poor foundation for social science. Second, the ideas we work with, including abstract theoretical ones, are conditioned by our own historical context. And finally, because people must produce in order to live, the sphere of production is primary relative to the sphere of thought and culture. While the last of these ideas, expressing Marx’s materialism, is eternally unfashionable in intellectual circles, it does have counterparts in several streams of nonMarxist social science. The second idea is less common. And the first contrasts strikingly with most contemporary social science, where theory is considered more advanced precisely to the degree that it is based on ostensibly timeless

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features of human nature, of dyadic interaction, or of larger collectivities. Marx begins with the opposite assumption because he sees human nature as largely socially determined and therefore relatively plastic. The Communist Manifesto (originally 1848), the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), the Grundrisse (1857), and Capital (1867) further articulate Marx’s historical materialism. (See Cohen (1978) for a particularly clear exposition of historical materialism.) If production is primary and if human production is by nature collective rather than individual, then the most basic structure of society is its ‘‘mode of production.’’ (Concrete societies often embody residues of earlier modes alongside their dominant mode: for example, capitalism is dominant in India today, but coexists with feudalism.) Modes of production are defined by two sets of relations. ‘‘Forces of production’’ are humanity’s relations with the natural world, composed of material ‘‘means of production’’ (equipment, technology, raw materials) and human productive capacities (skills, etc.). ‘‘Relations of production’’ define the distribution across social categories (‘‘classes’’) of rights to ownership and control over these means of production. In the capitalist mode of production, for example, capitalists own the means of production and compete in product markets to sell their commodities, and workers own nothing but their labor power and compete in the labor market to earn a wage. On top of this ‘‘base’’ of forces and relations of production sits a ‘‘superstructure’’ of culture, religion, law, and government. This superstructure is the means by which the ruling class maintains its domination and attempts to moderate its internal conflicts. Marx’s materialism leads him to see causality flowing mainly upward, from forces to relations of production, and from base to superstructure, but he acknowledges the importance of downward causal paths, especially in shorter term and for more localized settings. Marx is famous for the Communist Manifesto’s assertion that ‘‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.’’ There is little specifically Marxist about a perspective on history that highlights conflict and struggle: Marxism is distinctive in (a) privileging class conflict where much non-Marxist history devotes more attention to international and intraclass conflict among factions within the ruling class, (b) seeing this class conflict as taking different forms depending on the structure of the prevailing relations of production, and (c) seeing the direction and scope of this conflict as shaped by the real contradiction between the relations and forces of production. The broad sweep of human history can be understood as the dialectical progression of successively more productive modes of production. In the European region, this progression was from primitive communism to slavery, feudalism, and then capitalism. This progression is dialectical insofar as the


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emergence of a new structure is the result of the internal contradictions of the old. Class struggle between the exploiting and exploited classes is the motor of this progression; its overall direction is set by the vector of advancing forces of production. When the prevailing relations of production are no longer able to support the further advance of the forces of production, class conflict intensifies and the old class structure is eventually overthrown, allowing a new mode of production to emerge in which human productivity can develop further. Capitalism is distinctive in this sequence of modes of production because its characteristic relations of production greatly intensify pressures to develop the forces of production. In comparison, all previous modes are far less technologically dynamic. On the other hand, however, these capitalist relations of production simultaneously fetter the further development of the forces of production. This contradiction prompts Marx to predict as inevitable the emergence of a new form of society – communism – that would transcend the contradictions of capitalist society, preserving the positive historical achievements of capitalism (such as advanced technology and freeing the individual from the shackles of ascribed status), while abolishing private property in the means of production and freeing society from the anarchy of market-coordinated, profit-driven production.

Critique of Political Economy Capitalism as a mode of production emerges from small-scale commodity production when labor too becomes a commodity. This happens through a process of violent dispossession that deprives workers of alternative ways to access consumption or production resources, and that thus forces workers to exchange their capacity to work for a wage as if this capacity too were a commodity produced for sale on a market. Capitalist relations of production are therefore defined by two more specific relations: a relation of competition among commodity-producing enterprises and the wage relation subordinating workers to managerial authority in the enterprises that employ them. Marx’s analysis of the capitalist economy takes the form of a ‘‘critique of political economy.’’ Consistent with the philosophical premises discussed above, Marx argues that the economic base of capitalist society engenders a distinctive set of ideas about itself – a spontaneously generated ideology that he calls the ‘‘fetishism of commodities.’’ This ideology imputes causal powers to commodities and to their money equivalents, when commodities and money are in reality mere manifestations of underlying human activity.

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To give an everyday example: we often say that ‘‘the market’’ obliges a firm to cut production schedules and lay off workers. Marx argues that this locution makes a fetish of the market in the following sense: in capitalist society, we are alienated from each other; instead of collectively planning our production, we have put into place an anonymous mechanism – ‘‘the market’’ – which now constrains production and employment decisions; it is true that individual capitalists must submit to this mechanism, but behind the mechanism and explaining its apparent causal power lies the structure of capitalist relations of production. This fetishism is not merely a subjective illusion or error, but a (false) understanding of ourselves that is engendered by the social structure itself. A serious scientific account of the capitalist economy must penetrate below the level of surface appearance – where the market appears as a self-equilibrating and self-perpetuating mechanism – to reveal the historically contingent character of this capitalist social structure. It must therefore take the form of a critique of this spontaneous ideology. And this critique must encompass the more theoretically elaborated form of this ideology known in Marx’s time as ‘‘political economy’’ and today as ‘‘economics.’’ (See Foley (1986, 2006) for a particularly clear exposition of Marx’s economic views.) Marx builds on and critiques classical political economists such as Ricardo. He follows Ricardo in arguing that tastes, supply, and demand do not determine the price of a commodity (as argued current economic theory), but only influence its fluctuation around an objectively determined value. This value is determined by the socially necessary labor time invested in the product’s production. Note that, contrary to a popular misconception, this ‘‘labor theory of value’’ is not a normative theory but an analytic one: Marx is not arguing that value should be based on labor input; on the contrary, he is adamant that use-values typically also require a host of nonlabor contributions; his theory aims to explain how exchange-value works as the principle governing capitalist exchange. Marx develops his theory of the capitalist economy on the simplifying assumption that all products exchange at their values. (Marx goes on later to explain how prices also reflect different industries’ capital intensities, and how innovation allows producers to derive temporary ‘‘super profits.’’) If all products exchange at their values, we are immediately confronted with a puzzle: where do profits come from?2 This puzzle was the stumbling block for all prior theories of political economy, including Ricardo’s. To understand profit, Marx argues, we need to find a commodity that somehow creates value even as it is being used up. This special commodity is labor power. Firms pay workers a wage in exchange for the use of their ability to work – their labor


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power. In principle if not always in practice, firms pay workers the value of this service, which is determined, as is the cost of any commodity, by the socially necessary labor time required to produce it, which is expressed in the cost of the daily consumption required for workers and their families as well as in their expenses for training and education. The employment contract specifies that in exchange for this wage, workers will make available their labor services for a specified period. The gap between the value of labor power (the part of the working day necessary to cover the worker’s wage, say four hours) and value produced by the expenditure of labor power (the product is sold on the market at a price that reflects the full eight hours work in the day – abstracting for now from the role of nonlabor costs) is a measure of exploitation. Given the level of productivity attained by the forces of production in the capitalist phase of historical evolution, it only takes a few hours in the working day for workers to produce the equivalent of their wages (‘‘necessary labor time’’), and employers can appropriate the value produced in the rest of the working day (‘‘surplus labor’’ and thus ‘‘surplus value’’) with which to pay both the nonlabor inputs and investors’ profit. Note that Marx characterizes these relations of production as ‘‘exploitation’’ not because the worker does not receive the wages representing the full value of the day’s labor: on the contrary, Marx celebrates the great progress in productivity that allows for the creation of surplus, just as he honors the need to reinvest that surplus. He sees this as exploitation because control over the surplus is in the hands of the capitalist, not the whole collectivity. And even if an individual capitalist were inclined to share control (indeed, even if the firm is run as a workers’ cooperative), the implacable constraint of market competition on product, labor, and capital markets obliges the firm to pursue every avenue for maximizing surplus – without regard to workers’ welfare – and to redirect this surplus to areas with greatest profit potential – without regard to social utility. In Marx’s account, exploitation is not an exceptional state of affairs, a departure from the norms of competitive market relations, but on the contrary, a fundamental, defining feature of the capitalist form of production even in its more competitive variant. The distinction between labor and labor power was, according to Marx, his great discovery. The resulting theory of the origin of capitalist profit is rather straightforward and intuitive. But to reach this insight, we need to penetrate the fetishism of commodities, and in particular to see the distinctive social relation hidden behind the commodity labor power: we need to recognize that in order for labor power to present itself as a commodity on a labor market, masses of people have been deprived of any alternative access to consumption or production goods, and have been forced to sell their

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creative powers in exchange for wage by subordinating themselves to the alien authority of the capitalist. Alienation in Marx’s theory – unlike most of the sociology that cites him – is thus not just a subjective state of mind, but first and foremost an objective feature of the social structure. Marx identifies two generic strategies for increasing surplus value. First, firms can extend and intensify the working day and can force more members of each family into the labor force. This generates what Marx calls the ‘‘absolute’’ form of surplus value. Second, employers can respond to competitive pressures by technological and organizational innovations that reduce necessary labor time. This generates the ‘‘relative’’ form of surplus value. When capitalism first establishes itself, firms usually leave the technology of production unchanged, and exploitation takes the form of increasing absolute surplus value. The resulting contrast in hours and intensity of work between traditional village life and early factory life has been documented in numerous scholarly and literary accounts (Thompson, 1963). This is what Marx (1977, Appendix) calls the formal subordination of labor to capital: it is merely formal because the underlying labor process is as yet unchanged, still relying on traditional techniques. As capitalism consolidates, the negative social externalities of excessive working hours and child labor prompt political action by both workers and enlightened capitalists, resulting in new laws and regulations. These restrictions increase incentives for firms to accelerate technological innovation, and as a result, relative surplus value becomes progressively more important, and we see the emergence of the real subordination of labor to capital as the labor process itself is progressively reshaped by the introduction of new production techniques. This shift represents the historical unfolding of the basic contradiction of the capitalist production process, a contradiction which itself reflects the contradiction between the two poles of the commodity form. On the one hand, the production process is a labor process, in which use-values in the form of work skills and effort, tools, and materials are combined to create new use-values. On the other hand, and simultaneously, it is a valorization process in which these use-values appear in the form of exchange-values – monetary wages, inventory costs, and capital investment – that are combined to create money profit (see Bottomore, 1991, pp. 267–270; Marx, 1977, Appendix; Thompson, 1989). Marx summarizes the real contradiction between the labor process and the valorization process as follows: If capitalist direction [of work] is thus twofold in content, owing to the twofold nature of the process of production which has to be directed – on the one hand a social labor


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process for the creation of a product, and on the other hand capital’s process of valorization – in form it is purely despotic. (1977, p. 450)

The more conventional reading of Marx interprets this passage to mean that the technical imperatives of the labor process are subsumed or displaced by the social imperatives of valorization. The dialectical reading recalls that in Marx’s Hegelian discourse, content (here: the social labor process) and form (the valorization process) can be in a relation of real contradiction with each other. (The real contradiction between form and content, appearance and essence, is a common theme in Marx’s work. Geras (1971) explains the pitfalls of interpreting socially contingent forms as the true substance as well as the pitfalls of the converse illusion of seeing forms as a mere illusion.) On the one hand, valorization pressures drive capitalists to upgrade the capabilities of the labor process by ‘‘socializing’’ the production process, by integrating a widening spectrum of specialized skills into the ‘‘collective worker’’ – the community of more or less specialized workers as well as technical and managerial staff, cooperating to produce use-values. But, on the other hand, these same valorization pressures simultaneously drive capitalists to intensify their exploitation of employees in order to expand the capital invested in their firm, and this pressure breaks the collaborative fabric required for the effective functioning of the collective worker. The contradictions of the capitalist production process do not disappear with the shift from absolute to relative surplus value and from formal to real subordination – they deepen as socialization progresses. Marx’s analysis was not limited to the production process. Marx was one of the precursors of national accounting in his study of the distribution of economic activity between producer goods and consumer goods industries, and between sectors that produce new value and those that merely redistribute a fraction of the value already created (personal services, financial services, advertising and sales, real estate). He argued that competition between capitalists tends over the long period toward oligopoly. In his more mature writing, he argued that workers’ real wages would probably rise over the longer term. He argued that cyclical crises are an inevitable feature of capitalist development, periodically throwing masses of workers into misery and destroying productive capacities. He saw environmental crises too as inevitable in such a system. He argued that the imperatives of the capital accumulation process would drive the capitalist system to expand imperialistically, becoming increasingly global and creating interimperialist rivalries, wars, and massive social disruption, but also driving important positive changes for the working populations of

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the dominated countries as these workers are drawn out of precapitalist forms of despotism. He showed that capitalist development requires and stimulates the emergence of increasingly sophisticated credit and financial markets – and thereby multiplies opportunities for fraud (on the contemporary relevance of Marx’s analysis of finance, see Marens, 2009). Marx predicted – accurately – that as capitalism develops, government would play an increasingly important role in both directly assuring key services such as education and infrastructure and regulating the private sector. He was, however, skeptical that any degree of formal political democracy could change the fact that in a class-divided society, government, like the rest of the superstructure, reflects and reinforces the power asymmetry that defines the basic relations of production.

THE SCOPE OF MARXIST THEORY By comparison with other social theories, Marxism has several attractive features. First, it offers a broad historical perspective. For those anxious to understand how a better world might be possible, it is important to understand the historical specificity of capitalism and its distinctive forms of organization so as to highlight the implausibility of the notion (as advanced by, e.g., Fukuyama, 1992) that capitalism could be the ‘‘end of history.’’ Second, Marxist theory offers depth in its analysis of social life. It reveals the role of the social relations at the heart of the economic process. It has a rich conception of power that includes the possibility of ‘‘false consciousness’’ (Lukes, 2005): this concept may be slippery, but no serious discussion of power can ignore the corresponding reality. It has a rich theory of psychology (Cole, 1996; Se`ve, 1978). Third, Marxist theory does not deny the importance of the sphere of ideas and culture, but renders changes in this sphere more intelligible by highlighting their connections to changes in the material base of society. No critical point of view on society can be insensitive to the power of material interests in shaping discourse (as argued by, e.g., Eagleton, 1991). Finally, for scholars in organization studies, Marxist theory has the considerable advantage of embedding the analysis of organizations in a theory of the broader structures of society. It thus draws our attention, for example, to the possibility that the promising advances at the ‘‘leading edge’’ of capitalist development may coexist with – or even presuppose – the superexploitation of those at the lagging edge (e.g., Thompson, 2003).


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Nevertheless, Marxist approaches to organization studies face major hurdles. One hurdle stands out as particularly challenging: Marxists’ difficulty in acknowledging real progress under capitalism. Marxist scholarship is partisan: it is constantly seeking to highlight the problems of capitalism and to show why these problems cannot be satisfactorily resolved without fundamental change in social structure. This partisanship tends to blind Marxists to the progressive effects of continued capitalist development. Marx himself was eloquent on these progressive effects. Capitalism accelerates productivity growth, which tend to bring higher material standards of living to working people and not only to the ruling class. It accelerates technological changes that facilitate travel and communication: these technologies bring people closer in their social lives and facilitate their struggles for emancipation. The imperialist expansion of capitalism pulls masses of people out of precapitalist exploitation into capitalist exploitation: for a young person drawn out of feudalistic exploitation in rural Pakistan into a factory, even a sweatshop, in Islamabad, that represents a considerable expansion of freedom. This imperialist expansion breaks down narrow regional, ethnic, and national boundaries, and as a result people around the globe come to recognize more of their common humanity. As women are drawn into the wage-earning workforce, they are progressively pulled out of the bonds of patriarchal family dependence: this trend is encouraged by the commodification of functions such a food production and by the direct socialization of other functions such as health care and child education. As capitalist industry becomes more automated, it needs more educated workers, and as a result, average education levels rise, and with this rise, workers develop a broader understanding of the world and they master tools for changing that world. Most of these progressive effects are due to what I referred to above as the socialization of production. This socialization makes capitalist relations of production increasingly obsolete and precarious: obsolete because productivity advances are increasingly a function of collaboration rather than competition and exploitation, and precarious because working people become increasingly better equipped to take over the leading role in society from individual capitalists and from the blind mechanism of the market. This analysis motivates Marx’s optimism that the passage from capitalism to a superior mode of production is inevitable, even if this passage proves to be a long time coming and even if the path to the emergence of this new mode of production is arduous. This socialization tendency is in a relation of real contradiction with the valorization imperative that characterizes capitalist production. Valorization

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both stimulates and retards socialization. Focusing on the latter, retarding effect, many Marxists argue – with considerable merit – that the positive effects of capitalist development are often chimerical. Where these positive effects have more substance and durability, Marxists often ignore them, asserting – accurately enough – that they already receive far too much attention from capitalism’s apologists. Where they pay attention to these positive effects, Marxists often denounce their unevenness – which is indeed scandalous – without acknowledging that the aggregate effects are progressive. The credibility of Marxist theory, the plausibility of Marx’s optimism, and the effectiveness of Marxist partisanship are impaired unless Marxism can account for capitalism’s positive effects, and unless it can show that these positive effects do not undermine the central Marxist thesis that capitalism’s basic contradictions cannot be remedied without replacing capitalism with a superior form of society. The challenge for Marxist social theory is therefore to ‘‘walk on both legs’’ – the optimistic leg reflecting socialization’s progress and the critical leg reflecting the enduring limits posed to socialization by valorization constraints. The concept of real contradiction helps Marxists meet this challenge – to acknowledge capitalism’s progressive effects while maintaining and continually renewing Marxism’s critical side. However, in the history of Marxism, there is an enduring tension between those who emphasize its critical side and those who emphasize its optimistic side.

MARXIST PERSPECTIVES ON SOME ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS This section reviews contributions by Marxists to the analysis of some key organizational forms. Space limitations preclude a comprehensive or detailed review, but within each subsection I identify the main arguments and distinguishing features of Marxist versus non-Marxist approaches and of critical versus optimistic versions of Marxism. The Historical Imperative Marxist theory encourages organizational studies to put contemporary organizational forms into historical context. As discussed above, Marx analyzed the transition in forms of organization from handicraft to manufacture to large-scale industry and toward automation, and underlying this transition, Marx identified the shift from absolute to relative surplus


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value. His analyses of these various configurations have proven inspirational to many scholars in analyzing the evolution of forms of organization. More recent Marxist-inspired work in organization studies has built on this foundation, focusing on mutations in the nature of management control. Edwards (1979a) summarizes the main trajectory in the United States as a path from simple control, to technical control, to bureaucratic control. In Edwards’ account, simple and technical control correspond, respectively, to Marx’s absolute and relative surplus value, and the bureaucratic form is a more elaborate regime of relative surplus value that emerges in response to challenges to the legitimacy of technical control by dividing workers against each other and adding a normative layer. Others (e.g., Barker, 1993; Simpson, 1985) argue that bureaucratic control is increasingly being replaced by more internalized forms of control. Edwards and most other critical Marxists present this sequence as one that consolidates ever-greater management control. In a more optimistic Marxist vein, Hirschhorn (1984) and Adler (2001) argue that over the last century or so, evolving forms of management control have become progressively more socialized, encompassing a progressively broader range of human capacities and of business activities. Building on Barley and Kunda’s (1992) study of management journals that revealed alternating periods of focus on normative and rational controls, Adler (2003) argues that normative controls in the form of ‘‘industrial betterment’’ that began emerging in the 1880s relied on relatively primitive psychological mechanisms compared to the sophistication and subtlety of the personal and interpersonal processes invoked by the ‘‘human relations’’ approaches that emerged in the 1920s, and even more so compared to the ‘‘organization culture’’ approaches that emerged in the 1980s. Rational controls in the form of Taylor’s scientific management that emerged in the first decade of the 20th century focused on individual workstations and their interrelations, and since then rational controls have progressively enlarged the sphere of activities under conscious control (rather than ex post market coordination) to encompass entire, complex, internally differentiated organizations under the doctrine of ‘‘systems rationalization,’’ and then beyond the firm to suppliers and customers in the more recent period of outsourcing and business process reengineering.

Bureaucracy Bureaucracy plays a key role in this historical trajectory, and any discussion of bureaucracy must contend with Weber’s (1978) classic account.

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Mainstream sociology interprets Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy in two main ways. More conservative theorists read Weber as celebrating the efficiency of this form of organization. More critically oriented theorists highlight Weber’s discussion of bureaucracy as a form of domination legitimated by appeals to instrumental efficiency: they critique Parsons’ translation and interpretation of Weber on bureaucracy, arguing that Herrschaft should be understood as domination, not leadership or authority (Weiss, 1983). Recent organization theory has highlighted the noneconomic factors that encourage the diffusion of bureaucracy (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983); this has become part of a broad culturalist turn of neoinstitutionalism. Relative to these approaches, the Marxist tradition has been more alert to the specific role of bureaucracy in capitalist production. In Wright’s (1974) critical Marxist account, bureaucracy is prevalent not because of its efficiency but because it is effective as a form of domination appropriate to exploitative capitalist production relations (see also Clawson, 1980; Edwards, 1979b; Marglin, 1974). In the optimistic Marxist account, bureaucracy has a dual nature: as part of the forces of production, it is a powerful social organizing technology that enables the effective functioning of the collective worker; as part of the relations of production, it is a coercive mechanism of exploitation; since bureaucracy embodies this real contradiction, the experience of bureaucracy is typically ambivalent (Adler, 2006). The growing complexity and size of firms along with their progressive bureaucratization has meant considerable growth in the number of managers. On the Marxist account, managers play a contradictory role: on the one hand, they are agents of capitalist exploitation, and on the other, they are coordinators of a complex division of labor and part of the collective worker. Depending on their position in the hierarchy, one or other aspect will be more important; but Marxist theory highlights the extent to which all managers are agents of valorization. On the critical Marxist account, the growth of the management category represents a tendency to ever-more comprehensive management control over workers (Gordon, 1996). Optimistic Marxists suggest that we should also consider the socialization implied by this growth in coordinating capability. Van der Pijl (2004) draws an optimistic Marxist portrait of the senior managers in the private and public sectors of global capitalism, and the dual pressures they are under, as agents of both socialization and exploitation. A key issue in the study of bureaucratic forms has been the role of bureaucracy under socialism. Weber was pessimistic concerning the emancipatory potential of socialism, fearing it would necessarily rely on bureaucracy


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to an even greater extent than capitalism does, and that socialism would therefore engender even greater alienation. According to Lenin, the organization of socialist production would require bureaucratically structured administration, not only because a suitably redesigned bureaucratic form would support democratic administration, but also because in the preliminary, socialist phase of the transition to full communism, class struggle would continue, and bureaucratic structuring would allow the socialist regime to control its enemies and avoid production sabotage. To make this instrument more suited to new, revolutionary ends, Lenin, like Marx, took inspiration from the Paris Commune of 1871, and recommended that the tasks of government and bureaucratic administration be simplified so that they can be performed by every literate person rather than only by specialized functionaries, that officials be elected and recallable, and that they be paid wages comparable to other workers. Hearn (1978) argues that Mao’s cultural revolution sought to create a form of bureaucracy that avoided the risks of technocratic domination by a combination of ‘‘politics in command’’ and the ‘‘mass line’’ – a set of processes that empowered lower-level functionaries and the citizenry at large (‘‘the masses’’) in their relations with the bureaucracy. More recently, a new round of reflection on these issues has been stimulated by a series of volumes edited by Wright as the ‘‘real utopias project’’ (http:// www.ssc.wisc.edu/Bwright/RealUtopias.htm). This project has some strong Marxist roots and addresses in a far more nuanced way the role of bureaucracy in a superior form of social organization.

Taylorism and Scientific Management A vast literature has grown up around the history of scientific management, its effects in specific organizations and its diffusion within US manufacturing (Nelson, 1980, 1992), its transfer overseas (Guillen, 1994), and its use in the public sector (Schachter, 1989). Taylorism is often vilified in mainstream organization studies for its dehumanizing effects. The Marxist approach has seen Taylorism as more than a (possibly ill-conceived) management technique: Braverman (1974) argues that Frederick Taylo’s scientific management provides the template for capitalists’ exploitation of labor; it is management’s program of real subordination made explicit. If, in the critical Marxist analysis, Taylorism is an offensive against workers, the optimistic Marxist view starts with empirical observations such as those by Nelson (1980) and Kelly (1982), who show that Taylor’s scientific management brought improvements in pay and conditions for

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many workers. Jacoby (1985) documents the rapprochement between the scientific management movement and the labor movement after World War I. Nyland (1998) discusses the strong leftist leanings of many of the key figures in the movement. Adler (1995) thus argues that scientific management represents a step toward greater socialization, since it created tools for designing work processes – tools that are neither the privately held tacit know-how of craft workers nor assertions of arbitrary power by foremen, but engineering models subject to verification and challenge by workers.

Lean Production Lean production has given rise to a sizable literature, some of it Marxist in inspiration (Adler, 1995; Babson, 1995a, 1995b; Elger & Smith, 1994, 2005; Smith, 2000). Much Marxist analysis has focused on lean production’s intensification of work effort, through eliminating unproductive pores in the work-day and further rationalizing workers’ movements. It is seen as an extension of Taylor’s scientific management. Quality circles are often a part of the lean production model, and these have been subjected to Marxist critique as manipulative efforts (Grenier, 1988). Optimistic Marxists add that lean production makes some important steps toward socialization. Teamwork has been systematized, as have relations between teams (Delbridge, Lowe, & Oliver, 2000). Lean production brings under planful control upstream (supplier) and downstream (customer) relations. Workers typically receive more training in the logic of the production system and in systematic improvement techniques (Adler, 2007; Kenney & Florida, 1993). Lean production, in this perspective, is a nice illustration of how contradictions deepen with capitalism’s advance, in particular the contradiction involved in the firm’s need for workers who are simultaneously dependable and disposable (Hyman, 1987).

Knowledge Management Knowledge management has recently become a popular theme in management literature. Marxist scholars have insisted that in reality very few knowledge workers can produce anything of economic value without access to means of production controlled by others, that only few occupations allow employees to use much of their knowledge, and that relatively few organizations invest substantially in employee learning. For the main part,


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contemporary management is a direct descendant of scientific management in its effort to ensure that the key repositories of knowledge come under greater management control, even at the cost of productive efficiency. Some proponents of knowledge management decry this shortsightedness (Brown & Duguid, 1991, 2000; Davenport & Prusak, 1998), but few organizations appear willing to endow the collective worker with enough self-direction to develop comprehensive working knowledge (Jaros, 2004; Prichard, Hull, Chumer, & Willmott, 2000). Optimistic Marxists are more enthusiastic about even modest steps by management toward recognizing the power of knowledge. They see the real, albeit modest, growth in knowledge intensity of jobs as the embodiment of Marx’s prognosis of an increasingly ‘‘social individual’’ (Adler, 2001). In this, the optimistic strand builds on the assumption that all work, even the most routine, involves at least some knowledge: this may be tacit (Kusterer, 1978), but it is often collective (Spender, 1996). Lave and Wenger’s work on the concept of ‘‘community of practice’’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) has helped bring Marxist ideas to a wider audience, most notably the community of practice as the collective worker, and practice itself as the primary locus of knowledge.

Professions and Professional Firms There is considerable debate in both sociology and organization studies over whether the professions are destined to strengthen or weaken as capitalism advances. The stakes for the credibility of Marxist theory are high: Marx argued that the traditional middle class of small business would be destroyed by capitalist development, but acknowledged that new middle-class positions were constantly being formed as capitalist development created the need for more technical and management experts. If this latter trend were to predominate, and if these new categories formed a distinct new middle class, and if this new class developed interests distinct from and opposed to the working-class’s interests, then Marx’s basic argument about the future of capitalism would be seriously challenged (Boreham, 1983; Carchedi, 1977; Derber, 1983; Derber, Schwartz, & Magrass, 1990b; Johnson, 1977; Larson, 1980; Meiksins & Smith, 1996; Walker, 1979; Whalley, 1986; Wright, Costello, Hachen, & Sprague, 1982). The growth of such a new class has been predicted by many observers. Bell (1973), for example, argued that professions will gradually supersede corporations as the dominant organizing principle in society. Against this

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professionalization thesis, other observers point out that professionals themselves have been dragged under the capitalist juggernaut. Some, such as Haug (1973) and Rothman (1984), see a process of deprofessionalization due to increasing market rivalry between professions, the diffusion of expertise, and rising levels of public education and skepticism toward experts. Others (e.g., Derber, Schwartz, & Magrass, 1990a; McKinlay & Stoeckle, 1988) argue a more explicitly Marxist proletarianization position that highlights professionals’ progressive subordination to hierarchical and market rationality. Yet others follow Freidson’s diagnosis (1984) that there is little empirical support for the idea that professionalism’s distinctive features have eroded, but there is much evidence that regulation within professions has become more rationalized and formalized. Adler, Kwon, and Heckscher (2008) argue that capitalist development does indeed challenge the professions: the traditional ‘‘liberal’’ independent professional and their small-scale partnerships are being replaced by more hierarchically organized large-scale organizations. However, in an optimistic Marxist register, they also argue that professional work still requires a strong professional community – the effective production of these complex use-values requires a robust collective worker – and that the nature of this professional community is evolving toward a new, more advanced form that Marx might celebrate as prefiguring communism’s ‘‘free association of producers.’’ Contingent Work Marxist theory offers some useful lenses for studying the proliferation of ‘‘nonstandard’’ employment arrangements – part-time, interim, and contract work, the growing instability of regular employment, and the trend toward outsourcing (Kalleberg, Reskin, & Hudson, 2000; Osterman, 2000; Rogers, 1995; Smith, 1998, 2001). Empirical analysis reveals that contingent work has different effects and meanings for different workers: for some, it amounts to semi-unemployment, and for others, it is a wellestablished niche in specialized labor market (Barley & Kunda, 2004). Critical Marxists have shown how these new forms of work fragment existing collectivities. They undermine – often deliberately – the modest countervailing powers that some workers have managed to establish; they are particularly effective against unions. The loss of permanent status inflicts economic and psychological costs. From the optimistic Marxist point of view, contingent work appears to be in some cases a reflection of the deepening social division of labor, as activities are aggregated to form into new industries (e.g., engineering, food, or janitorial services). While economic


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insecurity is often a source of real anxiety and suffering, in some cases, the ability to exercise choice in assignments is experienced as real freedom. This kind of flexibility has some positive progressive content, even if it takes an exploitative form. Network Organization Marxists have, since Marx, predicted growing concentration and centralization in industry, and therefore a tendency toward the domination of industries by large, bureaucratized oligopolistic firms (Baran & Sweezy, 1966). In this, they have been joined by writers from other, non-Marxist starting points, such as Galbraith (1967) and Schumpeter (1942). The rise of the ‘‘network’’ form – linking smaller, more focused firms in highly adaptable customer– supplier relationships – therefore represents a challenge to conventional thinking. Looking within organizations too, many observers argue that stable bureaucratic structures are giving way to flexible internal networks. Marxists have responded to this challenge in two main ways. Critical Marxists have focused on the power asymmetries prevalent in these networks, arguing that in practice these networks are neither idealized markets of voluntary exchange between equals nor warm solidaristic relationships between peers, but instead structures of domination (Fields, 2004; Harrison, 1997). Optimistic Marxists have argued that these networks, insofar as their distinctive mechanism is trust rather than competition or authority, represent a genuine, if partial, socialization of capitalist relations of production (Adler, 2001). Engestro¨m (2008) uses Marxist ‘‘cultural–historical activity theory’’ to explore the ‘‘knotworking’’ involved in continuously negotiating the crossorganization collaborations that mark the network form.

Families and Households The family is also an organizational form undergoing considerable change. The rise of single-parent households and the increasing involvement of women in the wage-earning workforce have deeply transformed the family. Cala´s and Smircich (2006) outline a broad spectrum of feminist approaches to organization studies. Their discussion of ‘‘socialist feminism’’ summarizes some of the key debates and insights associated with the Marxist tradition within feminism. (The earlier literature is reviewed by Thompson (1989), Hartmann (1981), and Vogel (2008).) A key contribution of feminist work to the Marxist project has been to challenge simplistic accounts of the relation between the realms of

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production and those of reproduction. Feminists have argued that the production process presupposes a reproduction process, that women and men play different roles in these two processes, and that these differences are interrelated. This interrelation is important for understanding not only the structures of family and nonwork life but also the role of gender within production relations (Acker, 2000; Acker & Van Houten, 1974; Cockburn, 1991; Game & Pringle, 1984; Kanter, 1977; Reskin & Ross, 1992; Smith, 2002; Wajcman, 1998). Within this broad field, feminist work has had a particularly fruitful dialogue with Marxism in the study of technology and the organization of both wage work and domestic work (Wajcman, 2004).

And Many More y There are many other organizational forms that space limitations preclude me from discussing: multidivisional, multinational, and conglomerate types of corporations; unions (craft, industrial, associational, partnerships with management); government agencies; political parties (electoral, network form); military organizations; volunteer organizations; open-source software communities; churches; mission-based organizations; cooperatives; feudal organizations; slavery-based organizations; prisons; etc. In most of these, Marxist ideas have had some impact, and in some areas, substantial.

MARXISM’S CRITICS Criticisms of Marxism come in many variants. Some criticisms are hastily dismissive. Buss (1993), for example, assumes that Marxist theory stands or falls by the record of the former socialist countries, and asserts that so many other theorists have decided it is wrong that it must be wrong. Donaldson (1985) is surely correct that much of what passes for Marxist organization studies is indistinguishable from left Weberianism, but he is surely wrong when he asserts that because Marxism is mainly concerned with broader social structures and history, it can have nothing to say about the specific issues at the organization level. The more substantive criticisms attack on a variety of fronts. An important current of criticism argues against Marxist theory’s focus on class as a collective actor in history, and in favor of methodological individualism. There is no denying the attraction of deriving generalizable results from parsimonious assumptions about individuals. Recent years have even seen the


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emergence (then disappearance) of a small school of rational choice Marxists. Two problems arise for methodological individualism. First, in order to make the mathematics of aggregation work, these assumptions about human nature must be extremely simplistic and unrealistic. Second, there is no good theoretical reason to privilege the microlevel over the aggregate levels: causality goes both up from the individual and down from the collectivity, evolutionary biologists have made a strong case for the survival advantages of solidaristic altruism. Marx’s materialism is a common point of attack. Many scholars want to accord ideas and culture primacy. Adler and Borys (1993) argue that this is a debate that can be usefully joined, since the Marxist argument for materialism concerns primarily the longer-term and larger-scale transformations. On the Marxist view, local and short-term phenomena may well be primarily caused by ‘‘superstructural’’ factors, even as these factors are shaped by material ones over the broader spaces and the longer term. Discourse thus plays an important role in social change, but it is itself materially conditioned (see also Cloud, 1994, 2001). Marxism is often criticized as a deterministic theory. The criticism is hard to evaluate, since Marx offers no specific time frame for its predictions (Desai, 2002). Moreover, Marx’s predictions themselves are rather soft: they are formulated as trends, and are usually stated along with counteracting forces. At root, this criticism seems to be directed against any theory that prioritizes structure over agency as an explanatory principle. Against this criticism, Marxists respond simply that people make history, but not under conditions of their own choosing; that those conditions limit the options open and resources available for action; and that as a result, although agency may be a powerful explanatory axis for local outcomes of small groups, it cannot provide an explanation for broad historical trends. More specifically, Marxism is often attacked for its technological determinism. Critical Marxists shy well clear of technological determinism, focusing on the role of class interests in shaping technology’s trajectory (Noble, 1984). Optimistic Marxists by contrast embrace a soft form of technological determinism (Adler, 1989): they allow that capitalist relations of production accelerate the rate of technological change and that they encourage some directions of technology development at the expense of others, but they argue that there is a transhistorical, ‘‘anthropological’’ imperative driving the development of technologies that improve the productivity of labor, and that no ruling class has a durable interest in fostering the sustained regression of productivity. They argue that the natural world powerfully constrains the vectors of technological innovation

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that can satisfy this imperative, and they thus reject the ‘‘strong social constructionist’’ thesis that would explain technology’s overall direction of development by reference to social structures alone. Many feminists, students of race and ethnicity, and other sociologists who study organizations more empirically find that at this level of analysis identities and projects are more powerful than class structure in explaining change. They are surely correct to criticize doctrinaire Marxists who refuse to accord nonclass dimensions of structure any relevance, but this leaves entirely open the question of the relative importance of these nonclass factors in determining the broader, longer-term sweep of history. Some critics engage this latter debate and argue that social class as Marx analyzed it has receded in importance as a dimension of social structure. These critics argue that the emergence of the ‘‘new social movements’’ reflects a deep transformation of capitalism. Clearly we need good theories of social movements, and clearly Marxism offers only a modestly useful starting point for such theory. However, it is not clear that these social movements will assume ever-greater importance relative to the class dimensions of social identification and social conflict. Major surges in worker militancy, whether in the 1930s or 1960s, were preceded by predictions quite as confident as those we have heard in recent years that class conflict had permanently disappeared. Ritzer and Schubert (1991) argue that there has been a progressive divorce of various post-Marxisms from Marxist thought. The Nietzschean mood has set many scholars to a deep skepticism concerning any ‘‘laws of history’’ such as Marx advances, and Nietzschean poststructuralism has joined forces with a wide range of mainstream theories to assert a greater role for contingency and path dependence in history. This debate is hard to join: it is difficult to see how dialogue can bridge such different theoretical tastes. On the other hand however, this divorce may be a generational phenomenon: the first generation of post-Marxists sought to define their distinctiveness by attacking Marxism, while scholars today appear more eager to find some common ground, whether it be between Marxism and postcolonialism (e.g., Frenkel & Shenhav, 2003, 2006; Prasad, 2003), Foucault and Frankfurt School critical theory (Willmott, 2003), and Foucault and Marxist labor process ideas (e.g., Sewell, 1998).

IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION The relevance of Marx for organization studies appears to wax and wane in inverse proportion to the apparent durability of the capitalist order. With


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rise of worker militancy in the advanced capitalist world and the surge of national liberation movements in the Third World in the 1960s, a generation of scholars emerged for whom Marx’s ideas constituted the basic intellectual matrix. With the waning of the workers’ and national liberation movements since the 1970s and the demise of the socialist bloc since the 1990s, Marxism lost much of its appeal for scholars in organization studies as in other fields. More recently, as the capitalist order came under threat from new waves of worker mobilization and from financial crises originating in the United States and the United Kingdom, Marx reappears on the agenda. The future of Marxist organization studies appears bright.

NOTES 1. This chapter is complementary to Adler (2009a). It shares a similar overall structure, but focuses on philosophy and forms of organization rather than on topics in organization theory. 2. Current economic theory assumes that tastes, supply, and demand determine price; that at equilibrium all ‘‘factors of production’’ are paid a price reflecting their marginal productivity; that this is true too of capital; and that profit is therefore determined by the marginal productivity of capital. While this understanding of profit sounds plausible at a microeconomic level, it has proven to be entirely wrongheaded at the aggregate, macroeconomic level – indeed, it is a nice example of fetishism. A famous debate in the 1960s between Marxist-inspired economists at Cambridge, UK, led by Joan Robinson, and mainstream economists in Cambridge, MA, led by Paul Samuelson, ended in the victory of the former, acknowledged by the latter, in arguing that the profit rate could not be derived from any such supply and demand process, but was itself a function of the aggregate rate of exploitation. Graduate economics education today simply ignores the whole issue, and proceeds oblivious to the resulting incoherence of the neoclassical synthesis (Cohen & Harcourt, 2003).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Earlier drafts benefited from research assistance from Jade Lo and from comments by Michael Burawoy, Richard Delbridge, Steve Jaros, Martin Kenney, David Levy, Richard Marens, Mark Mizruchi, Craig Prichard, Mick Rowlinson, Paul Thompson, and Matt Vidal, even if there is much with which they still disagree.

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Paul S. Adler is currently Harold Quinton Chair in Business Policy at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. He received his PhD in economics and management at the University of Picardie, France. His research and teaching focus on organization design, with a particular focus on technical, professional, and manufacturing operations.

BEYOND UNIVERSALISM AND RELATIVISM: HABERMAS’S CONTRIBUTION TO DISCOURSE ETHICS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERCULTURAL ETHICS AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Andreas Georg Scherer and Moritz Patzer ABSTRACT Ju¨rgen Habermas is one of the most important authors in contemporary philosophy. In this chapter, we analyse his contribution to the philosophical debate on universalism and relativism and consider its implications for organization studies and organizations operating in an intercultural environment. We briefly describe the critique of a universal concept of reason that has been forwarded by sceptical and postmodern philosophers. As a response to this critique, we outline the contribution of discourse ethics and analyse the theories of Ju¨rgen Habermas and his colleague Karl-Otto Apel. We explore the justification of discourse ethics and point out some problems in its argumentative logic. In the light of this critique, we outline some characteristics of an intercultural ethics that is based on constructivist philosophy and point to some encouraging prospects on the Philosophy and Organization Theory Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 32, 155–180 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2011)0000032008

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consolidation of the debate between relativistic and universalistic philosophers. Keywords: constructivism; critical theory; discourse ethics; intercultural ethics; relativism; universalism.

INTRODUCTION The aim of this chapter is to analyse Ju¨rgen Habermas’s contribution to the philosophical debate on universalism and relativism, and to consider its implications for organization studies and organizations operating in an intercultural environment. What is at issue in these discussions is whether and in what way a universal justification of reason and rationality can be achieved in the light of the pluralism of existing norms, values and lifestyles in the social world. Proponents of a universalistic perspective argue in the tradition of Kant and the Enlightenment, stressing the idea of a unity of practical reason. In contrast, proponents of a relativistic perspective are sceptical of this idea of a universal conception of reason and advocate a pluralism of cultures and forms of social life. Hence, the label ‘relativism’ stands for the understanding that concepts of reason and rationality are historically and culturally contingent, and cannot be justified trans-culturally or applied to radically different cultures (see Habermas, 1994, p. 135 ff.). The critics of a universalistic perspective formulate two reservations: (1) the advancement of a universal concept of reason represents an act of domination of a particular perspective and leads to an unjustifiable suppression of the pluralism of cultures and forms of life (e.g. Foucault, 1980) and (2) the validity and acceptability of a theoretical or philosophical claim can only be judged within the particular set of rules of the culture and form of life in which it is embedded (e.g. Lyotard, 1984, 1992; Rorty, 1989, 1990). The fact that these philosophical disputes have not yet been resolved is of relevance for social theory and practice. It is also relevant for our understanding of the role of organizations in society (e.g. Crane, McWilliams, Matten, Moon, & Siegel, 2008; Donaldson, 1989; Donaldson & Dunfee, 1999; Scherer, 2003; Scherer & Palazzo, 2007, 2008; Scherer & Smid, 2000; Steinmann & Scherer, 1998a). This is especially apparent in situations where culturally heterogeneous conceptions of morals, norms and orientations clash with each other and where no procedures or rules contributing to the resolution of these conflicts and acceptable to all parties involved are available. In the social world, individuals have at their disposal

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shared meanings, established routines, and common norms that are the result of a common practice of life and contribute to the peaceful coordination of actions within their own cultures (see Giddens, 1984). However, agents from radically different cultures often do not have such a source of commonly accepted social rules and may therefore have radically different perspectives on how solutions to conflicts may be reached. Globalization can be understood as the process of intensification of economic and social exchange across national borders (e.g. Beck, 2000; Giddens, 1990; Scherer & Palazzo, 2008). This process increases the number of confrontations between actors and organizations from different cultural and national backgrounds. These conflicts often occur in regions beyond the reach of the regulations and enforcement mechanisms of the rule of law state (e.g. in failed states where regulations are weak and authorities are corrupted) and in areas where there is no shared understanding of norms and morals among individuals of different cultures (e.g. concerning the issues of seniority, gender, equality, etc.). In cases where there is no such common ground of shared social norms, disputes on appropriate behaviour may lead to power games and conflicts may remain unresolved (e.g. Gergen, 1995, p. 520 f.; Scherer, 2003; Wieland, 1997). Is there a universal concept of reason and in what way can it be helpful in resolving these kinds of conflicts? In the following we describe the critique of a universal concept of reason that has been forwarded by sceptical and postmodern philosophers. As a response to this, we both outline the contribution of discourse ethics and analyse the theories of Karl-Otto Apel and Ju¨rgen Habermas. Habermas and his Frankfurt colleague Apel developed an interesting alternative to the relativistic position. We analyse the justification of discourse ethics and also point out some problems in its argumentative logic. In the light of this critique, we outline some characteristics of an intercultural ethics that is based on constructivist philosophy and point to some encouraging prospects on the consolidation of the debate between relativistic and universalistic philosophers.

THE ‘UNITY OF REASON’ AND ITS CRITIQUE IN POSTMODERN PHILOSOPHY Two distinctive features characterize the postmodern epoch: (1) the decline of the nation state and (2) the critique of universal reason, described as follows: (1) On the one hand, postmodernity denotes the end of modernity and the decline of the power of the nation state as the main regulatory

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institution. Modernity is characterized by the belief in reason as initiated by the Enlightenment (objective reason replaces the pluralism of subjective or religious belief), by the establishment of the modern nation state system with the Peace of Westphalia (through the monopolization of power and the taming of internal and external conflicts), by the progressing secularization (with the growing division of state and religion) and later by the industrialization, bureaucratization and democratization of the countries of the Western world. The development of modern society led to the capitalist system of free and open markets and the democratic rule of law state as the most advanced institutions for a reasonable self-organization of the citizens, promoting individual freedom, safety and solidarity in the pursuit of happiness and prosperity (see Beck, 2000; Habermas, 2001e; Scherer, 2003, p. 11 f.; Zu¨rn, 1998). Today, in the course of the globalization process, the nation state is increasingly overstrained in its attempts to moderate the outcomes of the economic, political and social systems. Since the nations state’s powers of enforcement remain territorially bound, while organizations expand their activities beyond these borders, the nation state is increasingly losing its political steering capability (see Scherer & Palazzo, 2008, p. 416 ff.; Beck, 1992, 2000; Habermas, 2001e; Scherer, 2003). (2) On the other hand, the postmodern epoch stands for a pluralism of rationalities, meanings and cultural heuristics. This represents a mindset that rejects the idea of a universal justification of social norms. We will refer to this mentality as ‘postmodernism’. This scepticism has diverse sources (see, e.g. MittelstraX, 1989; Welsch, 1997), but can broadly be grouped around methodical and political motifs. The former, methodological aspects, rest on insights gained from the historic turn in the philosophy of science (see, e.g. Andersson, 1994; Lakatos & Musgrave, 1970). Kuhn (ibid., 1962) has shown that scientific progress cannot be perceived as a linear process of knowledge accumulation, but is characterized by the interplay of normal phases and scientific revolutions. Such revolutions are often the result of approaches standing outside of the traditional paradigm, and, hence, appear ‘irrational’ by established scientific rules. Feyerabend (ibid., 1975, 1978) took these results as the premise to propose that science itself had lost its privileged role in the process of rational knowledge creation. Science merely becomes a source of orientation among other forms of expression such as art, music or religion. The acknowledgement of this development was reinforced by the efforts to establish alternative paradigmatic foundations within the various disciplines of the social sciences as a reaction to the critique of


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the naturalistic model of explanation. Burrell and Morgan, for example, have identified four social paradigms holding incommensurable beliefs on the concept of man, the concept of knowledge and how society is stabilized or changed (1979). In organization studies there is an ongoing dispute on the role of paradigms and the possibility of trans-paradigmatic standards of research. In the meantime, the view has been widely accepted that the universal validity claim of reason could not be upheld in the light of methodological and philosophical restrictions of inherently incommensurable social paradigms (Scherer, 1998; Scherer & Steinmann, 1999). Building on these methodological and philosophical reasons, some authors (e.g. Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida and others) developed a political programme. It is their understanding that the pluralism of existing practical orientations should be preserved and not be subdued by the formulation and enforcement of a unified concept of rationality. Knowledge about what is right or wrong is embedded in different autonomous language-games and social practices. Trying to establish a meta-discourse that embraces all of theses languagegames would be an unjustifiable dogmatic imposition of a moral concept of right or wrong and true or false (e.g. Lyotard, 1984). The social motif of postmodernism is thus one of the democratic pluralisms (see Schreyo¨gg & Koch, 1999, p. 7). Over recent years these considerations have found their way into the social sciences (e.g. Boje, Gephart, & Thatchenkery, 1996; Calas & Smircich, 1997, 1999; Hassard & Parker, 1993; Holtbru¨gge, 2001; Kilduff & Mehra, 1997; Schreyo¨gg, 1999), where they have had a profound influence on the reception and interpretation of the impact of globalization on social and economic phenomena (e.g. Clegg & Gray, 1996; Gergen & Whitney, 1996; Holtbru¨gge, 1996). The call to acknowledge the pluralism of rationalities stresses the need to transcend the idea of unity in favour of an idea of difference: In this phase of thought, which characterizes the current sociological thinking about globalization, there is a realization that convergence is neither necessary nor desirable; that individual entities differ greatly across national societies, as well as within them; that culture is critical; and that convergence is less likely and less productive than divergence. These themes become characteristic of postmodernism. (Clegg & Gray, 1996, p. 299)

Such a postmodern orientation for society as a whole and organizations in particular feeds hopes for a successful inclusion of the strategic and moral implications of a global community, with multinational organizations assuming political responsibility by simultaneously pursuing different strategies in heterogeneous contexts (see, e.g. Holtbru¨gge, 1996). Still, these hopes are confronted by apparent difficulties inherent in a postmodern

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perspective. Postmodernism seems to be helpful by contributing to a reflection of existing social structures and a critique of situations of power and dependency (Scherer & Palazzo, 2007). It appears, however, that postmodernism is not capable of making statements about the direction of the future social development. It is very tolerant of the pluralism of language-games and of existing social routines, and it lacks a normative-ethical guidance on how and in what directions conditions must be changed (see Willmott, 1998, p. 93). Furthermore, postmodern philosophy still has to deal with its internal conceptual problems (see Norris, 2000, p. 34 ff.). It remains unspecified in what way the pluralism of life forms must be dealt with in order to avoid having one paradigm dominating the others (Welsch, 1997, p. 37). The question of how a peaceful cooperation or at least a coexistence of radically different perspectives is feasible remains unanswered. A normative social theory that could provide an understanding for a fruitful interaction between perspectives or a successful integration of differences into a progressive development of the social world would then be necessary (see Scherer, 1999, p. 204). Yet, this normative orientation does not exist in postmodern philosophy, nor is it desired by its proponents (see critically Giddens, 1994; Norris, 2000). This has immediate consequences for international management and organization theory, since its culturally connoted challenges cannot be overcome in the absence of a normative reference point. Furthermore, as the idea of proactive intervention rests on a modern epistemology (see Clegg, 1990), ‘postmodernity (y) could be of no obvious practical use to organizers since it would be aimed at illustrating the limits of their projects’ (Parker, 1992, p. 10). The need for an adequate response to these problems makes a critical modern philosophy necessary, as proposed by the programme of discourse ethics.

DISCOURSE ETHICS AND ITS MODES OF (INTERCULTURAL) JUSTIFICATION For the engagement in questions of intercultural conflicts in organization studies and international management, the programme of discourse ethics (Apel, Habermas) offers helpful insights, which not only have found their way into general business ethics (e.g. French & Granrose, 1995; Ulrich, 1986, 2008; Lo¨hr, 1991; Steinmann & Lo¨hr, 1994) but have also been employed in the justification of an intercultural business ethics (see Gilbert, 1998, 2003; Karmasin, 2002).


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Discourse ethics represents a consensual ethics, in which only those norms and actions can claim legitimacy that have been subjected to an ideal discourse and when a non-coercive consensus by all affected has been achieved (see Gottschalk-Mazouz, 2000; Tugendhat, 1993). Originating in German philosophy, various concepts for its justification, showing up significant differences, have since evolved. The three decisive concepts are transcendental pragmatics, developed by Apel (1976c, 1988), universal pragmatics developed by Habermas (1995a, 2001a, 2001b, 2003a, 2003b) and the constructivist philosophy of the Erlangen School (culturalism) (e.g. Hartmann & Janich, 1996, 1998; Hartmann & Lange, 2000; Kambartel, 1989b; Lorenzen, 1974), with Habermas’s understanding taking the middle ground. Transcendental pragmatics is a universal concept that refers to the culturally invariant conditions of communication as the ‘locus of unity’. It stands for a strong notion of justification (‘ultimate justification’ or foundationalism) that has been the object of critique due to its fundamentalist position and its cultural insensitivity. Universal pragmatics is also based on the conditions of communication. It understands these not as culturally invariant, but sees them as rooted in the shared life-world. The question of discourse ethics’ cultural transitivity has been analysed more closely in the culturalistic approach that has proposed a higher sensitivity for the cultural roots of language. Although the latter does not present a fully developed programme, it develops decisive amendments to both transcendental and universal pragmatics.

Apel: The Transcendental-Pragmatic Variant of Discourse Ethics Karl-Otto Apel’s transcendental pragmatics represents a universal concept of ethics, forwarding a strong notion of justification. It claims to provide the ultimate justification (Letztbegru¨ndung) of ethical principles, thereby providing absolute validity for its procedure of norm evaluation (e.g. Apel, 1976c, 1988; see also Bo¨hler, 1985, 1998; Ho¨sle, 1994; Kuhlmann, 1985). Apel considers the conditions of communication and tries to explain ‘what we must necessarily always already presuppose in regard to ourselves and others as normative conditions of the possibility of reaching understanding; and in this sense, what we must necessarily always already have accepted’ (Apel, 1976b, op. cit.; Habermas, 1976, pp. 21–22). Apel’s concept of discourse ethics represents an ethics that is procedural as well as oriented towards principles, argumentation and consensus. This means that it must be understood as a procedural concept to evaluate and justify norms and actions. The evaluation itself does not rely on material criteria or

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norms (e.g. ‘You shall not steal!’), but rests on a procedure of the evaluation of any material contents. Furthermore, the design of this procedure is derived from ultimately justified principles that guarantee for the rationality of the procedure as well as the validity of its results. The medium by which the evaluation and justification is performed is that of argumentation among equal participants in a discourse. Thereby, discourse ethics is not based on a monological reflection, differing to Kant’s concept of practical reason as delineated in his categorical imperative (see Kant, 1788), but rather stresses the importance of an inter-subjective communication. Lastly, the criterion for the validity of norms or the justification of an action is the consensus, that is, unanimous agreement by the participants in the process of argumentation. The outlined concept of a transcendental-pragmatic discourse ethics upholds the notion of a universal reason that can transcend the historiccontingent morality of local life forms in order to enable a peaceful coexistence between different cultures. This concept of discourse ethics provides a procedural notion of justice and claims universal validity. The procedural principles of discourse ethics can support the rational analysis of any actions, social rules, morals or particular concepts of a ‘good life’ (see Apel, 1997; Scherer, 2005). The (ultimate) justification of transcendental pragmatics is illustrated by the argumentative concept of retorsion ( performativer Selbstwiderspruch; see Apel, 1976a, 1976c, 1987). It represents the contradiction between the content of an assertion and the action of making an assertion (see Apel, 1996, p. 22; Tugendhat, 1993, p. 166 f.). For example, a sceptic who puts forth the argument ‘There is no universal claim!’ is making a universal claim, and by making this assertion, contradicts its content. This argumentative concept is not only employed to test factual assertions, but should also serve to reconstruct the rules of argumentation in fictional debates with potential sceptics. Apel and his colleagues argue that any participant in an argumentation who makes an assertion must assume that this assertion can be tested according to an implicit set of universal rules of argumentation. These rules apply to each participant in an argumentation since an argumentative rejection of the rules would be a self-contradiction (see Bo¨hler, 1985, 1998). This means, in conclusion, that every argumentation anticipates the condition of a discourse ethics that establishes the consensus as the ultimate criteria of validity in an ideal communicative community (see, e.g. Apel, 1976c, p. 358 ff.). Thereby, the transcendental-pragmatic conception rescues a unified and universal notion of reason, since anyone who argumentatively challenges this idea of communicative reason automatically makes use of it.


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Habermas: The Universal-Pragmatic Variant of Discourse Ethics The universal-pragmatic variant of discourse ethics is a cornerstone of Habermas’s research programme. As the most influential living member of the ‘Frankfurt School’, he has committed himself to provide the rational foundations for a critical social analysis and theory of society. He stands in the tradition of critical theory as outlined by Horkheimer and Adorno, who founded the ‘Frankfurt School’ in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the multidisciplinary and critical analysis of modern social conditions, in particular those of modern capitalism (for critical theory’s history see Alvesson & Willmott, 1996, pp. 67–89; Held, 1980; Rush, 2004; Scherer, 2009; Wiggershaus, 1994). Critical theory was developed for the revitalization of the ideas of the Enlightenment and to provide knowledge in order to strengthen individual autonomy and civic liberties (see Scherer, 2009). It rejects the claims of valuefree knowledge generation through the social sciences and assumes that social patterns are embedded in specific historical and cultural contexts (see Horkheimer, 1937; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947a, 1947b). While Horkheimer and Adorno were not able to justify their normative reference point of critique, Habermas sought to reconstruct the normative foundations of critical theory by basing critique upon the possibility of undistorted communication that, he argued, is built into the very structure of language. In his universal pragmatics Habermas analyses the use of communication skills that humans deploy in engaging in social relations (ibid., 1976). Building on the linguistic philosophy of Charles S. Peirce and the speech analytic philosophy of John L. Austin (1962) and John Searle (1969), Habermas suggests that a speaker raises four validity claims in the act of any utterance: firstly, the meaningfulness of what the speaker says; secondly, the truth of the assertion; thirdly, the legitimacy of the actors’ utterance; and lastly, the sincerity of the speaker. Although they can be challenged, thereby becoming the object of the process of argumentation, they must be understood as part of a universal structure of communication. Herein Habermas sees the relevant basis for social analysis and hence critical theory (see Scherer, 2009). Its normative core is represented by the notion of an ideal speech situation and its conditions. Habermas proposes that participants of a communication presuppose that their claims can be assessed and verified (or falsified) in an open discourse under ideal conditions. They do this regardless of the fact that actual communication is systematically distorted and usually does not satisfy the ideal conditions. Yet this ‘counter-factual assumption’ is routinely made by discussants since efforts of communication would otherwise fail. These

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conditions of a free and transparent discourse that are characterized by Habermas as ‘the freedom of access, equal rights to participate, truthfulness on the part of participants, absence of coercion in taking positions and so forth’ must be understood as ‘unavoidable presuppositions of argumentation’ (1995b, p. 56). Only the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ (Habermas, 1995b, p. 23) can secure the participants’ motivation to reach a consensus on what is true or false and right or wrong. Communication thereby becomes the ultimate reference of reason and rationality. Within discourse ethics it hinges on two fundamental principles: the principle of universalization (U) and the principle of discourse (D). The principle of universalization (U) addresses the validity of a norm. The validity of a norm is only given if all those who are affected can consent to it or agree to their consequences. This implies the need for consensus among those affected. The principle of discourse (D) addresses the characteristics of the process in which such a consensus might be achieved. It states that the agreement by all affected must be achieved through an open and free (practical) discourse in order to base the agreement on the power of the better argument. Habermas defends what he calls a ‘correctly understood universalism’ against postmodern scepticism towards the unity of reason and against the reproach that universalism would assimilate heterogeneity, levelling cultural differences. Such a mistrust appears unjustified to him, since a ‘correctly understood community’ does not constitute itself through concrete material norms, but rather through the ‘negative idea of abolishing discrimination’ (Habermas, 2001c, p. xxxvi). The idea of such a community should not be understood as a homogenous collective. The ‘inclusion of the other’ rather stresses the community’s openness for actors that are mutually foreigners and remain foreigners (Habermas, 2001c, p. xxxv ff.). With this concept Habermas presents a variant of discourse ethics that is more sensitive towards cultural differences, distancing itself from the ‘lingering foundationalism’ of Apel’s philosophy (see Habermas, 1995b, p. 79). Habermas does not claim ultimate justification as he considers the philosopher to be embedded in the argumentative praxis of a specific sociocultural life form. The philosopher can partially distance himself or herself from the social world in which he or she is embedded. However, the philosopher cannot peel off his or her cultural and historical legacy in favour of the perspective of a neutral observer from outside the social world (see Habermas, 1995b, p. 81 ff.). In contrast to the transcendental-pragmatic concept, Habermas does not derive his rules of argumentation from a transcendental reflection on the


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necessary conditions of argumentation, but rather reconstructs them from the general structures of communication within a life-world. The conditions and structures of communication form a background that cannot be transcended (see Habermas, 1994, p. 139 ff.). Consequently, the philosopher still can reflect on the validity of the presuppositions of communication, but he cannot assume a priori that these presuppositions will never lose their function with changes in the underlying sociocultural life form (see Habermas, 1995b, p. 83 f.). The formulated principles can, hence, only claim validity in relation to the specific life form in which they are embedded and its continued existence. They represent the most advanced status of such a reconstructive effort, yet they must be understood as principally open to revision and learning (see Habermas, 2003a, p. especially 10 ff.; Scho¨nrich, 1994, p. 146 f.). Habermas thereby settles for a weak transcendental justification, stressing the factual validity of conditions of rational discourses (see Habermas, 1995b, p. 83 ff.). Within our life form we have no functional equivalent for rational argumentation at our disposal (see Habermas, 2001b, p. 15 ff., 2003a, 2003b). Consequently, Habermas points out that we pragmatically have no choice but to understand the rules of argumentation as a regulative idea in our pursuit of orientation. Such a justification of the discourse ethics does not abandon a normative–critical perspective but rather justifies a universalistic validity claim for a procedural moral principle that is compulsory for all subjects capable of speech and action. It does this without the danger of the fundamentalistic claim of an ‘ultimate’ justification. In Habermas’s understanding, Apel’s claim of infallibility appears unjustified and unnecessary (Habermas, 1995b, p. 83 ff.).

Critique of the Universal Concepts of Discourse Ethics We cannot discuss here all problems and points of critique that have been forwarded against the universal concepts of discourse ethics as proposed by Apel and Habermas (see, e.g. Scherer, 2003, p. 305 ff.; Stansbury, 2009, p. 42 ff.; Steinmann & Scherer, 1998b, p. 48 ff.; Tugendhat, 1993), but will present five central objections from a culturalistic perspective: (1) the strategic implementation of the conditions of an ideal communicative community, (2) the latent objectification of members of alien forms of social life, (3) the neglect of the constitutive influence of the life-world on the rules of argumentation, (4) the narrow concept of pragmatism and (5) the disregard of the material content of the rules of argumentation.

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(1) Since the conditions of real communications do not match with those of the ideal discourse ethics, it becomes necessary to establish and enforce these ideal principles in practice; otherwise, no rational agreement can be reached. This appears to be especially true for intercultural contexts where actors with different world views collide. With the claim of ultimate justification und validity of the transcendental pragmatics according to Apel, this enforcement must be considered as an ‘emancipatory anticipation’ (emanzipatorischer Vorgriff ), which may even legitimately make use of strategic means in order to assist communicative reason (see Apel, 1988, p. 247 f., 1992, p. 35 ff.; Bo¨hler, 1995, p. 242 f.). Consequently, all means that aim to establish an ideal communicative community would be considered legitimate. This implies that the focus within intercultural conflicts would shift from the justification of the formal rules of argumentation to their efficient implementation. As it becomes unclear in which way an equal and mutual recognition in the sense of the ‘inclusion of the other’ could be possible in such a strategic mode of action, this position carries the threat of a dogmatic posture towards alien cultures, thereby discrediting itself. (2) Although discourse ethics calls upon the inclusion of others as equal partners in the process of rational argumentation, this inclusion appears to be linked to the quality of their assertions and not necessarily to the person per se. In admitting all arguments and excluding aspects that do not take the form of arguments (Bo¨hler, 1991, p. 161), the universal concepts of discourse ethics have to clarify the concept of an ‘argument’ more thoroughly. Yet, this is not unproblematic, since it is controversial what assertions qualify as arguments. The concept of argumentation itself becomes the object of the discussion, since one cannot assume the existence of a transcendental understanding of argumentation (Gethmann, 1987; Lueken, 1992). Especially in intercultural conflicts one may expect the existence of radically different concepts of argumentation that are mutually incommensurable. This assumption appears plausible in the light of the influence that the individuals’ socialization has on his or her capability to participate in the process of rational discourse (see, e.g. Banerjee, 2003, and his case study on Aborigines whose arguments were considered irrational in an Australian court). Argumentation itself is an object of specific processes of socialization (see Cohen & Arato, 1995, p. 376 ff.; Kambartel, 1989c, p. 34 ff.; Schneider, 1994, p. 22 ff.). Habermas, whose conception exhibits stronger pragmatic foundations than Apel’s, appears to recognize this problem, however without acknowledging its gravity to the full extent (Lueken, 1992, p. 223 ff.). The


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remaining fundamental character of the conceptualization of argumentation prohibits the recognition of radically different forms of social life and their exponents as equal interaction partners. Instead, they become objects in the strategic enforcement of a universal concept of argumentation. (3) The universal concepts of discourse ethics, especially transcendental pragmatics, attribute the concept of argumentation with a status independent of the life form’s practice. As the concept of rational argumentation itself is excluded from critical assessment (see Apel, 1976c, p. 405 ff., 1987, p. 172 ff., 1989), the question of the evolution of the rules of argumentation remains open. This perspective neglects the constitutive effect of the practice of argumentation on the meaning of the concept of argumentation and the design of its rules. Following Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of language, Kambartel and Schneider argue that the pragmatic turn in philosophy suggests that a sensible preoccupation with the meaning of concepts such as argumentation, reason or rationality is only possible once the use of the word has already been established in practice (see Kambartel, 1989a, 1989c, 1991; Schneider, 1992a, 1992b). The meaning of argumentation is not determined by rules that exist before practice, but rather through a continuous and stable use of the concept in the life form’s practice: ‘The meaning of a word is its use in language’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, y 43). (4) In the light of this critique, some authors suggest that the universal concepts of discourse ethics are based on too narrow an understanding of pragmatics (e.g. Gethmann, 1987, p. 272; Kambartel, 1992; Lueken, 1992, p. 223 ff.; Schneider, 1994). Discourse ethics overemphasizes the role of theory and derives the principles of argumentation from a particular theoretical perspective on language instead of reconstructing the characteristics of argumentation from actual practice (e.g. Schneider, 1998; Wohlrapp, 1998b). In order to explain this objection, Lueken distinguishes between a partially pragmatic (partialpragmatisch) and a fundamentally pragmatic approach ( fundamentalpragmatisch). A partially pragmatic approach is characterized by an understanding of pragmatics as a discipline of philosophy of language (besides syntax or semantics) that is concerned with the use of symbols in the act of speech. The existence of these symbols and items is implicitly assumed to be unproblematic. In contrast to this, a fundamentally pragmatic approach focuses on existing patterns of action within the life form from which it highlights and reconstructs the objects of analysis (see Lueken, 1992, p. 223 f.). The latter perspective stands for a bottom-up approach,

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whereas a partially pragmatic approach conceptualizes theories about practice from a top-down perspective. This would mean that the universal discourse ethics imposes its principles on the actual practice, instead of reconstructing them reflexively from the latter (see Lueken, 1992, p. 223 ff.), thereby making the validity of the universal claim dependent on the prevailing language theory. (5) Lastly, the apparent neglect for the material content of the rules of argumentation has been an object of critique. It refers to the question of whether it is feasible to separate the formal aspects of argumentation from the various material ideas of a ‘good life’ within the heterogeneous life forms. With the formal concept of rational argumentation forming the roof under which the different life forms interact and settle their disputes, it seems necessary to link these rules of argumentation to the underlying life forms. At this point Habermas insists on the universality of the grammatical role of concepts such as truth, rationality or justification, regardless of their differing interpretation in the various life forms (Habermas, 1994, p. 138, 1995b, p. 103 ff.). With this perspective the scope of the developed concept of argumentation becomes an empirical question (see McCarthy, 1993). Yet, it is doubtful that a universal historical community of language exists, assuming the same concepts of truth, rationality and justification. This becomes obvious in the consideration of the increasing pluralism of life forms, the tendencies of individualization in society, and the rise of different forms of fundamentalism and religious extremism. In the light of these problems concerning the justification of discourse ethics, we highlight some aspects of a culturalistic foundation that provides additional insights on the antagonism of relativism and universalism and the feasibility of an intercultural ethics (for organizations).

Culturalism as an Alternative Mode of Justification Culturalism has evolved from the methodical constructivism of the so-called ‘Erlangen School’ during the 1980s and 1990s (see Lorenzen, 2000; Hartmann & Janich, 1996, 1998; Hartmann & Lange, 2000). Its different variations do not constitute a coherent philosophical programme, but rather present an assembly of fragments. Beyond minor differences, culturalism also shares two insights with the methodical constructivism that have led to the linguistic-pragmatic turn in philosophy (see Lorenzen, 1989, p. 31 f.) On


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the one hand, they stress that every reference to the world is only feasible through language (linguistic turn). As a consequence, problems of truth or justification must be understood and examined as problems of their linguistic properties (see Janich, 1996, p. 28). On the other hand, practice becomes the methodical starting point in forming theories (practical turn). As a consequence, the analysis of language goes beyond mere semantics and is linked to the processes of its practical use. In critical debates with sceptic perspectives, methodical constructivism upholds the notion of the feasibility of justification, making the actual practice the methodical starting point of theory building. It is based on the insight that humans do possess capabilities to master their lives more or less successfully, even before they apply any scientific theories. Since practice is not always successful, theorizing becomes necessary in order to amend problems. And yet, since practice does not always fail, it becomes possible to build on these successful practices and routines as the ultimate condition and starting point of science. In this sense, methodical reflection represents a stylized reconstruction of actual practices. In the 1980s Paul Lorenzen (see Lorenzen, 1985, 1987, 1989) developed the premise of a theory of political knowledge to help post-traditional societies to strengthen peace. He proposes a consistent justification of ethical-political knowledge that is based on the practical efforts to secure social peace existing in post-traditional societies in the practice of law-making and argumentation in political institutions (see also Gethmann, 1992; Habermas, 2003a, p. 47 f.). According to Lorenzen, it is the task of ethical politics to mitigate the conflicts that arise within the pluralism of heterogeneous life forms in post-traditional societies through law-making and administration. The ‘pluralism of incompatible highest ends’ is supposed to be transformed into a ‘plurality of mutually compatible life forms’ in order to stabilize peace (Lorenzen, 1987, p. 233 f.). In contrast to a manual practice that represents the basis for the technical sciences, the lawmaking deliberation represents a verbal practice of argumentation. Lorenzen thereby continues the constructivist programme by making (at least partly) successful political practice as the starting point of a discourse ethics. This differs from the universalistic conceptions of Apel and Habermas that focus on the analysis of conditions of language in a world without institutions, instead of reconstructing the practice of peaceful argumentation within and outside political institutions. Likewise, Kambartel (1989b, 1991, 1998) underlines the need to overcome the notion of a theoretical, criterial concept of reason. He insists that we do not follow a universal principle of rationality in our use of reason. We are

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rather participants in a specific situation wherein we produce judgements and orientations. We learn the use of reason by deploying different criteria in order to obtain reasonable orientation as participants of a specific, shared culture in which we are embedded throughout our childhood and onwards. Therein we learn to handle conflicts in a reasonable way. Hence, we are not born as reasonable beings, but rather become such through socialization, education and self-reflection (see Kambartel, 1989c). In consequence, Kambartel deems it necessary for philosophical and scientific writings on reason to be based on this ‘culture of reason’, since the argumentation would otherwise lose its rigour and miss the meaning underlying the notion of reason. This notion cannot be gained at the philosopher’s desk, but requires practical embeddedness in a specific situation.

CONCLUSION: ON THE POSSIBILITY OF AN INTERCULTURAL ETHICS Discourse ethics in general, and Habermas’s ‘universal pragmatics’ in particular, has had a profound impact on management and organization theory. Herein the legitimate use of power has been subject to critical analyses, with foci on organization studies as an academic discipline (see Steffy & Grimes, 1986), strategic management (see Alvesson & Willmott, 1995; Scherer & Dowling, 1995; Shrivastava, 1986), the question of stakeholder inclusion (e.g. Deetz, 1995; Smith, 2004), the possibilities of responsible leadership (Maak & Pless, 2006a, 2006b) or, lastly, the facilitation of moral decision making in organizations (see Stansbury, 2009). This also applies to Habermas’s later work on the role of law and democracy in modern society (see Habermas, 1996, 2001d, 2001e), wherein he softens the conditions of his Universal-Pragmatic ideal speech situation in favour of the idea of public deliberation as the expression of communicative rationality and the search for legitimate decision making (Scherer & Palazzo, 2007). Palazzo and Scherer have employed these arguments to reflect on the conditions of corporate legitimacy (see Palazzo & Scherer, 2006) as well as the civic role of multinational corporations in society in the light of globalization (see Scherer & Palazzo, 2007, 2008; Scherer, Palazzo, & Baumann, 2006). Discourse ethics’ contribution to organization theory can be further highlighted with regard to our initial problem of the antagonism between relativism and universalism. It provides the grounds for an intercultural ethics whose characteristics will be conclusively defined. A discourse ethics


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that is informed by a culturalist perspective features (1) a principal openness towards alien perspectives, (2) the acknowledgement of the cultural embeddedness of all moral orientations, (3) the pragmatic reduction of the scope of its justification and (4) an understanding for the mutual relativity of formal and material ethics. (1) Ethical norms and the moral acceptability of actions cannot be assessed with the help of external criteria. Rather this assessment process is understood as a process of learning by the opponents of an ethical conflict. The opponents may apply their respective moral norms but once they realize that they do not mutually accept the norms of the other, they are left with nothing but to learn from each other. The principal openness for alien perspectives allows an intercultural ethics to engage in such a learning process with the moral orientations of other cultures. This learning process can be characterized by the three-stage model of communicative cultural integration as proposed by Wohlrapp (ibid., 1998a): in the first step actors have to submit themselves to the ‘experience’ of the alien as something beyond the familiar experience. Whereas this may be related to the exchange with a different culture as well as with actors of the shared life-world, this first encounter is primarily descriptive. In the second step the actors strive to achieve an ‘understanding’ of the experienced unfamiliarities. This is only feasible if the unfamiliar is recognized as a behaviour or action that corresponds with the respective actor’s own conduct. The latter thereby poses as an identification foil that makes the articulation of the differences possible. Beyond this reflective engagement a third step is needed that aims to ‘produce peaceability’. The latter can only be realized in actual interaction, wherein the actors have to distance themselves from their accustomed peculiarities. The act of transcending the latter rests on the insight that these attitudes have to be subjected to discussion in order to allow a mutually peaceful coexistence (see Wohlrapp, 1998a, p. 58 ff.). Such a learning process must be understood as principally open with regard to its initial and final situations, as it cannot be determined from the outset who has to learn from whom. For the conflict of heterogeneous moral concepts, this means that neither can one assume the existence of an initial preference for a specific moral nor is it possible in theory to anticipate the final solution of the conflict. The guiding orientation of this learning process is the question whether one moral norm is sufficient to address and solve the current conflict (see Lueken, 1992). As long as there is no consensual solution to such a conflict, the

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affected actors have to work on their problematic situation and, if necessary, transcend their existing stock of normative orientations. They have to continue until they find an existing suitable norm or until they are capable of constructing a new one as an experimental solution. They establish a practice that has not existed before. (2) The understanding for the cultural embeddedness of moral orientations also applies to the scientific and philosophical efforts to conflate these orientations into an ethics. Theory is not pursued for theory’s sake. It has, instead, to find its origin in praxis. Science thereby gains goals that are derived from a pre-scientific, culturally connoted praxis (see Lorenzen, 1989). This does not mean that the researcher becomes an instrument of any particular interests. He or she is rather supposed to participate in and contribute to the process that produces reasonable aims and orientations. In this way, the researcher can examine whether the aims that prevail in praxis are reasonable and, thus, justified. This assessment is not based on external criteria but on the mutual discourses with the affected, wherein subjective orientations are supposed to be transcended. As indicated, this notion of reason is not an invention of the philosophers. It is a reconstructed cultural achievement of post-traditional societies that tends to take the form of overcoming subjectivity. Hence, reason can be defined as trans-subjectivity representing an attitude of overcoming subjective orientations in order to make them universal, whenever it appears necessary (see Lorenzen, 1987). The reference point for these undertakings is always the consensus of the affected individuals. (3) Linking moral action to its cultural basis implies a reduced scope of the validity claim of the ethics’ justification. Instead of focusing on theoretical universal justifications, the focus shifts towards local problem solving. The justification claim of ethical norms is aimed at the discussion and resolution of specific problems, misunderstandings or disagreements. Hence, the forwarded arguments should, in the first place, convince the involved actors and not everybody. Therefore, the proponents of discourse ethics need not claim a compulsory, timeless, trans-local and trans-cultural validity (see Schneider, 1994). Nevertheless, the attained understandings and agreements can still become universal if the actors involved in an actual discourse impart their insights to others, and these become insights of even more actors through ‘dialogical networks’ (see Kambartel, 1991). Hence, it appears unnecessary that specific arguments are conceived of as compulsory through ultimate justifications (see Schneider, 1994). As a consequence, there is no ‘view from nowhere’ (Donaldson & Dunfee, 1999, p. 14), nor is a theoretical justification of universal ethical norms possible.


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(4) The rationalistic separation of a formal procedural ethics and material morality as proposed by Apel (and partially by Habermas) is (speech-) pragmatically not fully justifiable. An (culturalistic) intercultural ethics remains a procedural ethics, as only the discourse can spawn legitimate (material) norms. Yet, a culturalistic perspective highlights the necessity to understand the procedural conditions of discourse itself, as the result of a specific cultural form of life, depicting its links to its inherent material morality (see Schneider, 1992a, 1994). Form and content cannot be separated analytically, as the meaning of words cannot be understood as completely separated from praxis. This applies to any description of form and content. Consequently, any formal criteria (e.g. freedom to enter a debate, participation with equal rights, truthfulness or absence of coercion) and their meanings are always rooted in a particular form of life that expresses its materiality in the praxis. They are the historically contingent achievement of the Enlightenment.

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Andreas Georg Scherer is head of the Institute of Organization and Administrative Science (IOU) and holds the Chair of Theories of the Firm at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). His research interests are in business ethics, critical theory, international management, organization theory and philosophy of science. He has published nine books. His work has appeared in Academy of Management Review, Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, Management International Review, Organization, Organization Studies and numerous volumes and other journals. He is Associate Editor of Business Ethics Quarterly and member of the editorial boards of Business and Society, Management International Review, Organization and Organization Studies. Moritz Patzer was a research assistant at the Institute of Organization and Administrative Science (IOU) at the Chair of Theories of the Firm at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) from 2005 to 2009. His research interests are in responsible leadership, leadership ethics, business ethics, international management and philosophy of science. He completed his doctoral thesis on responsible leadership at the University of Zurich in 2009.

HERMENEUTIC PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY Frank J. Barrett, Edward H. Powley and Barnett Pearce ABSTRACT Our aim in this chapter is twofold: first, to review briefly the history of the hermeneutic traditions; second, to examine its influence in organization studies. We begin with a review of hermeneutic philosophy including ancient Greek origins and Biblical hermeneutics. We then delve more deeply into the work of 20th-century hermeneutic philosophy, particularly Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, to demonstrate how hermeneutics became a field that is concerned not only with texts but also with verbal and nonverbal forms of action and the preunderstanding that makes any interpretation possible. Finally, we explore how hermeneutic philosophers claim that interpretation is the mode by which we live and carry on with one another. In the third section, we suggest that the field of organizational studies has discovered the relevance of hermeneutic theory, a rarely explicitly acknowledged debt. In particular, we outline the influence of hermeneutic theory on several figural areas, including culture, sensemaking, identity, situated learning, and organizational dialogue.


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Keywords: hermeneutic philosophy; organization studies; interpretive sociology; Heidegger; Gadamer; Ricoeur; organizational culture; linguistic turn; identity.

INTRODUCTION Hermeneutic philosophy as a theory of interpretation of experience emphasizes how we cope in the world and come to understand objects and subjects. While its origins focus on the study of biblical texts and later ancient and classical cultures, hermeneutics as a philosophy offers a way of understanding the process of interpretation. Its influence today extends to organization studies, where scholars studying culture, identity, sensemaking, and learning draw on the philosophical tenets of hermeneutics to explain human action, intentionality, and meaning in the context of organizations. Our aim is to review briefly the history of the hermeneutic tradition and examine its influence in organization studies. We begin with a review of hermeneutic philosophy broadly, beginning with the ancient Greek origins. We also review the emergence of Biblical hermeneutics, which is concerned with the correct interpretation of sacred texts. Our main focus is the emergence of philosophical hermeneutics, chiefly in the work of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, to demonstrate how hermeneutics became a field that is concerned not only with texts but also with verbal and nonverbal forms of action and the preunderstanding that makes any interpretation possible. Finally, we explore how hermeneutic philosophers claim that interpretation is the mode by which we live and carry on with one another. In the third section, we suggest that the field of organizational studies has discovered the relevance of hermeneutic theory, a rarely explicitly acknowledged debt. In particular, we outline the influence of hermeneutic theory on several figural areas, including culture, sensemaking, identity, situated learning, and organizational dialogue.

HERMENEUTICS: A BRIEF HISTORY Greek Origins of Hermeneutics In Greek mythology, Hermes was the Olympian god who was the primary boundary crosser. The patron of travelers, orators, athletes, and thieves, he was known as the one who brought messages from the gods to mortals and

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as one not above a bit of trickery in the process. Crossing the boundaries between the gods and mortals required interpreting messages as well as conveying them. As mortals became interested in interpretation of what other people said and did, often recorded in ‘‘texts,’’ they borrowed Hermes’ name for their work, calling it hermeneutics. The Greeks in fact were quite concerned about the meaning of texts – poems, dramas, Socrates’ dialogues. But there were two very different ideas about hermaneutics in classical Greece; both were set out in Plato’s Protagoras. In Plato’s hands, this was a dialogue between the esteemed and respected sophist Protagoras and the iconoclastic Socrates (Plato’s teacher). Among other issues was the interpretation of texts. Protagoras was a storyteller who belonged to a long tradition of people who used what we would now call ‘‘narratives’’ and their ‘‘thick descriptions’’ as the way to develop character, adjudicate disputes, and persuade people about public policy. In Plato’s hands, Socrates was concerned with knowledge of unchanging realities. The two sides of hermeneutics were the contemporary interpretation of the significance of texts for present purposes (Protagoras’ view) and the reading through texts to find out their true meaning (Socrates’ view). Since Plato wrote this dialogue, Socrates won. When Plato banned poets from his ideal Republic, he did so partially because he viewed them as dangerous, creating expressions that fail to convey the truth. He warns that poets are possessed by madness, tell wild stories, create false representations of gods and heroes, and hence will corrupt the taste of the citizens. The idea that hermeneutics was a way of finding out what the author ‘‘really meant’’ or of the truth embedded in the text dominated hermeneutics for most of the subsequent centuries. In the past 400 years, however, the view associated with Protagoras has come back into favor and has been enriched by many thinkers.1 Biblical Hermeneutics and Fredrich Schleiermacher In Western history, hermeneutics became associated with the interpretation of sacred texts. Biblical hermeneutics evolved out of a concern for the correct methods for understanding the Bible. Through most of the Middle Ages, true understanding of Biblical texts was relegated to a select few – usually priests trained in theology who knew the lingua franca within the Church hierarchy. During the Reformation, the question of correct interpretation of sacred texts became a contested one. The Reformers felt that Church dogma had obscured the meaning of scripture and spawned a renewed interest in the meaning of scripture.

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In the 18th century, scholars discussed the importance of understanding these sacred documents within their living contexts, a principle known as the ‘‘canon of totality.’’ A group of theologians began to return to classical Greek and Hebrew to understand the original meaning of the text. Some even began to question whether scripture has the same meaning in every time and in all places – in other words, ‘‘meaning is not fixed.’’ Some began to see the Bible as a collection that required not just dogmatic theological but also historical interpretation. In the context of this century, we encounter the first important philosopher of hermeneutics. Fredrich Schleiermacher, an 18th-century German philosopher/theologian, struggled to reconcile the Enlightenment tradition of knowledge as an egalitarian endeavor with his Protestant theology. Assuming that the meaning of scripture is not relegated to only the hierarchy of the Church, how does one discern the intent of the authors of scripture? He was the first to propose that what is needed is a general theory of hermeneutics, a theory of interpretation and understanding of all texts, not only sacred texts, opening the door to looking at challenge of interpreting all forms of human communication. Interpretation, he said, is a legitimate way of knowing that is distinct from positivistic knowledge.2 He was the first to explicitly articulate the principle that understanding cannot be accomplished by isolating parts. Understanding the meaning of a text depends upon larger context. Interpretation is circular, a movement back and forth between parts and whole: There is y an opposition between the unity of the whole and the individual parts of the work, so that the task could be set in a twofold manner, namely to understand the unity of the whole by the individual parts and the value of the individual parts via the unity of the whole. (Schleiermacher, 1998)

This is one of the first references to the hermeneutic circle. What Schleiermacher has done is to call attention to the role of the reader. The reader anticipates the unfolding whole as he or she encounters each word and each sentence, and each word and sentence shapes the reader’s anticipation of the unfolding whole. He proposed a set of interpretive rules that are beyond the scope of this chapter. But perhaps his biggest contribution, besides his influence on Dilthey, was his sense of the goal of interpretation. For Schleiermacher, understanding is a matter of inverting the process by which the text was written: Just as every speech has a twofold relationship, both to the whole of the language and to the collected thinking of the speaker, so also there exists in all understanding of the


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speech two moments: understanding it as something drawn out of language and as a ‘‘fact’’ in the thinking of the speaker. (Schleiermacher, quoted in R. E. Palmer, 1969)

Understanding is a psychological, empathic accomplishment in which the reader seeks to close the gap between his or her understanding and the author’s beliefs and intentions to get inside the mind of the author. Gadamer refers to Schleiermacher’s approach to hermeneutics: ‘‘to understand the author better than he understood himself’’ (Gadamer, p. 192). Schleiermacher’s notion that interpretation is an attempt to reconstruct the original meaning of the author is a notion that Gadamer will challenge. Wilhelm Dilthey and verstehen Dilthey was a biographer of Schleiermacher, and is regarded as the first modern philosopher of history. He articulated the epistemological foundation for the social sciences as distinct from the natural sciences. In order to fully grasp the importance of Dilthey’s contribution, it is important to revisit the Enlightenment world in which he lived, a century that had given birth to the natural sciences. The early fathers of sociology, Comte and Saint Simon, searched for a positivist ‘‘science of society’’ and envisioned a social science that emulated the natural sciences. Under the influence of the Enlightenment revolution, the task of the new discipline would be to explain the relationship between the various parts of society as it evolves in progressive stages toward a new social order, the industrial society. They extolled the linear and incremental nature of scientific progress that draws upon past experiences and discoveries contributing toward building predictive theories. The task of social science, as in the natural sciences, would be to identify recurring, unmalleable, and systematic patterns, and transhistorical and valid principles to explain permanence among flux. Dilthey, however, claimed that the human sciences call for a unique methodological approach, that human phenomena cannot be grasped by using the logic of the natural sciences. Human action, he argued, is subjective, guided by motivations and intentions of actors. The natural scientist is interested in abstract laws; the social scientist is interested in the meaning that human actors ascribe to their actions. The appropriate method for understanding actors’ motivation is the experience of empathy, or verstehen. Rather than seek objective detachment, one should aim to reproduce the experience of the actors. Thus, the prime data that the human sciences seek to grasp are not objects or atoms or events, but meaning. Dilthey moves to abandon the Kantian

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notion of consciousness as sensation as if it were a matter of atoms impacting the mind. Instead, he insists on the language of ‘‘erlebnis.’’3 In his 1960 classic Truth and Method (discussed below), Gadamer makes a point of emphasizing Dilthey’s use of the German word ‘‘erlebenis,’’ roughly translated in English as ‘‘experience.’’ Originally the word designated ‘‘to be still alive when something happens.’’ Gadamer points out that for Dilthey, the word attempts to connote ‘‘the immediacy with which something real is grasped,’’ something that makes a special impression of lasting importance, such as encountering an exceptionally moving work of art. Gadamer will challenge many of Dilthey’s precepts.

Martin Heidegger and the Understanding of Being In order to understand the impact of Heidegger, it is important to appreciate the context in which he studied, in particular the influence of his teacher, Husserl, and the field of phenomenology. In his concern for disclosing consciousness, Hilthey advances Dilthey’s concepts, particularly in his emphasis on intentionality, but in a way that would be rejected by Heidegger. While he would not be considered a philosopher of hermeneutics, Husserl becomes an important figure in that several of his concepts, including the role of language and meaning, are challenged by Heidegger and Gadamer as they advance the philosophy of hermeneutics. For Husserl, the meaning of an expression is dependent upon what the speaker intends through the use of signs. Understanding is a mental process of grasping the intentionality of the speaker conveyed in words. Signs are representations of objects, and to understand one connects word-signs to referents.4 A meaning intention is ‘‘an understanding, a peculiar actexperience relating to the expression, which is present y shines through the expression y lends it meaning and thereby a relation to objects’’ (Husserl, 1900/1901, p. 302). Heidegger reacted against Husserl’s view of language as signs that carry the speaker’s meaning and disclose consciousness. He reacted against the notion of mental representations that carry meaning or intention. In Heidegger’s view, Dilthey and Husserl were prisoners of the Cartesian and Kantian separation of subject and object. In Heidegger’s view we have not only inherited a misrepresentation of consciousness but also inherited a misrepresentation of being itself from the early Greeks and the Enlightenment philosophers. Whereas the Enlightenment view of knowledge assumes separate and self-sufficient subjects and objects, for Heidegger ‘‘being’’ is holistic and integrated.


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In Heidegger’s philosophy, when Dilthey, Schleiermacher, and Husserl asked the question ‘‘how does the subject comes to know an object?’’ they were missing the holistic context. Heidegger noted that in order for any object to have salience for a subject, they are not separate entities but both (subject and object) already belong to a world that allows the object to show up as meaningful. There is already a preunderstanding of being that allows objects to show up, the background world the basis upon which any object is relevant or meaningful. With this move, Heidegger makes a crucial ontological turn with hermeneutics. Interpretation is not just meaning; it is grounded in a whole set of background practices, a kind of preunderstanding that makes knowing possible. We are beings-in-the-world, involved, absorbed, coping with an entire referential totality of equipment and other beings. We are not detached analytical monads. When one is absorbed in something, such as when one is hammering a nail, reading a book, or listening to lecture, one is ‘‘being-in-the world’’ of referential totality and barely noticing background practices. Only when there is a breakdown, when the hammer one is using feels too heavy, or the chair one wants to sit in falls apart, does one see the world as one of separate subject and object. When you describe an object, such as a hammer as ‘‘too heavy,’’ you have taken the object out of its holistic context within which one copes. The error that misled Descartes and Kant and later Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Husserl is to view knowledge and understanding as contents inside the mind. Rather, understanding is ‘‘being in the world,’’ an openness to the world. Hermeneutics is more than a methodology for understanding; it is the fundamental human condition of being. To say that understanding is our mode of being means that we inhabit the world in a prereflective way, a way that allows anything to show up as meaning something, a background set of practices that orient us in the world. To understand is to understand the projection of one’s possibilities of being. We are always already projecting ahead of ourselves in time, disclosing possible worlds.5 What does he mean by the notion of preunderstanding? Preunderstanding is our holistic background skills that give us familiarity, various particular coping skills that hang together in coherent, coordinated ways, intermeshed with referential totality of equipment, roles, and norms; these holistic coping skills are our understanding that enable us to get around in the world and allow us to make sense of everything we encounter. The notion of ‘‘pre’’ in preunderstanding can be discerned in the following quote: ‘‘Any interpretation which is to contribute understanding, must already have understood what is to be interpreted’’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 194).

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Language, he claimed, is the house of being. We are ‘‘thrown’’ into a way of talking and being that precedes us, so that our language speaks us rather than we speak our language. This is an enigmatic claim. What might it mean? It hits to the heart of Heidegger’s notion that ideas do not exist in the human mind (or in the mind of some other Supreme Being) prior to being brought into speech. Rather, ideas and concepts are language. Language is context that expresses and determines who we are (Heidegger, 1971, p. 146).6 One implication of Heidegger’s insight is that the self is always already participating in a context that guides the projection of meaning; knowing is never an achievement of an isolated subject. One is already embedded within a tradition of being.7 In fact, one only ‘‘has’’ an identity because of the relational whole that gives meaning to one’s actions and the totality of surrounding equipment. A mountain climber climbing a mountain is not detached and analytical, not aware of a separation between self and world; he has an identity only because of his holistic relation to the snow, rocks, ice picks, boots, etc. In this way, Heidegger has taken a radical turn. He extends notion of hermeneutic circle – not just relation between subject and text but also the relationship between self-understanding and understanding of the world.

Hans Gadamer and the Fusion of Horizons Many regard Heidegger’s student Hans Gadamer as the central hermeneutic philosopher of the 20th century. His emphasis on hermeneutics within the humanities became so central that Heidegger declared ‘‘hermeneutic philosophy to Gadamer’s own cause’’ (Albert, 2002, p. 17). He looks at the question of hermeneutics both as a set of principles or methodology for interpreting meaning and as an ontology. His book Truth and Method is in essence a history of hermeneutics. In this sense, the title of his book is ironic in that he challenges the ‘‘method’’ of hermeneutics as a cognitive process of empathy put forward by Dilthey and he offers as different way to consider what we accept as truth. Gadamer explores numerous meanings of the term ‘‘understanding.’’ He draws on Heidegger and Aristotle in arguing that understanding is essentially an application, a practical ‘‘know-how,’’ a capacity to do or apply something. This is a departure from Dilthey’s notion to claim methodological rigor; understanding (verstehen) is a cognitive process of empathic re-enactment. For Gadamer, understanding is less a cognitive achievement than a practical one. To understand something is to be able to apply a skill, such as a cook engaged in cooking or an engineer designing a


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tool. He draws upon Heidegger’s notion that understanding is always also a self-understanding, a realization that it is I who am capable of cooking or doing. This is the way in which understanding is my primary way of being in the world, the mode of my participation in the world. Gadamer adds another dimension to what it means to ‘‘understand.’’ Understanding is related to agreement. To understand a text is akin to entering a dialogue between conversation partners seeking to achieve some kind of common ground. This is not the same as grasping the author’s intention. Understanding is always translation, a matter of putting things into words, taking something foreign and articulating it in terms that are familiar. Understanding, application, interpretation, and translation are terms that are almost interchangeable for Gadamer. Since interpretation is a translation, an attempt to take something foreign and relate it to familiar words, it is impossible to get outside of prejudice. In fact, this is perhaps the most radical of Gadamer’s points and as direct a challenge to Enlightenment view of knowledge as we are likely to find: prejudices are conditions for understanding. One can never get outside of one’s words in order to grasp a text: We are always already embedded within an historical tradition and cannot get outside of it in order to get a ‘‘truer’’ picture of the text. There is no place to stand outside of history and/or culture to get a better grasp of things. Even becoming aware of this doesn’t help: ‘the standpoint beyond any standpoint y is pure illusion.’ (p. 376)

There is no direct access to a world unmediated by language. We always inherit interpretive biases in the form of language. Biases bring forth meaning by anticipation, expectation, and projection. Understanding, then, is a projection of the horizon of the reader that meets the horizon of the text. Gadamer introduces an important phrase that many cite as one of his core contributions to the field of hermeneutics: understanding is a fusion of horizons. The dialogical encounter between reader and text expands or contracts the reader’s world. Drawing directly upon Heidegger, prejudices and biases are our openness to the world, they are the conditions that allow us to experience anything. Gadamer is interested in the possibility of openness when he suggests how to approach the ‘‘other’’ as we enter dialogue with a text, a person, or an event. He calls for the acknowledgment that one’s truth claim should be taken seriously and that one should approach the ‘‘other’’ with a willingness to accept the others’ differences, a willingness to allow our horizons to be challenged. Gadamer inherits the term ‘‘horizon’’ from Husserl who used it to refer to perspective or viewpoint, but appropriates it in non-Kantian

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ways. He writes: ‘‘The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Applying this to the thinking mind, we speak of narrowness of horizon, of the possible expansion of horizon, of the opening up of new horizons, and so forth’’ (Gadamer, 1960, p. 302). Understanding is a ‘‘fusion of horizons,’’ the meeting of differences. ‘‘A horizon is not a rigid boundary but something that moves with one and invites one to advance further’’ (Gadamer, 1960, p. 245). The reader of the text extends or projects his or her horizon toward a text, another person, or an event. The text, person, or event is no immaculate object, but comes with its own horizon or historical context and projects its horizon outward to the reader. I play out a possibility of my own being when I interpret a text. Gadamer’s privileging of language is an important contribution to the field of hermeneutics: ‘‘Being that can be understood is language.’’ For him language is not only a means of communication. Any understanding that cannot be put into words is no understanding at all. Drawing upon Heidegger’s notion, it is language that makes thought possible, a direct contradiction to the Enlightenment view in Kant, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Husserl that holds language as carrier of meaning.

Paul Ricoeur: Metaphor, Narrative, and Selfhood Paul Ricoeur is another significant figure in the development of hermeneutics (1967, 1981, 1984). His philosophy touches many disciplines, including psychoanalysis, religion, ethics, literary criticism, and linguistics. It is far beyond the scope of this chapter to summarize his work, but suffice it to say that his theory of hermeneutics is woven throughout. In some ways, his entire philosophy is a philosophy of reading. More so than Heidegger and Gadamer, Ricoeur made an impact on literary studies, particularly in his analysis of the structures of narrative and metaphor. The notion of the ‘‘text’’ as metaphor for speech and action becomes a central theme in his work. We are always reading, or interpreting discourse in the form of speech, action, or texts. We have inherited knowledge embedded in texts, the meaning of which is concealed and must be revealed through the work of hermeneutics. All facets of life in this sense are like portions of text to be deciphered and interpreted. A theme that concerned Ricoeur was the notion of selfhood. For Ricoeur, each person is obligated to strive for self-understanding8 – we are beings


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who inquire into ourselves, who seek to understand who we are. More importantly, for our purposes here, self-understanding is a hermeneutic achievement and occurs through ‘‘signs deposited in memory and imagination by the great literary traditions’’ (Ricoeur, 1995, p. 16). The Stanford Encyclopedia claims that this is the core theme of Ricoeur’s work and that he has written a philosophical anthropology of the ‘‘capable person,’’ one that acknowledges the vulnerabilities and capabilities that humans display in their activities. Ricoeur outlines two different genres of hermeneutics. One is an approach toward texts with faith, openness, and willingness to grasp the sacred, hence his influence in the field of theology. His analysis of metaphor and narrative emphasizes the potential for novelty and new understanding. The other approach is the ‘‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’’ the attempt to demystify, the assumption that one must get behind the disguises of the text. Ricoeur called Marx, Freud, and Nietzche ‘‘masters of suspicion’’ who approached human consciousness as deceptive and attempted to uncover its falseness to arrive at something more authentic.9 Identity and selfhood are not stable or pregiven constructs. We must construct a coherent identity to become intelligible to ourselves. We rely on stories and narrative emplotments to make discrete events intelligible and connect disparate experiences. We are engaging in narrative construction whenever we ‘‘bring together facts as heterogeneous as agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, and unexpected results’’ (Ricoeur, 1984, pp. 42– 45). Through narrative we are able to discern a larger whole apart from each distinct element. One constructs different kinds of stories to account for a myriad of disparate events. Stories give form and relate events to one another. They allow us to attribute causality and intention to events. When we talk about an action as a manifestation of intent, we are positing a plot but doing so retrospectively: The paradox of emplotment is that it inverts the effect of contingency, in the sense of that which could have happened differently or which might not have happened at all, by incorporating it in some way into the effect of necessity or probability exerted by the configuring act. The inversion of the effect of contingency into an effect of necessity is produced at the very core of the event: as a mere occurrence, the latter is confined to thwarting the expectations created by the prior course of events; it is quite simply the unexpected, the surprising. It only becomes an integral part of the story when understood after the fact, once it is transfigured by the so to speak retrograde necessity which proceeds from the temporal totality carried to its term. (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 142)

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We reflect upon actual experiences and draw upon a tradition of narrative from various cultural sources to create a sense of constancy and identity: As for the narrative unity of a life, it must be seen as an unstable mixture of fabulation and actual experience. It is precisely because of the elusive character of real life that we need the help of fiction to organize life retrospectively, after the fact, prepared to take as provisional and open to revision any figure of emplotment borrowed from fiction or history. (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 162)

There is a sense of vulnerability and fragility in Ricoeur’s view of selfhood. Narrative provides a cohesive fabric that links the disparate moment to moment of our lives. Finally, mention must be made of Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor. Traditionally, linguistic philosophers viewed metaphor through the lens of rhetoric, the notion that metaphor is the substitution of one word for another. But for Ricoeur metaphor is powerful not because of its literal meaning. Rather, metaphors have the potential to open up worlds of meaning. When grappling with metaphor, the reader suspends familiar understandings or literal interpretations of the sentence. Metaphors force the reader or listener to take on an active role, connecting the words to larger contexts. Ricoeur writes that metaphor ‘‘forces conceptual thought to think more’’ (1977, p. 303). Not all metaphors have this potency. ‘‘Dead’’ metaphors, through repetition, have achieved the status of myth and no longer open a horizon of possible meanings. ‘‘Live’’ metaphors insist that we actively engage to allow a new idea to emerge for us. New, living metaphors invite us to see something through something else and to notice new dimensions, and thus keep human thought alive and exercise the imagination. Ricoeur’s version of the hermeneutic circle challenges the reader to be open to the emergence of new meaning: ‘‘We must understand in order to believe, but we must believe in order to understand’’ (Ricoeur quoted in Simms, 2003, p. 351). In sum, the field of hermeneutics has had an influential role in the social sciences and organization studies specifically. By challenging the normative assumptions associated with positivism, hermeneutic theory raises questions regarding the nature of knowledge within the field of social studies itself. In the second part of this chapter, we revisit the logical positivist assumptions that guide most organizational research efforts in order to appreciate some of the challenges many have raised through a hermeneutic lens. We then explore four areas that have been influenced by hermeneutic theory: organizational culture, sensemaking, organizational identity, and dialogue as an intervention into organizational learning.


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META-THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS THAT GUIDE ORGANIZATION STUDIES We must begin by acknowledging that hermeneutic approaches to social science remain a minority approach. In fact, most research in organizational studies remains committed to a logical positivist view of knowledge, consistent with the Enlightenment philosophers, one that emulates the natural sciences (see Barrett, 2008). The predominant view that guides most organization studies and research makes an attempt to show that the author(s) have tried to eliminate the appearance of interpretive bias. The assumption is that social science should be a value-free enterprise. This view advocates building on prior knowledge to formulate hypotheses and the use of quantitative methods to measure social and psychological processes through experimental or quasi-experimental designs. Researchers often use surveys and questionnaires that uncover aggregate differences between classes of individuals, groups, and organizations. When researchers discuss how they worded items on surveys, they do their best to demonstrate that they have eliminated interpretive bias. In fact, they refer to these surveys using impersonal value-free terms from the natural sciences – ‘‘instruments.’’ The assumption is that the researcher should remain uninvolved with the subject under study so as not to cloud the findings or reaffirm one’s normative expectations; the researchers should approach the problem as if objective facts are waiting to be discovered. Like the model used in the natural sciences, the researcher should ‘‘let the facts speak for themselves,’’ contributing toward the advancement and accumulation of knowledge through incremental fact-oriented research. This approach has given birth to functionalism, a view that social structures are shaped by imperatives and that they adapt toward the maintenance of social order.10 Structural functionalist researchers believe that below the surface of appearances and individual particularities, there are deeper structures, regularities that can be explained in terms of cause and effect. What is deemed ‘‘knowledge’’ is based on objective explanations that causally connect verifiable patterns that become translated into transhistorical formulas codified in the acontextual language of mathematics (and statistics). This empirical rigor will lead to the accumulation of knowledge: the search for reliable patterns among the contingencies of observable events has led scientists to mount a program of research that seeks to provide the last word, to solve problems once and for all. So where does this leave the influence of hermeneutics? In fact, many, especially in recent years, have raised doubt about the possibility of a

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neutral, value-free inquiry. These voices are strongly influenced by the interpretive turn and claim that it is impossible to document ‘‘objective facts’’ without some a priori theoretical and value-laden lens, a view that reflects Gadamer’s notion of knowledge as a projected horizon. These theorists hold that what passes for truth is historically and contextually contingent. ‘‘Facts’’ are negotiated achievements within communities of agreement that reflect and reinforce interests and standpoints. What we take to be ‘‘fact’’ is always already guided by some prior theoretical lens that deems it worth noticing, a notion that Heidegger would endorse. When one begins with the facts, one has already advocated an implicit theory that coincides with common sense and the status quo within some community. These communities have been called interpretive communities, discourse communities, communities of practice, and communities of knowing. Indeed, anthropological studies of scientists engaged in research and theory construction have demonstrated that the activity of research is a negotiated achievement, that the ‘‘facts’’ of science are social constructions (see Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Knorr, 1981). These studies have shown that establishing ‘‘facts’’ is often a competitive enterprise between scientists within various interpretive communities and rather than unbiased detached observers, scientists are often deeply invested in which facts emerge as legitimate and which are overlooked. Gouldner (1979) argued that theory is informed by domain assumptions, background dispositions that favor particular beliefs and values. What Gouldner has called ‘‘domain assumptions,’’ Heidegger might refer to as the essence of hermeneutics – the background conditions that allow anything to be deemed known or knowable. Gouldner claims that the researcher’s personal experience and sentiment do in fact shape social research. Social theorists’ interests and internalized prejudices often remain resistant to evidence that would surface them. Whether a theory is accepted or rejected is due partly to the tensions and sentiments it generates. For Gouldner all social theory has both political and personal relevance, despite what the formal methods books might say. When the theorist confronts the social world, he or she is also inevitably confronting his or her own values and preferences, a point that resonates with Gadamer’s philosophy. In the 1930s a critical approach to social theory emerged in the Frankfurt school, one that was influenced by the controversy that Heidegger had begun in Germany. These scholars challenged the traditional view and claimed that social scientists always operate with tacit theoretical biases. To name one, Habermas (1972) proposed that the approach to knowledge production can be linked to three different cognitive and ideological


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interests that generate different forms of knowledge for different purposes. First, empirical–analytical knowledge reflects a technical interest for the purposes of enhancing prediction, control, efficiency, and effectiveness, an approach that he would argue generated much of the organizational literature on strategy and structural contingency. Second, the historical– hermeneutic theories have a practical purpose of improving mutual understanding, exploring how various actors make sense of their worlds and how norms and schemas evolve to legitimize certain activities over others. Finally, an emancipatory approach to knowledge creation seeks to expose forms of domination and exploitation in the service of transforming social institutions, creating better and more rational social worlds. One could argue that the Frankfurt School took hermeneutics in a different direction, fostering a school of critical theory, a theoretical orientation that demonstrates how privileged positions of autonomy and power exclude or marginalize subordinate actors. Critical theory is enjoying a growing interest in organization studies (see, e.g., the work of Wilmott, Knights, Alvesson). Ricoeur wrote about the importance of critical self-understanding in a way that challenges one to be open to novel possibilities and the emergence of new meaning. In this vein, Gergen’s work might be viewed as a challenge for organizational researchers to self-reflect. He called for ‘‘generative theory’’ (1982), knowledge that challenges established theoretical terms. Rather than simply concerning ourselves with construct validity, perhaps researchers need to reflect on the implications of theoretical terms and concepts. Generative theory poses the following question: how are patterns of action enabled and constrained by the theoretical terms we use? In this vein, Gergen claims that theory creation and theory testing are hermeneutic enterprises. Theory does more than reflect objective truth; it also serves to facilitate or constrain modes of action. This is taking Heidegger’s ontological claims and considering the implications. Gergen proposes that theoretical terms reinforce or transform the preunderstanding that allows the world to show up as it does. Theories not only reflect or predict the world but also reinforce or challenge ways of being. Gergen goes so far as to propose that knowledge can become an intervention into social practice; perhaps bolder forms of theorizing can enable innovative repertoires of action, challenging the status quo and advancing alternative social forms. Generative theory claims that social science can be a powerful influence in constituting people’s experience, clearly an appreciation of hermeneutic philosophy. By creating linguistic categories, distinctions, and causal attributions, scientists are publicly defining reality that guides people by shaping the way they talk about life and how they report their own and

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others’ experiences, indeed, how people actually have experiences. It would be difficult for a person in 19th-century Europe to describe himself or herself as high in emotional intelligence. However, in modern organizations the term has become a lens for self-reflection as well as behavioral assessment. Foucault took this one step further: social scientists help to create what is taken to be normal and legitimate. Further, a limited set of inferences for actions flows from these a given set of theoretical terms. For this reason, Foucault acknowledges the hermeneutic power of researchers by referring to scientists as ‘‘authorities of delimitation.’’ In the same vein, Anthony Giddens’ highlighted the double hermeneutic of social science, contending that social scientists play a prominent role in shaping the discourse by which people carry out their lives. In sum, hermeneutic philosophy has had a growing influence on the practice of social and organizational research, claiming that the researchers are indeed biased and that researcher’s choices are interpretive moves. These moves have consequences for how social science activity is conducted, what topics are chosen, what methodology is adopted, and how we conceptualize the consequences of such knowledge. In the next section we briefly touch upon some of the substantive areas that have been influenced by hermeneutic philosophy.

HERMENEUTICS AND ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH In the second section we briefly traced the evolution of the field of hermeneutics. In the previous section we suggested that the traditional canons that inform organizational research are being challenged from several corners influenced by hermeneutics. Now we suggest some of the areas in which hermeneutic philosophy has influenced organization studies. We suggest that the interpretive perspective can be seen in the areas of organizational culture, sensemaking and identity, and situated learning. Hermeneutics and Studies of Organizational Culture While structural functionalism remains a strong orientation since the birth of the field of organization studies, interpretation and meaning have become increasingly focal. Max Weber borrows from Dilthey’s notion of verstehen as central to understanding human action in organizations. Several


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researchers have picked up on this thread of interpretation. Silverman’s 1970 book was one of the first to make interpretation and meaning-making central. Andrew Pettigrew (1979) called attention to organizational culture in a seminal piece. He suggests that organizational culture comprises a broad amalgam of motives, feelings, actions, belief systems, meanings, and interpretations bound up in myth and ritual and is imbued early in an organization’s life cycle. His view of how culture develops in organizations follows a functional view, although his conception of culture is a meaning system inculcated by founders and embedded in structures and routines. From a hermeneutic lens then, cultural roots are an embodiment of individual actors’ meaning-making and interpretive schemes – a foundation of verteshen. Pettigrew believes that in understanding organizational actors’ motives and actions, scholars may detect cultural patterns. Another key turning point was the special issue of Administrative Science Quarterly in 1983 devoted to the study of organizational culture. The editors half apologetically write that ‘‘culture as a root metaphor for organization studies is a new idea, redirecting our attention away from some of the commonly accepted ‘important things’ (such as structure or technology) and toward the (until now) less-frequently examined elements raised to importance by the new metaphor (such as shared understandings, norms, or values).’’ In the past 20 years, culture has indeed become a legitimate topic in the field of organization studies, and is grounded in many of the epistemological assumptions of hermeneutics. Schein’s (1985) influential book Organizational Culture and Leadership argued that organizational culture is concerned with the shared values, norms, and assumptions of a group or organization. Language and symbols increasingly become legitimate topics for research as culture research addresses the taken-for-granted, shared, tacit background ways of seeing. Since culture research includes a focus on meaning and the process of meaning-making, researchers seek a close relationship to the data. They become interested in looking for exceptions rather than only focusing on verifying a priori hypotheses that focus on structures. Qualitative research methods, including ethnography and interviews, are legitimate source of data. Researchers including John van Maanen, Peter Frost, Joanne Martin, Mary Jo Hatch, and Haridmos Tsoukas made important contributions to the growing research on interpretation, meaning, and culture in organizational settings. Another important contributor was Turner (1990) who furthered an appreciation of cultural processes, symbolism, and qualitative research methods. He was key contributor to the Standing Conference on Organizational

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Symbolism (SCOS), an important European movement devoted to symbolic– interpretive studies of organizational cultures. Researchers became interested in myths, stories, discourse, rituals, values, and beliefs. Some of the important edited collections are those by Pondy (1983), Frost (1985), Jones, Moore, and Snyder (1988), Turner (1990), Gagliardi (1990), and Smircich (1983). Martin, Frost, and others began to raise important debates regarding whether cultures are unitary or differential with conflicting subcultures. Some began to explicitly call attention to the role of the researcher as co-constructing rather than only reflecting cultural themes, a move that mirrors Ricoeur’s emphasis on the role of the reader in co-constructing the meaning of a text (Smircich, 1995; Van Maanen, 1995a, 1995b). Trice and Beyer (1984) further developed the symbolic theme in their studies of ceremony and ritual practice in organizations. The debate set forth by Joanne Martin and others reawakened organizational scholars to the study of culture. She called particular attention to nuanced understandings of cultural roots using a metaphorical logic. She argues that scholars studying culture from a functionalist, unitary perspective, considering culture a variable in organizational research miss an alternative approach, that is, culture from a symbolic standpoint, one that incorporates a wide range of ‘‘thick descriptions’’ (Geertz, 1973). The metaphorical and symbolic paradigm enables scholars to ‘‘look beneath the surface, to gain an in-depth understanding of how people interpret meanings of these [cultural] manifestations and how these interpretations form patterns of clarity, inconsistency, and ambiguity’’ (Martin, 2002, p. 4). She and other scholars following this broadened view of the scholarship of culture seek to understand the role of human action in organizational life through a richly complex and diverse set of symbols, artifacts, experiences, and emotions and their respective interpretations.

Hermeneutics and Sensemaking The literature on sensemaking is also informed by hermeneutic theory. Sensemaking is concerned with how people construct meaning, constrain action, and construct identity. Sensemaking researchers strive to articulate the distinction between the routine of organizational life in which the subject–object distinction is not salient and the sensemaking efforts that occur after a breakdown. Sensemaking is explicit and ‘‘visible’’ under conditions of surprise and unmet expectations, when events are perceived to be different from what was expected, or when the meaning of events is so unclear that actors do not know how to engage the world. These are the


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moments that Heidegger describes when he outlines the shift from the ‘‘ready to hand’’ mode in which one is in a state of absorbed coping or immersed in the flow of events to the ‘‘unready to hand mode’’ in which action is disrupted and people must reflect or introspect to access reasons for engaging. The scripts and rationales that people look for in attempting to reengage the world are drawn from organizational and institutional settings, past routines, plans, and procedures. This recalls Heidegger’s preunderstanding of being and Ricoeur’s notion that we draw upon metaphors and narratives in the culture to construct coherent understandings. Weick and others posit that sensemaking within the ongoing stream of activity, people begin to notice and bracket, they carve cues from an undifferentiated flux. Imposing labels triggers a particular kind of diagnostic treatment and will suggest modes of acting, managing, coordinating, etc. Weick writes, ‘‘people make sense of things by seeing a world on which they have already imposed what they believe.’’ ‘‘Imposing labels’’ is not unlike Gadamer’s emphasis on the formative power of language and the projection of horizons.11 What is important for our purposes is to highlight the way that sensemaking research highlights meaning-making and interpretation as ongoing activities involving noticing, bracketing, and labeling, meaningmaking efforts to reduce uncertainty and transience and begin to create order out of chaos that predisposes people to act in certain ways: ‘‘In the context of everyday life, when people confront something unintelligible and ask ‘what’s the story here?’ their question has the force of bringing an event into existence’’ (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005, p. 410). Weick and others echo Ricoeur’s sensitivity to stories as necessary cultural resources meaningmaking. Sensemaking efforts are efforts to create a plausible story (Weick et al., 2005). Stories become more plausible when they link with prior stories, when events can be seen as exemplars of familiar principles and stories.

Organizational Identity Identity construction is at the base of sensemaking activities and undergirds the efforts to stabilize meaning. Following Weick, ‘‘people learn about their identities by projecting them into an environment and observing the consequences’’ (1995). In 1985, Albert and Whetten (1985) first adopted the construct of ‘‘organizational identity’’ to connote those facets of an organization that are central, distinctive, and continuous. They proposed that identity is an interpretive construct and can only be understood through interpretive methods. The proper method for understanding identity is an

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‘‘extended metaphor analysis.’’ They claimed that public identity is conveyed ‘‘through signs and symbols’’ such as logos, signs, slogans, etc. (p. 95). The growing research in the field of organizational identity has emphasized how identity is an important hermeneutic key through which organizational members make sense of issues. Dutton and Dukerich, for example, used the lens of identity to understand several issues in the Port Authority. Identity impacts issue interpretations, emotions, actions, and adaptation processes. Beliefs about identity shape the meanings given to events and what solutions should be deemed legitimate. They are very close to Heidegger’s hermeneutics, the background assumptions that allow objects to show up as meaningful, the basis upon which events, people, and things make legitimate sense. In Heidegger’s scheme, this background assumption becomes foreground and explicit when there is a breakdown of some kind. Indeed, the employees of the Port Authority began to talk about identity issues when their sense of identity was disconfirmed and when they were embarrassed and angry by the negative press because of the way they dealt with the homeless population. When they were ontologically threatened, they began to wonder ‘‘who are we?’’ Weick also picks up on this theme in his analysis of Mann Gulch. Smokejumpers’ tools, narrative, symbols, and actions represent their identity and act as handles in a Heideggerian sense that enable coping and managing in challenging circumstances. Sparrowe (2005) draws on this notion as well. He argues that identity is constructed through self-constancy and understandings of experience in the world that is interpreted as trust and reliability in a person (being ‘‘relied on’’ or ‘‘counted on’’) and conceptions of character or individually possessed and enduring qualities: Ricoeur does not deal explicitly with authenticity. However, the relationship between character and self consistency offer interesting possibilities for linking authenticity to the narrative self y. Character is a response to the question, asked by the subject about himself or herself: ‘what am I?’ But self consistency is a response to the question asked by others, ‘where are you?’ [Ricoeur, 1992, p. 165] Authenticity cannot be meaningful if the self is empty of character, but it cannot be real if it ignores the dynamics of lived experience. It is the narrative self that unites character and self consistency. (p. 430)

Identity involves a dynamic relationship between ‘‘what we are’’ and ‘‘where we stand’’ in relation to lived experience. Weick’s analysis of Mann Gulch highlights both the tragic misidentification of character and the effect on the smokejumpers’ lived experience, which led to their unfortunate fate. Their tools, with which they most closely identified, impeded their ability to deal effectively with the dynamic situation they faced.


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Hermeneutics and Narrative Approaches to Organizational Studies If identity construction is a narrative process, involving narrator and taking account of audience in forming and editing components of one’s story, what is the role of leadership? Ricoeur’s narrative theory offers some fruitful implications. For Ricoeur, self-understanding is a moral imperative. The self is a narrative project in which one weaves a story of coherence to unite disparate experiences. Sparrowe explicitly uses Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy that leaders’ authentic self-awareness is made possible by attending to the narrative construction of self that includes the voices of others. He draws on Ricoeur’s narrative project, moreover, to suggest that leaders narrate their self-concept, which potentially influences identity construction and that followers mimic identity of their leaders (Luthans & Avolio, 2003). Ricoeur’s influence in this domain is ‘‘texts,’’ and the ‘‘emphasis is on the discursive or linguistic nature of experience’’ (Sparrowe, 2005, p. 424). Ricoeur’s concern is about lived experience and living texts unfolding through time and space, through the action and emotions of actors enacting their stories. The practice of emplotment is the means by which ‘‘we try to inhabit worlds foreign to us’’ (Ricoeur, 1988, p. 249) and thus negotiate the path between experience and narrative. To negotiate such a path means one must possess self-understanding and self-awareness to link past to present and present to future in narrative sense, to make sense of unexpected events, and heterogeneity of agents, goals, interactions, and the like. Ricoeur’s influence in leadership development, namely the role of narrative as a means to self-awareness and self-understanding, is the foundation for emotional and social intelligence. According to Sparrowe, the root of authentic leadership is the ‘‘authentic self.’’ Management consultants use a narrative approach in a coaching context to create emplotment as a way to foster selfawareness through reflection. In leadership development practice, one asks leaders to articulate personal narratives concerning the success or obstacles in work relationships, that is, the examination of autobiographical texts, and what might be done to learn from personal constructions. Responses are in the form of stories and critical incidents that help individuals identify effective leadership moments and experiential markers they use as ‘‘handles’’ to enable their personal effectiveness – these touchstones are anchors for future effectiveness. Such a process of aided self-inquiry requires deep reflection, self-analysis, authenticity, and the examination of discursive turns. Ricoeur’s influence in organizational studies is also active in the domain of managerial communication. Czarniawska-Joerges and Joerges (1988) offer several examples of linguistic turns in organizations. For them,

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language in organizational life reflects a rich and nuanced understanding of meaningful organizational constructions, cultural contexts for organizing, and symbols and meaning systems. Talk in organizations, they contend, enjoins intentional and communicative acts with managerial action, that is, use of language and narrative represents one organizing force for routine, quotidian work. They cite the example of ‘‘labels’’ in organizational talk, which serve to organize objects and work. Linguistically, labels classify and organize how people perceive and understand packets of organizational life, and yet organizationally they ‘‘carry their own implications for action’’, that is, labels consolidate information and due to their meaning suggest appropriate diagnoses and action, thus becoming prime movers for enacting organizational realities. In all of these examples, the role of values shapes the narratives and identities of leaders. In managerial communication, linguistic markers shape the means by which people think about and enact organizational responsibilities, and leaders often set those markers. Leaders possessing self-understanding and who master emotional self-control influence followers. The self-narratives they construct have power to inspire others to action because they are grounded in leaders’ set of ethical concerns, value sets, and moral orientations, which, according to Luthans and Avolio (2003), followers are more likely to adopt.

Hermeneutics and Situated Learning Heidegger and Gadamer view knowledge and understanding as practical application. The notion that understanding is practical activity has influenced the literature in the area of situated learning. Theorists of situated learning and ‘‘practice’’ draw upon hermeneutic philosophy to make this point. Several organizational researchers have been influenced by Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1990), Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), and Giddens (1979, 1984). Bourdieu’s concept of habitus sees social actors as embodying tacit, preconscious expectations (‘‘intentionless intentions’’). Giddens’ structuration theory looks at the background structures and interpretive schemes, and the shared fundamental assumptions that organize the way actors construe meaning, choose actions, understand events and experiences, and serve as templates that allow individuals to process incoming information efficiently, to notice, select, remember, learn, and extrapolate whole gestalts from partial data. The background of mutual understanding and the basic orientation in Gidden’s theory is informed by Heidegger’s


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preunderstanding of being. In structuration theory, they are the basis upon which individuals organize beliefs, values, preferences, and meanings into structures of knowledge. When preconscious expectations transform to situated learning and action, organization members, as agentic, social actors, engage with physical world in counterintuitive ways. They come at the world with fresh eyes and innovativeness. Background assumptions shape the world, but when called into question, when preconscious becomes explicit, new opportunities to engage emerge. Situated learning informs the relationship between action and the context of performance, so, for instance, in organizations, situated learning is about contextualized behavior Take, for example, facing a life or death moment in an organization (Powley, 2009). Actors’ situated actions occur in context of a perpetrator, victims, emotions evoking fear and hope simultaneously, and counterintuition. The inhabited world of the crisis moment takes on new meaning and new significance such that physical objects possess a quality Weick, borrowing Heidegger, describes as thrownness, or the capacity for ‘‘bricolage, making-do, y [or] staying in motion to cover new options’’ (Weick, 2004, p. 76). Weick emphasizes the improvisatory nature of dealing with constant change and notes that exposure to thrownness feels very much like dealing with the unexpected in a liminal space. He further states that ‘‘thrownness puts a premium on recovery, resilience, and normalizing, without calling attention to the fact that these moods are at a premium’’ (p. 76). In a sense, the crisis moment exacerbates ‘‘thrownness.’’ Weick’s (2004) conceptualization of ‘‘thrownness’’ in managing represents one application of liminality in management practice. Liminality as an organizational phenomenon is at the heart of situated learning and action. It calls on individuals to consider and question their habituated relationships in favor of new actionable possibilities. For example, in organizational change interventions, the change process represents ritual space where liminality is a core feature: in an out-of-normal-operations context, organization members experience thrownness as they negotiate nonroutine relationship interactions, discover new knowledge about others and work, and bond together to create new enabling opportunities for the organization. Many times in such large system change programs, the intervention space represents an intentionally constructed liminal experience, so organization members step outside formal roles to engage with others throughout the organizational system and work toward a change objective (Powley, 2004; Powley, Fry, Barrett, & Bright, 2004). Moreover, situated learning is a reaction against cognitive and behavioral views of learning. While cognitive learning theories emphasize the inner

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state of the individual, situated learning holds that learning is not simply a matter of transmission of acontextual knowledge from one person to another. Rather, learning occurs within a particular social and physical context and often involves activity (over passive reception). Seeking to eschew the image of internal cogitation that precedes action, Suchman (1987) states that ‘‘we generally do not anticipate alternative courses of action, or their consequences, until some course of action is already under way.’’ Several example illustrate our point: Seifert and Hutchins (1992) take a situated learning perspective in their study of decision making on a Navy ship; Lave studied people using mathematical knowledge within practical settings; Orr (1996) studied the learning practices of Xerox’s service technician representatives. Essential to organizational learning is access to legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1990), understanding how to function as an insider. This recognizes that learning is much more than receiving abstract, acontextual, disembodied knowledge. It is a matter of learning how to speak the language of the community of practitioners. Brown and Duguid (1991) refer to organizations as communities of practices, groups of people who learn by practice and participation. Their studies of how newcomers learn how to do tasks that insiders do recalls Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s view of the person as embedded within a horizon of meaning and the view of understanding as practical know-how.

Dialogue One insight from Gadamer’s Truth and Method that has been influential is the belief that prejudice is part of all experience, we live within a tradition that shapes us, and the Enlightenment ideal of perfect knowledge is unattainable. Operating under the illusion that one is without prejudice is to be dominated by prejudice. This idea has been influential in a number of areas, but one that has particularly benefited is the area of dialogue and deliberation. From such a perspective, individuals potentially overcome the temptation to treat the other as an object and the temptation to rise above the other (see Rasmussen, 2002). The moral tone of the hermeneutic experience is to seek openness, and openness to the immediate hermeneutic experience and to approach the other as a ‘‘Thou’’ (Buber, 1958) are perhaps two ways to address the role of dialogue.


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Gadamer’s notion of openness has influenced discussions of public discourse (for a critique of applications of Gadamer to public deliberation, see Rasmussen, 2002). In the field of organizational development and organizational learning, the notion of dialogue has its roots in Gadamer and possibility of the intersubjective. For example, we look to contributions from Senge, Issacs, and Argyris. Their work focuses on the role of dialogue, the practice of engagement and openness, and considering the other as subject rather than object. Dialogue, conversation, discussion, and communication are not, in their view, functional apparatus or semantical, objective constructions sui generis. Instead, these communicative acts in the organizational setting are a part of routines, practices, and emergent organizing occurring in the flow of work; they represent social modes for interaction, engagement, learning, or developing others. Through them social actors create relationships, make connections, and encounter others as social beings (Gergen, Gergen, & Barrett, 2004). Perhaps the most prominent influence of the hermeneutic tradition in this domain is the place of verbal and nonverbal forms of action and preunderstanding that makes interpretation possible. With interpretation as a focal point of dialogue and deliberation, forms of dialogue shape meaning systems and action and thereby influence social actors’ action with and toward others. Practically speaking, dialogue becomes an actionable strategy by which organizational actors may influence, engage, enable, empower, or whatever suits them. Another contributor to this field was Chris Argyris (1974) who saw dialogue as a basis for professional competence and practice. At the heart of his work are conversational dynamics based on underlying assumptions one has about self and others, and the systems and structures in which they operate. In the spirit of Gadamer’s call to approach a text with openness, for Argyris, understanding underlying assumptions within conversational dynamics, through mechanisms of self-understanding and reflection, opens one’s possibilities for action and engagement. For him dialogue is about collaboration and action in ways that foster not only personal growth but also organizational learning. In the field of organizational change and team learning, Peter Senge (1990) and his colleagues at MIT have emphasized the role of dialogue. Dialogue in this view is an essential practice for becoming a ‘‘learning organization.’’ Their approach to organizational learning resonates with Gadamer’s notion that expansion of horizons creates new possibilities for being. This group differentiates dialogue and monologue or dialogue and discussion. The purpose of discussion is to persuade or to sell something, to

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reach closure on meaning, and to justify and defend assumptions. Dialogue is open inquiry. The purpose of dialogue is to inquire with the intention of learning and being changed, to pay attention to the unfolding of meaning, and to uncover and examine assumptions. For Senge, Argyris, and their colleagues, dialogue and deliberation become mechanisms to produce deliberate, coordinated action and predictable results in terms of both individual behavior and organizational performance. More specifically, principles of dialogue guide the process of inquiry involved in learning organizations. In both academic study and practical contexts, individuals are encouraged to suspend judgment, show respect for differences of thought and being, and regard each other as colleagues. Theorists Senge and Argyris, for example, emphasize reflection and inquiry skills that are the foundation of dialogue. In practice, they contend that for individuals to truly learn from self and others, they must balance inquiry and advocacy, and refrain from defensive behavior – all reflective openness. Similarly, Gergen speaks of transformative dialogue. This is what one might refer to as an appreciative hermeneutic, that is, an active, engaged relational orientation, mutual self-disclosure, and openness to surprise that could demand painful self-examination – a hermeneutic of appreciation rather than suspicion and a critical stance so often typical of academic scholarship.

CONCLUSIONS We have reviewed the history of hermeneutics from the ancient Greeks to late 20th century, highlighting the way in which philosophers have considered the nature of understanding and interpretation. We reviewed the formative contributions of Schleimecher and Dilthey and focused on the 20th-century philosophers Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur and how the nature of learning and understanding has shaped our interpretation of the world. From ancient to modern philosophers, we highlight the shift in hermeneutics from textual, methodological concerns to the study of interpretation. Our approach lends legitimacy to the knowledge of and approaches to interpretation as a field of study, separate from positivist views of science. We have also traced the influence of these philosophers in organization studies. In the last section we suggested that interpretive perspective has


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found its way into the organizational studies in areas such as organizational culture and symbolism, sensemaking and identity, organizational narratives, studies of situated learning, and dialogue. Dilthey’s notion of verstehen underlies the interpretive approach to cultural analysis. The study of culture examines organizational actors’ meaning systems and interpretations of their context, values, norms, and assumptions over technology and structure, much like an archeologist resurfaces artifacts that represent prior ways of seeing and being which now are embedded in current practice. Moreover, culture studies have gained acceptance, particularly since being grounded in hermeneutics and its focuses on language, symbols, norms, values, and beliefs. We traced the influence of hermeneutics in Karl Weick’s work on sensemaking. As in the hermeneutic tradition, sensemaking researchers rely on interpretative means to articulate distinctions between the routine of organizational life in which the subject–object distinction is not salient. Sensemaking involves a number of hermeneutic practices to interpret action and activity in organizations, such as noticing or bracketing. We took note of Heidegger and Ricoeur’s influence on identity, narrative studies, and leadership. Constructing selves results in examining taken-forgranted experiences. Organizational life often unfolds in a reified fashion with little thought for origins or assumptions, except when self-analysis and reflection enable an individual to see beyond the situation. Such analysis could demand significant attention depending on the circumstances that call for self-understanding. Moments of crisis represent one opportunity. The examination of narratives as living texts, however, can be a powerful mechanism for anchoring the self or awakening the self to new possibilities, and leadership development was a corresponding domain of practice. The influence of hermeneutics is also prominent in the field of organizational learning and dialogue. In these areas of study, individual action and agency are critical. Social actors make sense of their experience, transform it, and enact their lives and worlds based on their understandings. Their preunderstanding shapes the transformation and enactment, and, not until called into question through some outside force, they remain tacit. In the context of dialogue, hermeneutics influences interpretive means to construct language and communicative acts. These acts shape meaning systems and are stylized for a given context and the relationships in which they are used. As we have shown, the role of dialogue does not operate solely at the individual level, but also represents opportunities to form meaning at an organizational level.

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The influence of hermeneutics in organization studies is rich and continues to be an important, yet less recognized research domain. Our aim has been to draw attention to the historical underpinnings of hermeneutics and its influence in organizational theory. As other philosophical traditions addressed in this volume, hermeneutics offers nuanced understanding of the worlds scholars create and inhabit, which we see as beneficial to future opportunities for organization studies.

NOTES 1. At least one interpretation of this is that they had a conflict between an ‘‘oral’’ and a ‘‘literate’’ interpretation of texts. Plato’s dialogue Protagoras is a good example: Protagoras saw ‘‘texts’’ as providing narratives and the basis for thick descriptions that provide guidance; Socrates saw ‘‘texts’’ as imperfect (‘‘rhetoric’’) and wanted to substitute ‘‘knowledge’’ of what the good, the beautiful, and the true ‘‘is’’ (emphasis on the grammar of the verb ‘‘to be’’). See Levine (1998, chap. 3). 2. By expanding hermeneutics to consider not only textual understanding but also all modes of understanding, he would introduce the theme that will be developed in the 20th century by Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. 3. Later Husserl will take this concept and interpret it in Cartesian terms through the lens of intentionality; Heidegger and Gadamer will go in quite a different direction. What is important to note for our purposes here is that the concept of ‘‘erlebnis’’ becomes an epistemological concept. 4. Later philosophers, notably Richard Rorty, will refer to this as the ‘‘mirror theory’’ of language, the notion that the function of words is to mirror or reflect the world. 5. Gadamer will make this Heideggerian notion of ‘‘historicity of being’’ a central part of his theory of prejudice as essential for understanding, a point we will explore below. 6. This is a theme that Charles Taylor will take up in his essay Interpretation and the Sciences of Man. 7. In addition, as Gadamer will contend, the ‘‘other’’ that one seeks to know is part of a larger tradition as well. Gadamer will call this liken understanding to the fusion of horizons, a point we will explore below. 8. Self-understanding is accomplished through interpretation: ‘‘there is no selfunderstanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms’’ (Ricoeur, 1991, p. 15). 9. Ricoeur wrote an extensive study of Freud and dubbed psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic practice, a discipline that interprets human consciousness as the expression of desires. 10. Talcott Parsons built on these concepts and furthered a functionalist view that saw society in terms of self-maintaining, homeostatic systems with specific


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mechanisms that support the internal stability of society; while he acknowledged that humans are capable of voluntary action that might change those structures, structures tend to persist nevertheless. Parsons’ influence on the field of organizational studies was and remains strong, most notably in the school of structural contingency theory. 11. The sensemaking framework, however, is not entirely consistent with the hermeneutic philosophers we have reviewed here: Weick and others continue to hold out for an objective, ‘‘real’’ world apart from interpretation; also the phenomenological view of the self found in Husserl and his student Schutz; a Cartesian subject– object dualism that Heidegger and his students sought to overturn.

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Frank J. Barrett, PhD, is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School where he also works in the Program on Negotiations. He is a professor of Management in the Graduate School of Business and Public

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Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, and is Area Chair of the Management group since 2004. He is also on the faculty of Human and Organizational Development at the Fielding Graduate University. Frank has written on metaphor, masculinity, improvisation, organizational change, and organizational development in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Human Relations, Organization Science, and Organizational Dynamics as well as numerous book chapters. He wrote Generative Metaphor Intervention: A New Approach to Intergroup Conflict (with David Cooperrider) that won the award for best paper from the Organizational Development and Change Division of the Academy of Management in 1988. He won the best paper award again in 2003 for Planning on Spontaneity: Lessons from Jazz for a Democratic Theory of Change, a paper he co-authored with Mary Jo Hatch. He is also a jazz pianist. Edward H. Powley, PhD, assistant professor of management at the Naval Postgraduate School, teaches organizational behavior and studies organizational healing, positive change, trust, and organizational crises. He has consulted and conducted research with Prudential Retirement, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Navy, Roadway Express, and the Society for Organizational Learning. He worked previously for the World Bank and the Corporate Executive Board. He received his doctorate from Case Western Reserve University and master’s from The George Washington University. Barnett Pearce (PhD, Ohio University, 1969) is a professor emeritus in the School of Human & Organizational Development at Fielding Graduate University. He has served on the faculties of the University of North Dakota,University of Kentucky, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Loyola University Chicago, in the position of department chair at the latter two institutions. Improving the quality of communication has been his driving professional commitment, first taking the form of developing a conceptual understanding of communication, known as ‘‘the Coordinated Management of Meaning’’ (CMM), and, more recently, integrating scholarship with the practice of designing and facilitating communication, particularly in public meetings about community issues. He is a member of the core faculty at Fielding of the Dialogue, Deliberation & Public Engagement graduate certificate program, and a founder of the Transforming Communication Project. As a practitioner, he has worked on six continents through the nonprofit Public Dialogue Consortium and the for-profit Pearce Associates.


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He has published nine books, including Moral Conflict: When Social Worlds Collide (with Stephen Littlejohn), Interpersonal Communication: Making Social Worlds, and Communication and the Human Condition. His most recent publications include the book Making Social Worlds: A Communication Perspective and the article Toward a New Repertoire of Communication Skills for Leaders and Managers published in The Quality Management Forum.

PHENOMENOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Robin Holt and Jo¨rgen Sandberg ABSTRACT Phenomena are what we as researchers begin with, and to study phenomena is to appreciate how any determination of things and events always relates back to the context in which they appeared. Phenomenology is the study of such relations of appearance and the conditions of such relations. Appearance is an active rather than superficial condition, a constant bringing together of experiencing beings and experienced things (including sentient beings), in what the modern ‘‘father’’ of phenomenology Edmund Husserl called conditions of intentionality, and what his errant, one-time student Martin Heidegger called conditions of thrownness and projection. This chapter delves into the philosophical background of this mode of study, before opening up into consideration of, first, where phenomenology has been influential in organization studies, and, second, the potential of the approach. In so doing, we suggest much can be made of reorienting research in organization studies away from an entitative epistemology in which things are seen in increasingly causally linked, detailed isolation, and toward a relational epistemology in which what


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ROBIN HOLT AND JO¨RGEN SANDBERG

exists is understood in terms of its being experienced within everyday lives. Keywords: relationality; Husserl; Heidegger; dualism; phenomenology; Schutz; social construction; interpretive approach.

1. INTRODUCTION Phenomenology is a peculiar and peculiarly influential philosophical movement informing organization studies. Peculiar because while phenomenological philosophers, such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Alfred Schutz, share a similar spirit of approach to understanding the rich and varied experience of life, their ways of doing phenomenology differ significantly (Spiegelberg, 1982). Indeed, their disagreements are vociferous. It seems their advocacy of a pre-ideological appreciation of human experience or being has resulted in contrasts as vivid as dreamt up by any ideologue. As a movement, it has been peculiarly influential precisely because of this vivid variety, particularly its persistent refusal to reduce understanding of ourselves and our world to representations of isolated things through definitive methods governed by generalized theories. Life and the meaning of life have to be taken whole, and messy. Although it is widely recognized that phenomenology plays an influential role in organization studies, except for some paradigm studies (e.g., Burrell & Morgan, 1979; Johnson & Duberly, 2000; Pfeffer, 1982), and some occasional attempts to introduce phenomenology to organization studies, such as Sanders’s (1982) effort with Husserl and Sko¨ldberg’s (1998) with Heidegger, few have systematically traced and spelt out how phenomenology has come to influence, and is influencing, organizational researchers. This is what we aim to do in this chapter. Such an investigation is important for two related reasons. First, it contributes to an increased awareness of how phenomenology has influenced and continues to influence organization studies. Second, it makes it possible to see more clearly what phenomenology has to offer organization studies and, thus, how it can be further utilized to advance our understanding of human action and activities in organizations. This chapter is organized into two parts. The first is a foray into the phenomenological movement of the early twentieth century. There is no totality to this movement, no definitive set of figures who are ‘‘in’’ and ‘‘out,’’ so rather than attempt any exhaustive coverage (a task which would itself be

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somewhat unphenomenological), this part discusses work of two of the movement’s most celebrated exponents: Husserl and Heidegger. And even here, being amid the work, we err from the former toward the latter. The second part shifts register. It offers a more considered description of how phenomenological ideas have influenced organizational research. It does so by looking at (a) how phenomenology informs research methodologies and theoretical frameworks used in organization studies and (b) how phenomenology has influenced and been received in specific areas of organization studies. Thereafter, it identifies some misunderstandings of phenomenology within organization studies and suggests how these have interrupted what we might call the phenomenological project. The two parts work as a pair. They speak to one another as part of a common undertaking, without aping or confirming one another. The first part endeavors to express as much as describe phenomenology, whereas the second part integrates a host of empirical and theoretical studies in order to trace historically the emergence of phenomenological influence in organization studies. In this way, we hope the chapter itself is written in a spirit of engagement rather than stipulation, that it is considered an opening rather than a definitive statement.

2. PHENOMENOLOGY 2.1. In the Beginning There Were Things Phenomenology, from phenomena, the Greek for appearances, is the study of our experience, how things and events appear to us. Knowledge, beauty, right and wrong, and the immaterial and the material are all understood experientially. It is in explicating the relationship between things and ourselves that we ‘‘get at’’ what ‘‘is’’ and what it is ‘‘to be.’’ Phenomenology provides a new beginning, to release us from obscuring abstractions and scientific postures, and help us realize a prejudice-free understanding of ourselves and our world. Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of modern phenomenology, proposes this call of ‘‘going back to the things themselves’’ as the primary goal of phenomenology (1900–1901/1970, p. 7). The principle of correlation is at the heart of the phenomenological method; things appear to us and so each determination of a thing always correlates back to the individual conscious to which these things appear. Threaded through these relationships is what Husserl calls intentionality. He argues that our modes of consciousness, such as perceiving, judging, or

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imagining, are always related to something, which is not consciousness itself but intentionally constituted in an act of consciousness (1900–1901/1970, p. 554). In other words, things are never things in themselves but always things as something for someone. For example, we are not experiencing the things on our kitchen table in isolation but as something with particular meanings such as a plate, a fork, and a knife that we use for eating and by which we are able to understand ourselves as things that eat, rather than not. Hence, ‘‘things’’ in phenomenology are phenomena, that is, things as they are appearing to us, and this is all we need to go on when we ascribe meaning. We are aware of things insofar as we are orientated toward and aware of them as things with meaning-for-us, and in so being become aware of ourselves in such directed relations. In developing his phenomenology, Husserl is responding to what he understood as a crisis in the sciences, which presented a world of false objectivity that left no space to consider the problem of consciousness (1936/ 1970). Things understood by science were abstractions insofar as these representations of things required the prior scene setting of intentionality, which was not of the same order as the raw, physical relationship between two material objects. Intentionality was a relationship of meaning; an entire world arises from it. If we really looked at what we thought to be mind-independent things, we would forever find the influence of intentionality. To study the world phenomenologically, then, is to study how things become things from within the horizons in which they are given life and start to flourish, and these horizons are inevitably those of the experiencing, conscious subject. Husserl calls this world opened by the subject the life-world. Although he develops the idea of the life-world throughout most of his career, in the Crisis of the European Sciences in 1936 he uses the concept of the life-world to describe the everyday world with which we are entwined and which we take for granted. It provides the point of departure for all our actions and activities, as well as for our knowledge; it is through our lived experience of the world that we can engage with that world and come to know about it. By applying what he called the phenomenological reduction or epoche¯, Husserl claims it is possible to investigate and describe how aspects of the world appear to us in our lived experience, that is, how they manifest themselves to us in the first instance. Applying the phenomenological reduction means bracketing out and withholding our previous experience (theories and prejudices of things) so that we can focus on the experienced things directly and on how they appear to our consciousness in a pure and undistorted way, and, thus, arrive at a secure foundation for scientific knowledge (Husserl, 1913/1962, pp. 155–167). As Sokolowski (2000, p. 50,


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italics in original) poignantly put it, bracketing enables us to ‘‘look at what we normally look through.’’ What we look through means those simple, direct experiences that we overlook because of their very ordinariness. It also refers to the ideas we look through at the world, ideas like ‘zero’ and ‘infinity’, that whilst quite abstract come to assume an ontological footing that often cloaks our intuitive experience of the life-world. By bracketing out existing ideas concerning the existence of things in the real world, bracketing concentrates attention on us, on what we experience, and it is we who experience things like numbers. This attention to psychology is leavened with a rigorous commitment to discovering the ideal, or objective manner in which things like numbers appear to conscious beings. He was not reducing meaning to subjective perspectives, but reaching after the idealized stuff of experience, what he called noema. This is Husserl getting at the most basic condition of what it means to be conscious and so to experience the world as a world, irrespective of any empirical instance of such consciousness (Luft, 2005; Held, 1996). Despite this bracketing out, in practice we are still left amidst a welter of influence, which always disrupts attempts to isolate the correlation between experiencing subjects and experienced things. Husserl talks of consciousness and of being aware, yet quickly acknowledges how awareness of this awareness tails off into so many horizons of coming and going. In other words, when we try and go to the things themselves, our consciousness dissipates in many circulating eddies of intentional engagement within wider and often unreadable and unrepeatable patterns of life (Safranski, 1998, p. 75). So even if we follow Husserl in bracketing out our theories and prejudices in order to better appreciate our own status as human beings, as our intentional condition becomes more obvious it also becomes more troubling. This is because in all such bracketing there are so many exceptions and so many curtailments as to leave us astounded, as much as we are comforted, by meaning. In short, when we go to the things, we do not find steady, clear directed relations between subjects and objects but an opening up of experience that at one and the same moment is entirely habitual and strange. The secure foundations of knowledge that Husserl is after are elusive. The problem for Husserl, as Derrida (1973) points out in his Speech and Phenomena, is that isolating this transcendental moment (bracketing out ourselves from previous theories and prejudices) is itself problematic because such isolation always occurs from within history. Experience is never raw, but always bears the impress of language and habituated expectation; no matter how intense, the infinite is always experienced from within the finite.

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To get behind language (manifest in sedimented and conversational relations with other language users and held fast in structures such as tradition, norms, and grammar), to find the basic conditions sustaining our correlation with things (such as our physiology, our geography) requires ‘‘unheard-of thoughts,’’ the openness of which we can never know because even our raw intuition cannot comprehend such a beginning (Derrida, 1973, pp. 102–104). If phenomenology was a method for going back to the things themselves, then it was a method for which there was no identifiable unmoved mover and no transcendental starting point. Husserl is not wanton in his disregard of these difficulties; indeed, for many, such as Emmanuel Levinas, Husserl’s work is itself a representation of the inevitability of the ongoing struggle of bestowing rich meaning on the world, rather than any clarifying treatise on what exists. Husserl remains alive to how intentionality fundamentally traduces any permanent sense of inner being because every moment of consciousness is always being directed toward things, moving outward, from the perceiver to what is being perceived, yet nevertheless he still seems to ache after some kind of settlement of the self, some kind of self-evident repose (Safranski, 1998, pp. 71–88).

2.2. Martin Heidegger: Being-in-the-World, Equipment, Technology, and Organization Martin Heidegger (1879–1976), Husserl’s pupil, philosophical nemesis, and personal betrayer, accepts Husserl’s phenomenological ambition of going back to things themselves to establish a new beginning, but finds the phenomenological method of his teacher to have gotten itself fixated with transcendental grounding. Husserl’s idea of a pure, or transcendent self, the single subject outside of any instance of its being intentionally conscious in relation to other things, is a diversion from the real phenomenological message: to investigate life before science, theory, and any attempt at idealizing grounding. By emphasizing the self as a ‘‘still point’’ in the flux of intentional engagement, Husserl, like most philosophers, was excusing us from encountering life in all its uncertainty and questionableness, in all its florid and turbid opening and closing. If we are really going to go to the things themselves, Heidegger argues, we must return to the world in which we are constantly engaged, not to something rarefied, bracketed off, separated, or mentally configured (1969/1972, pp. 58–59). While not denying Husserl’s insight about the intentional character of consciousness, Heidegger wants to ‘‘radicalize the philosophical interrogation


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of intentionality by raising more fundamental questions, neglected in traditional philosophy, of ‘the question of being’ and, specifically, ‘the question of the being of the intentional’ ’’ (Moran, 2000b, p. 42). In other words, Heidegger suggests an inquiry into the being of beings, that which makes possible something to come into being in the first place. To get at the basic conditions of being – the conditions that make it possible for us to make sense of things and ourselves – we begin to answer with reference to our own being, and the most basic and immediate feature of our own being is not the intentional structure of consciousness but beingin-the-world (Heidegger, 1927/1962, pp. 49–58). Being-in-the-world is far from one of conscious direction; indeed, for the most part it is far from mental. It finds us thrown into a condition of everydayness, an entire weave of things that typically goes unnoticed because it is lived in. Heidegger calls this basic relationship with things equipmental. We live in an everyday world of instrumentality in which our intentional relationship with things, far from being individual and somehow private to us as mental beings, is governed by common human, social arrangements. Unpacking this a little, Heidegger suggests that things are not approached consciously, but from within some already existing dispositions or specific ways of being-in-the-world, such as eating, walking, driving, teaching, etc. They already matter in some way, or are significant, insofar as we are drawn to them as useful, or recoil from them as dangerous or ugly. Any attempt at bracketing only takes place from within this dispositional weave of things mattering in some way. The way they matter, moreover, is already scripted. Our interests are arranged for us, so we learn about things in relation to entire scenes of significance that rarely come into question and which are typically future oriented. Things are used in order to do things. They are enlisted in projects in which we too find ourselves enlisted, as underway. So a table is defined by an established use that we take up unthinkingly as our concern with and solicitude for the table are expressed in our use of it ‘‘in order to’’ write, or eat, or display, which in turn are done in order to do yet further things (Heidegger, 1927/1962, y15, p. 98). The table is what Heidegger calls ready-to-hand (zuhanden). So our primary relation with things in the everyday world is not that of detachment but of absorbed coping. We use things such as tables as means in order to realize projects that have been laid out, and which always draw us on. Our being is always pressing into the future as we thoughtlessly engage with things in already existing, but constantly evolving social practices. Our second relation with things – in the light of our everyday practical coping – is when we notice things individually because we can no longer

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enlist them in our practices, they prove troubling. It is first when our equipment breaks down that we are aroused into an inchoate phenomenal state of awareness of isolated things; they are no longer invisible or subsidiary. So, for example, it is only when a leg of a table snaps because it is too fragile, or when the table is too high, that it surfaces into consciousness as a thing bracketed off from the entire gamut of use and potential use to which it might be equipmentally put. Our reaction is to search for the thing, or to find other equipment to make a fix so that we no longer find it troubling, or to imagine a substitute thing or an improvement in design. This gives rise to our third relationship with things, the theoretical. Theory, which presents things as being one way or another present-to-hand (vorhanden), as a thing to be contemplated, has emerged from these successive ‘‘fixing’’ attempts, ideas about what is and where things are analyzed in order for them to be simply presented ‘‘as is.’’ Thus, our equipmental relationship takes the form of skill and habit punctuated by interruption and frustration. Knowledge becomes what the philosopher John Dewey (1939, p. 8) calls the product of competent inquiries. New skills are tested, alternative tools are used, and theories are enlisted and developed in order to recover our sense of instrumental control in the face of practical disturbance. Things such as tables are defined, their parts are catalogued, suitable materials for their construction are investigated, appropriate decorations are drawn out in style manuals, and generalized ideas about table-ness are sedimented across the cultures of table use. Theory, then, is a removal from things, offering a refined or general view of what constitutes the world known about as an amalgam of isolated elements without background. While for Heidegger we cannot opt out from this condition of equipmentality, breakdown, and theoretical presence, he invokes the term Dasein – there (da) being (sein) – to describe a human being in a way that conveys what he felt was the potential in all of us to get a view or sense of our condition as something we constitute for ourselves. The paths of the world already laid out for us may be well trodden, but they remain paths we take, and in being aware of this there is potential for openings to arise. Here, Heidegger reverts to the term clearing, where each of us is the scene not only of being in accord with what is necessarily laid out (acting and talking in ways that others find sensible and normal) but also of possibility, of opening out from the existing order of things. This sense of Dasein being potentially creative as well as necessarily compliant is not of the abstracting theoretical kind because our being can never escape its instrumental condition, of which theory remains a part. Our complicity with life is non-negotiable. Yet in being complicit in this way, Dasein need not always be instrumentally configured.


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There is something beyond this relationship of equipmentality, something primal, that we also typically ignore not simply because of its nearness and everydayness, but in addition because of its being disturbing and unsettling. Heidegger is straining the phenomenological method here because he is attempting to reveal what the everyday world normally conceals. He does not, however, believe his inquiry is betraying the method, because his is a sustained attempt to consider the inevitability of everyday conditions of normality as somehow problematic, as a momentary source of bewilderment, and so as a personal experience of anxiety or wonder out of which opens up the possibility of different ways of being (Haar, 1993; Cooper, 1976). Such an inquiry is, however, difficult. It requires a double break with our everyday experience. The first break involves our acknowledging how we enlist the world as our world, something serving our instrumental needs as a being attempting to survive and flourish. This world is constituted by the threefold relationship we have with things as tools, with things as broken tools, and with things understood theoretically and hence as redesigned or potential tools. It is a comforting world. It is the world understood in relation to us and our projects. So experiences of breakdown, though immediately frustrating and even threatening, remain settled experiences because we are reaching after the prospect of recovery as we gradually immerse ourselves in more and more technologically refined ways of dealing with the world as equipment. The world becomes the world confined by the intentional state of the experiencing subject as it is played out in the everwidening frame of technology, what Heidegger calls the Gestell. The Gestell or enframing is not avoidable or replaceable. It is the inevitable frame of technology by which we humans organize our lives. As things broke down, we theoretically parsed them, disclosing their elements, reassembling them, and fusing them with other things, and in doing so have been able to better orchestrate a world in which our tool use, and the pragmatic and theoretical recovery of such use, has become more and more impressive. Yet the very success of what, for Heidegger, remains a one-sided view of the world (our equipmental/theoretical one of instrumentality) has puffed it up into an all-sided view, which in turn is masked so as to make the organized structuring of the Gestell appear natural, and harmless (Heidegger, 1951/1968, p. 34). For Heidegger, this Gestell or technological framing of our everyday world has reached its apotheosis in the modern age of organized mechanization. In our world of factories and total construction (Bau), where events associated with being human (education and scholarship, leisure, travel, and even birth and death) are increasingly organized as events of production and consumption, and the things of which those events consist (exams, book

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chapters, holidays with pay, hotels, drugs, memorials) are enlisted as means to this continual organization. The world is a world of flattened and flatpacked resources (including human resources) amenable to our increasingly mechanized sensibility: immediate, graspable, and serviceable. Heidegger as a phenomenologist cannot be considered a critic of this organized world, a proposer of rival theories or positions. To understand him as such is to think of him as offering alternative designs, new knowledge, and better ideas, which of course only further constitute the Gestell (Safranski, 1998, pp. 161–162). We cannot escape the Gestell, nor indeed should we when so much of a flourishing life demands a form of pragmatic engagement with the world so as to meet material and psychic needs. Yet what remains missing for Heidegger (1951/1968, p. 34) in this technological enthusiasm is any awareness of how our complicity with the Gestell is itself something troubling and worthy of concern. For Heidegger the Gestell describes our human world as one in which we humans are evaluators, bestowers of value, and in evaluating we bring the world to us in our own image as controlling, objectifying beings overseeing an increasingly pliant, though occasionally troublesome, world of things-as-equipment unaware that we too remain within the thrall of technology, as much equipment as anything else. As Introna (2009) remarks, to see things outside of their being useful, outside of their being equipment for our own ends, is to encounter the action of things outside of any knowledge we might have of them, whether that knowledge is skilful ‘‘knowing how’’ or theoretical ‘‘knowing that.’’ Hence, Heidegger advocates the second break with our everyday experience. Not only might we use phenomenological method to reveal our equipmental condition, the Gestell, by considering how we respond to breakdown, but we might also use phenomenology to avoid confining our being-with-the-world entirely to a condition of zuhanden or vorhanden. Here, our being-there is with things that are neither unacknowledged means/tools nor theoretically presented things (classified, known objects, predicted events), but things presenting themselves, in transition, unfurling, decaying, and remaining in their own care, rather than subject to the pragmatic care of those always relating to things instrumentally. Phenomenologically we must struggle to become as near to things as we can as they waver between being and nonbeing and so experiencing the potentiality of being rather than its being always ordered. Organizationally this places us near to human beings, Dasein, caring for futures that are always withheld, but which nevertheless are the source of all opportunity and possibility (Held, 2007). Hence, Heidegger equates Dasein with a clearing, an opening where Dasein is striving to project onto its own horizon


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the possibilities of a world, and doing so repeatedly by bringing what has been and what is arriving into an endlessly renewed presence, a happening of endless opportunity (Haar, 1993, p. 23). To think about Dasein in these two related ways, as equipmentally bound and as a clearing, is a struggle because it produces nothing tangible, nor does it assuage any qualms we might have about the way we conduct ourselves through life. Yet it is, for Heidegger (1951/1968, pp. 69–72), the only way we can achieve perspective on who and what we are, and what we can become, without removing ourselves from what sustains this becoming, which is the everyday thereness of being. To emphasize this first and then second break, Heidegger begins to separate the term da-sein, a leavening of humankind in which we understand ourselves not only as instrumentally concerned (within the Gestell) but also as animated by the possibilities of absence: ‘‘the vastness of that which gives everything the warrant to be’’ (1949, p. 385). This vastness is what organized technology has occluded with its presentation of and reaching after a tamed, ordered world, yet it remains the grounding for which this organization comes and into which it falls back.

3. TRACING THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ROOTS OF ORGANIZATION THEORY After having discussed the possibilities of phenomenology as embodied in the work of Husserl and then Heidegger, we now take a step back, and begin a more descriptive tracery following the occasions where phenomenology has so far contributed to and has been received by organization studies. Tracing the phenomenological influence is complicated for several reasons. It is now close to 100 years since phenomenology was first introduced to social science. Since then, its ideas and principles have been extensively circulated, absorbed, and substantially reformulated in many research approaches. The original phenomenological sources may not even be recognized or acknowledged in much organizational research, despite drawing on them. Therefore, as a first step in tracing how phenomenology has come to influence organization studies, we provide a brief overview of how it came to form a cornerstone in the development of what can be called the social constructionist interpretive perspective (the SCI perspective) of social science, within which a large number of organizational studies are situated (Hatch & Yanow, 2003; Prasad & Prasad, 2002; Sandberg, 2001, 2005;

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Sandberg & Targama, 2007; Schwandt, 2003; Yanow & Schwartz-Shea, 2006). Based on this overview, we identify some important figures in the introduction of phenomenological approaches in organization studies. Thereafter, we investigate to what extent phenomenology has influenced different areas of organization studies. Finally, we analyze the future potential for phenomenology, particularly in the light of our above foray into Husserl and Heidegger.

3.1. The Development of the SCI Perspective Within Social Science While phenomenology has influenced all major disciplines in the social sciences, such as education (Dall’Alba, 2009), psychology (Ashworth & Chung, 2006), and sociology (Ferguson, 2006), it was mainly through the uptake of phenomenological ideas within sociology that phenomenology came to have a significant impact on organization studies. This impact was profound because it fostered a challenge to what was becoming the dominant way of understanding the world, the scientist one. By the 1970s more and more scholars began to realize that the theoretical frameworks, methodologies, procedures, and claims for objective knowledge within the positivistic approaches had significant limitations for being able to advance understanding of human action and activities (Sandberg & Targama, 2007). As Bauman (1996, pp. 825–826) noted in relation to the field of sociology: The most seminal departures that led in the course of the 1970s to widespread criticism and rejection of what Giddens termed the ‘orthodox consensus’ was the phenomenological revolution. Initiated by Berger and Luckmann (1966), the revolution was sustained by a spate of radical reformulations of the subject matter and proper strategy of sociological work. The posthumously published work of Alfred Schutz served as the main theoretical inspiration and authority y The effect of the exposure to phenomenology was to shift interest from external, extra-subjective structural constraints to the interpretation of the subjective experience of actors; and from the determination to arbitrate between objective truth and prejudiced opinion to the effort to reveal the conditions of knowledge rooted in communally transmitted traditions.

Looking historically, the elaboration of the SCI perspective in sociology had already started in the 1920s in Germany through Max Weber’s (1921/ 1968) development of interpretive sociology and Max Scheler’s (1925/1980) establishment of the sociology of knowledge field. While Weber was pre-phenomenological in the sense that whilst he was inspired by the hermeneutic concept of verstehen (understanding) (Psathas, 1973, p. 2) he did not make a systematic use of it (Walsh, 1972, pp. xvii–xxv), Scheler was


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both a trained phenomenological philosopher and sociologist. It was however Schutz (1932/1972), through his adaptation of Husserl’s notion of intentionality in his attempt to formulate a philosophical foundation for the social sciences, who established phenomenology as one of the most central cornerstones of the SCI perspective. Although Schutz (1932/1972) agreed with ‘‘Weber that it is the essential function of social science to be interpretive, that is, to understand the subjective meaning of social action, Schutz finds that Weber has failed to state clearly the essential characteristics of understanding (Verstehen), of subjective meaning (gemeinter Sinn), or of action’’ (Handeln). According to Schutz, this failure seriously weakened ‘‘the foundations of interpretive sociology’’ (Walsh, 1972, pp. xvii–xviii, italics in original). By utilizing and elaborating Husserl’s concept of meaning as a basis for human action, Schutz provided a firm phenomenological grounding of interpretive sociology. Similarly, Schutz’s phenomenological foundation also provided a crucial building block in Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s radical redefinition of the sociology of knowledge, which forms the basis for the majority of social constructionist frameworks within social science ‘‘in terms of a phenomenological analysis of the reality of everyday life’’ (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p. 7). Drawing on Schutz’s phenomenology of the everyday world enabled them to develop their theory of how members of a society construct awareness of reality through common-sense knowledge. By emphasizing and conceptualizing sociology of knowledge as the study of common-sense knowledge, they radically redefined the area of sociology of knowledge, which in the past had been concerned with the history of theories, ideas, and ideologies of the intellectuals. Their emphasis on common-sense knowledge made it considerably broader in scope. As Berger and Luckmann (1966, p. 27) point out: ‘‘We owe the fundamental insight into the necessity of this redefinition to Alfred Schutz. Throughout his work, both as a philosopher and as sociologist, Schutz concentrated on the structure of the commonsense world of everyday life.’’ His overall theory of the structure of the common-sense world that in crucial ways underpins both interpretive sociology and social constructionism was synthesized and published posthumously in two books with help of Luckmann entitled The Structures of the Life-World (Vol. 1, 1973, Vol. 2, 1989). Husserl’s phenomenology and Schutz’s elaboration and adoption of it to the field of sociology also played a significant role in Harold Garfinkel’s development of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967, 2004; Anderson, Hughes, & Sharrock, 1985), which can be seen as a form of empirical

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phenomenology in the sense that it aims to understand and elaborate on the methods people use to construct their reality through everyday activities. For example, as Garfinkel writes in the Preface in his seminal work Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967, p. ix): these ‘‘articles originated from my studies of the writings of Talcott Parsons, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, and Edmund Husserl. For twenty years their writings have provided me with inexhaustive directives into the world of everyday activities.’’ Phenomenology was also important for the development of Harvey Sack and Emmanuel Schegloff’s conversation analysis, which is closely related to ethnomethodology (Heritage, 1984; Hammersley, 2003). Schutz’s phenomenology of the everyday world also played a central role in Clifford Geertz’s (1973, 1975, 1983) advancement of an interpretive anthropology or what he called a ‘‘scientific phenomenology of culture’’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 364). In a similar vein, Husserl and Schutz’s phenomenology, via Berger and Luckmann’s theory of social construction, formed a centerpiece in the development of institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Zucker, 1977), which is frequently used in organization studies (Barley & Tolbert, 1997). In contrast to Garfinkel’s microfocus, the institutionalist approaches focus on how the macrocontext in the sense of specific socially constructed institutions, such as ‘‘gender,’’ ‘‘leadership,’’ ‘‘professions,’’ ‘‘marriage,’’ and ‘‘money,’’ shapes the social interaction at the microlevel. While Husserl’s phenomenology through Schutz’s elaboration and application of it to sociology can be seen as the first wave of phenomenological influence on the social sciences and organization studies, with the uptake of Heidegger’s phenomenology a second wave of phenomenological influence emerged. What above differentiates Heidegger’s influence is that investigating our ‘thrown’ condition of equipmentality places social practice at the center for the constitution of meaning rather than human consciousness or people’s lived experience of their world. Differently expressed, in the first wave of phenomenological influence, the meaning that underlies human action and activities is primarily seen as located either directly in individuals’ lived experience of reality or in the interaction between individuals, while in the second wave social practice is regarded as the locus of meaning. It is important to note that Heidegger’s phenomenology not only emerged as a new and distinct orientation in itself but also gave rise to many new directions within the phenomenological movement. One direction is the development of modern hermeneutics or phenomenological hermeneutics through thinkers such as Gadamer and Ricoeur. Another orientation is the phenomenological philosophy of existence primarily heralded by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Dreyfus & Wrathall, 2006). Other important orientations


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arising from Heidegger’s phenomenology are poststructuralism through the development of Derrida’s deconstruction (Moran, 2000a, p. 436), and Foucault’s structuralism (Dreyfus, 1995, p. 9). Modern hermeneutics, existentialism, and poststructuralism have all influenced the development of the SCI perspective within the social sciences in significant ways. It is also worth mentioning that Heidegger had an impact on two of the most influential instigators of critical theory, Herbert Marcuse and Ju¨rgen Habermas, which has had important imprints on the SCI perspective. As McCarthy (1993, p. 83, chap. 3) notes in his historical expose of critical theory: ‘‘Marcuse on the one end and Ju¨rgen Habermas at the other, were avowed Heideggerians for a period of their career.’’ In fact, both Marcuse and Habermas studied under Heidegger for an extensive period of time. Although Heidegger’s phenomenology had been frequently referred to by various social scientists up to the mid-1970s, mostly in relation to Schutz’s work, it was primarily Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1990) who brought it into the social sciences through his theory of practice. Although Bourdieu does not always explicitly acknowledge the debt to Heidegger (and other phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty), the influence is very apparent. For example, Bourdieu’s concept ‘‘social field’’ is to a great extent underpinned by Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world as our most basic form of being rather than, say, our mind (Dreyfus, 1995, p. 191). Similarly, the notion of ‘‘habitus’’ in his practice theory is influenced by Merleau-Ponty (in turn deeply influenced by Heidegger) and his phenomenological principle of ‘‘lived body.’’ As Dreyfus and Rabinow (1993, p. 38) note, Bourdieu’s ‘‘use of phenomenological ontology allows us to see the way in which the bodily habitus anchors the homologies and analogies of the social field, how the ability to respond appropriately to events in the world arises from skills without recourse to rules and representations, and how what it is to be something in the social world is determined by and reciprocally determines practice.’’ While not as evident as in Bourdieu’s practice theory, Heidegger’s phenomenology is also central to Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory. As he says in the introduction of his theory: ‘‘The radical transmutation of hermeneutics and phenomenology initiated by Heidegger, together with the innovations of the later Wittgenstein, are the two main signal markers of the new path’’ (Giddens, 1984, p. xxii). More recently, Heidegger’s phenomenology has also had a significant impact on the ‘‘practice turn’’ (Ortner, 1984; Schatzki, 1996, 2002; Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, & Savigny, 2001; Sandberg & Dall’Alba, 2009) taking place in the social sciences and organization studies. Within organization studies, the SCI perspective informed by Husserl and Heidegger has been adopted in four broad areas of analytic concern: first,

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the study of individual action by investigating people’s lived experience or understanding of their work situation and what it means for them (e.g., of leaders, managers, strategy makers, etc.); second, the study of social action by investigating how collectives (teams, departments, communities within organizations, as well as whole organizations) understand or make sense of their situation; third, the study of how aspects of human reality are constructed through the interaction between people, either at a microlevel or at the macrolevel (e.g., at the microlevel, ethnomethodological studies and at the macro level, institutional theory studies, the macroinstitutional theory studies, some discourse studies, and gender studies); fourth, the study of human action and activities by taking a point of departure in social practice (e.g., the recent practice-based studies within strategy and knowledge in organizations). It is to elaborating on these concerns that we now turn.

3.2. Central Introducers of Phenomenology to Organization Studies Although some ethnomethodological scholars, such as Bittner (1965) through his article The Concept of Organization, were some of the first to introduce phenomenological principles to organization theory, David Silverman, Karl Weick, and Gareth Morgan come to play a key role in introducing phenomenology to organization studies, either indirectly through the SCI perspective or by drawing more directly on phenomenological philosophy. David Silverman’s (1970) book The Theory of Organizations and ‘‘the action frame of reference’’ framework he developed in that book for understanding human action have had a huge impact. It made many management scholars increasingly aware of the phenomenological insights to be had by focusing on actors’ subjective meanings in order to explain action in organizations. In elaborating his action frame of reference, Silverman draws heavily on Schutz’s (1964) phenomenology and Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) theory of social construction (see in particular Chapters 6 and 7 in Silverman’s book). Silverman postulates that ‘‘Sociology is concerned with understanding action rather than with observing behavior. Action arises out of meanings which define social reality. Meanings are given to men by their society y Shared orientations become institutionalized and are experienced by later generations as social facts. While society defines man, man in turn defines society. Particular constellations of meaning are only sustained by continual reaffirmation in everyday action’’ (Silverman, 1970, pp. 126–127). A few years later, Silverman (1975) tried to develop a firmer phenomenological ground for his action theory by more


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systematically utilizing Schutz’s phenomenology of the everyday world, in particular his notion of the ‘‘natural attitude,’’ first developed by Husserl. His later writings on research methodology (Silverman, 1985, 2004, 2005, 2006), in which he tries to develop an ethnomethodological-inspired ethnography ‘‘for how to get at an actor’s meaning’’ (Silverman, 1994, p. 5), are also heavily informed by phenomenological principles from Schutz’s phenomenology of the everyday world in companion with Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology. His writing on research methodology has had a particular strong influence on the SCI perspective in organization studies and has together received more than 7,000 citations in Google Scholar. Karl Weick is another important exponent of the SCI perspective and its underlying phenomenological principles to organization theory. While Weick initially embraced a strong cognitive approach, ever since his seminal work The Social Psychology of Organizing was first published in 1969, and more latterly his Sensemaking in Organizations (1995), he has been promoting phenomenological principles. He became initially interested in sensemaking through Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodological study of decision making in juries (Weick, 1995, p. 10). His theory of sensemaking, which fundamentally is based on phenomenological ideas and concepts, such as ‘‘lived experience,’’ ‘‘bracketing,’’ ‘‘thrownness,’’ and ‘‘breakdowns,’’ has had an enormous influence on organization studies. The two books alone have attracted more than 12,500 citations in Google Scholar. One of the most important concepts in sensemaking theory – ‘‘the enacted environment’’ – is especially inspired by Schutz’s seminal work The Phenomenology of the Social World (1932/1972) and his elaboration of Husserl’s notion of ‘‘lived experience’’ as the basis for human action, which, according to Weick, forms the centerpiece in the concept of enacted environment. ‘‘To understand the crucial features of an enacted environment, one must cultivate an exquisite sensitivity to time. The chapter in which Schutz develops the most important portions of his analysis is entitled, ‘Meaningful Lived Experience.’ The importance of this title resides in the fact that it is phrased in the past tense: the meaningful experience is lived; it is not living or to be lived. This is the most crucial feature of the enacted environment. Stated bluntly, we can know what we’ve done only after we’ve done it’’ (Weick, 1969, p. 64). Although not pointing it out explicitly in his seminal work in 1969, ‘‘bracketing’’ is another Husserlian idea (via Schutz’s phenomenology), which Weick draws on in elaborating his sensemaking theory. While Husserl used bracketing as a way to withhold prejudices and ideas about nature for investigating how things appear to us in our lived experience, Weick uses it do describe how we bracket off and single out some aspects of our ongoing

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stream of lived experience and through that enact reality in specific ways (Weick, 1995, pp. 35–37). As he put it himself: ‘‘to understand sensemaking is to be sensitive to the ways in which people chop moments out of continuous flows and extract clues from those moments’’ (Weick, 1995, p. 43). While he was primarily drawing on ideas and concepts from Husserl/ Schutz’s phenomenology in the first phase of developing his sensemaking theory, in the latter phase he has been predominantly drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenology. For example, in order to describe how sensemaking is something ongoing, Weick has in a range of studies (1995, 2003, 2004) drawn on Heidegger’s concept of ‘‘thrownness’’ and its idea that people are always in ‘‘the middle of things,’’ carrying out their various projects. A closely associated Heideggerian concept is ‘‘breakdowns.’’ In a similar way as Heidegger uses the notion of breakdown to highlight the structure of our everyday existence, Weick (1995, p. 45) uses breakdowns of the various projects in which we are constantly engaged to better understand how sensemaking takes place. Another researcher who has played a significant role in bringing phenomenology into organization studies is Gareth Morgan. While Silverman and Weick, through the action frame or reference and sensemaking theory, respectively, placed the SCI perspective on the organization theory agenda, it was Morgan together with Gibson Burrell in their book Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis (1979) who more clearly identified and elaborated the SCI perspective as a distinct perspective within organization studies, and how it could be used to advance our understanding of organization practice. That book alone has recorded close to 4,000 citations in Google Scholar. Influenced by Kuhn’s (1962) theory of scientific paradigm, Burrell and Morgan carried out a meta-theoretical analysis and identified and elaborated the main characteristics of the ‘‘interpretive paradigm’’ evolving in organization theory. In their explication they identified hermeneutics (primarily Dilthey and Gadamer) and phenomenology as cornerstones of the interpretive perspective. When it comes to phenomenology they present Husserl’s ‘‘transcendental phenomenology’’ out of which is derived ‘‘existential phenomenology,’’ particularly reflected in the work of Schutz (Burrell & Morgan, 1979, p. 240). However, associating Schutz with existential phenomenology is contentious because being derived from Husserl places Schutz’s emphasis on intentionality somewhat askance to the concerns of phenomenologists inspired by Heidegger (Schutz & Luckmann, 1973, pp. xvii–xxvi; Walsh, 1972, pp. xiii–xiv). Through his early contacts with phenomenological principles such as those expressed in Silverman (1970), Morgan come to integrate them into


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much of his own research (Morgan, 1980, pp. 11–21) about methodologies, the use of metaphors in research inquiries, theory development (Morgan, 1980, 1983a, 1983b, 1986), and leadership (Smircich & Morgan, 1982).

3.3. How Phenomenology Has Been Used in Organization Studies Above we identified some (Silverman, Weick, and Morgan (with Burrell)) as important figures in introducing phenomenological ideas to organization studies. In this section, we analyze more specifically how phenomenology has influenced particular disciplinary areas of organization studies through a database search of eight leading journals in organization studies, four USbased (Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science) and four Europeanbased (Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies, Organization, Organization Studies). In order to get a sense of the magnitude of the influence, we first carried out an analysis of search terms that directly refer to the SCI perspective, namely, ‘‘interpretive/interpretative/social construction/constructionist/constructivist.’’ Although a fairly blunt measure, the database analysis suggests phenomenology has had and retains a fair degree of influence. As Table 1 shows, the search terms recorded a total of 3,884 hits (1,806 þ 2,078). The relatively even distribution of hits across the ‘‘major’’ journals (if we take into account their age difference) suggests that phenomenology has made a strong inroad in both the US and the European organization studies. In a second analysis we narrowed down the search terms and searched specifically on ‘‘phenomenology,’’ ‘‘Husserl,’’ ‘‘Heidegger,’’ and ‘‘Schutz.’’ As we can see in Table 2, although these search terms recorded less hits (822 ¼ 396 þ 134 þ 64 þ 228) than the search terms derived directly from the SCI perspective, the articles that contain the narrower search terms have been published across all eight journals. One interesting trend here is that while there is little difference between the US-based and the European-based journals when it comes to Schutz, the three European journals Organization Studies, Human Relations, and Organization have on average recorded significant more hits for ‘‘Heidegger’’ and ‘‘Husserl’’ than the US-based journals. This may be explained by the fact that both Husserl and Heidegger were born and based in Europe, while Schutz, who was also born and worked in Europe (Austria and France), later moved to the United States and played an important role in introducing phenomenology (mainly Husserl’s) into field of sociology in the United States.


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Table 1. Number of Hits Recorded for the Search Terms ‘‘Interpretive/ Interpretative/Social Construction/Constructionist/Constructivist’’. Journal/Search Termsa

Interpretive/ Interpretative

Social Construction/Constructionist/ Constructivist

ASQ (EBSCO) AMR (EBSCO) AMJ (EBSCO) ORG.SC (EBSCO) JMS (EBSCO) ORG.ST (Sage) HR (Sage) ORGAN (Sage)

168/41 ¼ 209 210/50 ¼ 260 118/30 ¼ 148 122/33 ¼ 155 179/80 ¼ 259 258/108 ¼ 366 170/81 ¼ 251 93/47 ¼ 140

165/27/14 ¼ 206 208/43/30 ¼ 281 95/15/7 ¼ 117 89/13/13 ¼ 115 196/67/35 ¼ 298 306/98/89 ¼ 493 237/69/36 ¼ 342 117/53/56 ¼ 226

Total

1318/488 ¼ 1806

1413/385/280 ¼ 2078

a

Journals: ASQ, Administrative Science Quarterly; AMR, Academy of Management Review; AMJ, Academy of Management Journal; ORG.SC, Organization Science; JMS, Journal of Management Studies; ORG.ST, Organization Studies; HR, Human Relations; and ORGAN, Organization. Databases: Business Source Premier at Ebsco (EBSCO) and Sage Premier at Highwire (Sage). As we searched the entire database for each journal, the search period for ‘‘older’’ journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly is longer than that for ‘‘newer’’ journals such as Organization.

Table 2. The Distribution of the Search Terms ‘‘Phenomenology,’’ ‘‘Husserl,’’ ‘‘Heidegger,’’ and ‘‘Schutz’’ in Articles Published in the Eight Selected Journals. Journal/Search Terms

Phenomenology

Heidegger

Husserl

Schutz

ASQ (EBSCO) AMR (EBSCO) AMJ (EBSCO) ORG.SC (EBSCO) JMS (EBSCO) ORG.ST (Sage) HUM.REL (Sage) ORGAN (Sage)

33 56 18 25 36 101 75 52

4 7 3 4 13 31 26 46

9 8 4 3 3 15 10 12

30 31 16 10 28 37 61 15

Total

396

134

64

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In order to get a more specific sense to what extent (and how) phenomenology has influenced specific areas of organization studies, in a third analysis, we categorized the studies that contained one or several of the search terms (phenomenology, Husserl, Heidegger, Schutz) into broad areas

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Table 3.

Areas of Organization Studies Influenced by Phenomenology.

Area of Organization Study Aesthetics Change Communication Culture Decision making Emotions Ethics Gender Identity Knowledge Leadership Method and theory development Power Sensemaking Strategy Structure Team Technology

Example of Studies Taylor (2002) Warren (2008) Bartunek (1984) Palmer and Dunford (1996) Deetz (2003) Phillips and Brown (1993, AMJ, 36(6), 1547–1576) Denison (1996) Flores-Pereira, Davel, and Cavedon (2008) Maitlis and Hakan (2004) Grint (2005) Boudens (2005) Myers (2007) Jones (2003) Sonenshein (2007) Ball (2005) Runte and Mills (2006) Creed, Scully, and Austin (2002) Alvesson and Willmott (2002) Gherardi (2000) Sandberg (2000) Chen and Meindl (1991) Grint (2005) Hatch and Yanow (2008) Golden-Biddle and Locke (1993) Chikudate (2002) Feldman (1989) Walton (1986) Isabella (1990) Smircich and Stubbart (1985) Chia and Holt (2006) Ranson et al. (1980) Kallinikos (2004) Fiol and O’Connor (2005) Barker (1993) Orlikowski (1992, ORG.SC, 3(3), 398–427) Ciborra (2006)

of organization studies. As Table 3 suggests, phenomenology has (based on the more specific search terms), in one way or another, influenced virtually all areas of organization theory.1 While this overview suggests that phenomenology has had an impact on almost every subdisciplinary area within organization studies, the extent to

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which organizational researchers have drawn on phenomenology and its principles varies considerably, but they can be condensed into three distinct modes of engagement: indirect, in-between, and direct modes. The database search indicates that the largest by far is the indirect mode. Here scholars draw on phenomenology indirectly by applying various interpretive research approaches and social constructionist frameworks in their study of organizations. This is evident in that they refer to terms such as ‘‘interpretive’’ and ‘‘constructionist’’ but not directly to ‘‘phenomenology’’ or specific phenomenological philosopher. For example, in his study of aesthetics in organizations, Taylor (2002, p. 824) bases his argument on phenomenology by mainly referring to it indirectly via Berleant’s (1970) book The Aesthetic Field. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience and to Weick’s (1979) book The Social Psychology of Organizing: ‘‘I conceptualize the organizational members’ aesthetic experience as being based in the aesthetic interaction, which is based upon Berleant’s idea of the aesthetic transaction (Berleant, 1970; Fine, 1984). I use interaction to get to the idea of involvement of both the performer and the audience, or what Weick (1979) called a ‘double interact.’’’ The researchers compromising the in-between mode not only house their studies within the SCI perspective but also directly refer to ‘‘phenomenology’’ or Husserl, Heidegger, or Schutz’s work. However, while referring more directly to phenomenology, they rarely engage more systematically with phenomenological concepts. Instead, they often refer to them indirectly through different ‘‘mediators’’ such as Berger and Luckmann’s social construction, Giddens’s structuration theory, and Bourdieu’s practice theory. The database search suggests that such in-between references to phenomenology are less frequent than indirect referencing. One such example is Bartunek’s study of organizational restructuring. She borrows her main concept ‘‘interpretive schemes’’ from Ranson, Hinings, and Greenwood (1980), who in turn adopted it from Giddens (1979) and Schutz (1972). Later on she also makes some direct references to Giddens (1979, p. 366) when arguing that ‘‘structural features are in reciprocal relationship with individuals’ actions and understanding. According to Giddens (1979), structural features are both the medium and outcome of individuals’ actions: they provide rules and resources individuals draw on to act, but they exist only through being applied and modified in action.’’ The direct mode is undertaken by researchers more directly and systematically engaged with phenomenology and its principles in their research on organizations. Such direct and systematic engagement is even less common than in-between referencing. The most ambitious of those studies have tried to establish a phenomenological research program in organization studies,


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such as Sander’s (1982) attempt to introduce Husserl’s phenomenology and Sko¨ldberg’s (1998) effort to launch Heidegger’s phenomenological philosophy into organization theory. Such attempts are however very rare. A more common way of directly referring phenomenology is to take up some specific concept or ideas from a phenomenological philosopher. Deetz (2003, p. 422), for example, refers directly to Husserl when discussing the subject–object dualism and how it can be overcome through the linguistic turn in the social sciences. ‘‘The ‘turn’ as a possibility grows out of the birth of social constructionism and ‘perspectivalism’ y Husserl’s formulation was an important early move in this rethinking (Husserl, 1913/1962). In his treatment, specific personal experiences and objects of the world are not given in a constant way but are outcomes of a presubjective, preobjective inseparable relationship between constitutive activities and the ‘stuff’ being constituted.’’ Similarly, in his study of risk and digital technologies, Ciborra (2006) draws and utilizes explicitly some of Heidegger’s key concepts such as ‘‘care’’ (p. 1346) and his notion of ‘‘Gestell’’ (pp. 1344–1346).

4. DISCUSSION: SOME MAJOR MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF PHENOMENOLOGY IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH Although phenomenology has had a strong impact on organization studies, there are some serious misunderstandings of phenomenology that might prevent researchers from exploring the rich potential of the method. One of the most fatal misapprehensions of phenomenology was inflicted by Burrell and Morgan (1979), not least because they have played one of the more significant roles in introducing phenomenology to organization studies. The problem comes, as is often the case, with categorization; specifically ‘‘placing’’ phenomenology as a purely subjectivist approach in opposition to the objectivist approaches. This polarization has meant the nuances and even significant divergences in the phenomenological movement (of the kind we have suggested above that exist between just two of its early exponents, Husserl and Heidegger) are played down, and even ignored. As Willmott (1993, p. 682) laments, in Burrell and Morgan’s paradigm map ‘‘philosophies of social science are either irremediably ‘subjectivist’ or ‘objectivist’ in orientation. Studies of organization must therefore analyze organizational phenomena either as ‘a hard external reality’ or appreciate the ‘importance

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of the subjective experience of individuals in the creation of the world’ ’’ (Burrell & Morgan, 1979, p. 3). Related to this problem has been the maintenance of dualist positioning between subjectivists and objectivists in the social sciences, phenomenology becoming just another form of subjectivism seeking out its life in the shadow of the larger, ‘‘superior’’ objectivist standpoint. As Deetz (1996, p. 193) suggests more generally, Burrell and Morgan’s subjectivist–objectivist categorization encourages status quo and performs political functions: the objectivists can continue as before without being questioned by other paradigms and maintain privileged status as ‘‘objective’’ in ‘‘positive association to the natural sciences.’’ Although the ‘‘subjectivists’’ making up the interpretive paradigm also received their own ‘‘paradigm state’’ in Burrell and Morgan’s grid, they continue to get marginalized as less worthy than objectivists within the scientific pecking order. A more serious consequence arising from Burrell and Morgan’s conceptualization of phenomenology as just another subjectivism is the concealment of phenomenology’s most fundamental principle, namely that subject and world are inextricably related. This concealment not only meant that organizational scholars have come to misunderstand the main point of phenomenology, but also meant that they were unable to use its full potential to advance organization studies, namely as a genuine alternative approach that goes beyond and overcomes the subject–object dichotomy in social science. ‘‘Indeed, the whole point of phenomenology is that we cannot split off the subjective domain from the domain of the world as scientific naturalism has done. Subjectivity must be understood as inextricably involved in the process of constituting objectivity y there is only objectivity-forsubjectivity. Phenomenology’s conception of objectivity-for-subjectivity is arguably its major contribution to contemporary philosophy’’ (Moran, 2000a, p. 15). In their defense, it is somewhat understandable that Burrell and Morgan came to classify phenomenology as purely subjectivist as the first wave of phenomenological influence was based primarily on Husserl’s phenomenology, launched through Schutz’s elaboration of it as a foundation for the social sciences. Husserl’s phenomenology is subjectivist in the sense that it postulates that a subject’s consciousness is required in the constitution of meaning and so requires of phenomenological investigation a consideration of the subject’s bracketing outside of any wider, more broadly sociological concern. However, Husserl’s notion of intentionality also shows that in the constitution of meaning consciousness is always directed to something that is not part of consciousness, but remains critical to meaning. As Giorgi


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(1992, p. 7) aptly formulated it: ‘‘the very meaning of subject implies a relation to an object, and to be an object intrinsically implies being related to subjectivity.’’ In other words, objectivity is not possible without a subject, and subjectivity is not possible without an object. As we tried to elaborate on above, how the subject and the world are inextricably related is more clearly articulated in Heidegger’s notion of beingin-the-world. It shows that the epistemological subject–object relation is a founded mode of being-in-the-world (cf. Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011). Differently expressed, being-in-the-world is what allows people and things to show up as something in the first instance; it is the world that offers the relief against which things become things. It comes before the subject–object distinction because it is our specific ways of being-in-the-world (e.g., teaching, parenting, managing, strategizing, etc.) that enable us to understand ourselves as particular subjects and objects as particular objects. For example, teaching as a specific way of being-in-the-world enables us to carry out a range of work activities that we understand as teaching, utilizing an array of tools such as textbooks, whiteboards, and learning theories that we understand as having a particular purpose in teaching at the same time as it enables us to understand ourselves as teachers. It is perhaps this principle within phenomenology that subject and world are always already entwined that offers researchers the greatest potential in organization studies because it frames the condition of meaning in a way that transcends the subject–object dichotomy in social science. Developing research approaches that comprise and take as the point of departure our being-in-the-world are likely to open up new areas of inquiry and new ways of investigating organizations. Attempts to develop such approaches are evident in the recent practice turn that is taking place in organization studies and social science at large (Sandberg & Dall’Alba, 2009). Below we describe two such attempts that we authors have been involved in to illustrate what the researcher may need to pay attention to and how to proceed when taking being-in-the-world as the point of departure for studying organizational phenomena: Sandberg and Pinnington (2009) on professional competence as ways of being, and Chia and Holt (2006) on strategy as practical coping. Traditional theories of competence, such as the dominant KSA theories (Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes), are entity-based in that they conceptualize professional competence as consisting of two independent entities, a set of specific attributes possessed, such as knowledge, skills, and attitudes, which people use in accomplishing a separate set of work activities (Sandberg, 2000). A particular problem arising from entity-based approaches is that while they identify necessary prerequisites (list of attributes) for carrying out

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a job, such a list of attributes does not ‘‘demonstrate whether the workers use the prerequisite attributes, or in what way they use them in accomplishing their work’’ (Sandberg & Targama, 2007). In other words, they are unable to describe what constitutes competence in work performance, or what Gherardi (2006) called ‘‘competence as practical accomplishment.’’ Sandberg and Pinnington (2009) elaborated and proposed an existential ontological perspective on professional competence based on Heidegger’s notion of ways of being-in-the-world, and examined its utility in a study of competence in corporate law at a large international law firm. Taking ways of being-in-the-world as a point of departure, (in this case, ways of practicing corporate law) rather than entities sensitize the researchers to pay close attention to how competence in corporate law is constituted in its enactment or performance. It enabled them to specifically design rich interviews for identifying and describing what might be called the thrown condition of corporate law practice. Their in-depth interviews were supplemented by situated observations of the corporate lawyers, such as in their interactions with clients in shared meeting areas and welcoming clients to their office, the use of specific clothing, mobile phones and the importance of prestigious office buildings. Those observations generated important verbal and nonverbal data enriching the researchers’ understanding of ‘good’ corporate law practice as a coming together of people, places and tools. The focus was not on tools themselves (computers, legal document, websites, prestigious buildings, etc.) but on their entwinement in the sense of their uses in particular ways of practicing corporate law. The findings generated from the existential ontological perspective developed and utilized by Sandberg and Pinnington suggest that such a perspective enables closer descriptions of what constitutes competence in work performance. Their study shows that professional competence is not defined by specific attributes such as knowledge and skills per se but by specific ways of practicing corporate law. They identified four different ways of practicing corporate law, each one forming a distinct (entwined structural whole) competence. In particular, their findings show that each way of practicing corporate law distinguishes and integrates a specific understanding of what corporate law involves, a specific understanding of what it means to be a corporate lawyer, a range of work activities, other people such as clients and other lawyers, and tools such as legal resources, computers, and clothes into a distinct competence in corporate law. So, for example, minimizing legal risks as a particular way of practicing corporate law distinguishes specific self-understanding (legal service provider), specific understanding of work (applying legal rigor throughout business


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transactions), particular people (clients, colleagues, support staff), and specific tools (legal knowledge, precedents, communication skill, clothes, and buildings) into a distinct competence in corporate law. In contrast, managing commercially important risks contains a different self-understanding (business advisor), understands its most central work activity differently (getting a good understanding of the company’s commercial situation), involves other people (regulators and other central decision makers), and engages them differently, and uses different tools (commercial awareness and commercially applied legal knowledge), which are integrated into a distinctly different competence in accomplishing corporate law. Chia and Holt (2006) likewise take issue with entity-based approaches to understanding organizational phenomena, though here with an emphasis on strategy (and the research of strategy). They suggest that typically our understanding of strategy is configured as a mode of observation in which a planned reality is built from the detached, rational assessment of prevailing observed conditions. Using Heidegger’s essay Building, Dwelling, Thinking, Chia and Holt argue that this understanding of strategy results from being held captive by a ‘‘building view’’ of human agency. In such a view, the organization is understood as a separate entity inside an identifiable environment whose characteristics can be isolated and understood in causal, law-like fashion sufficient to enable strategists to detail where the organization is, where it might want to be, and how it might move between these conditions. For Chia and Holt conceptualizing strategy practice in this way is limited because it invokes, silently, an image of the strategic agent (and by extension the researcher of strategy) as separable from their world, with a view over their world, and the power to reconfigure the world to their own design. Following Heidegger, Chia and Holt argue strategic practice might also be understood as emerging from the more engaged or ‘‘dwelling’’ view of agency, which they unpack in two ways. First, a sensitivity to how effective patterns in organized activity arise because of our thrown condition. Observed consistencies in organizational actions and outcomes are explained not through deliberate goal orientation but instead via modus operandi, unconscious, internalized dispositions to act in ways congruent with past actions and experiences in whose thrall we all inevitably act. In fact, much of what we know as goal setting and planning arises from this condition of dwelling. Specifically, conscious, formulated knowledge of the kind invoked by strategists as strategy arises in response to breakdowns in our equipmental relationships, invoking theory in order to recover a settled, instrumental condition. Here, because this formulated knowledge remains

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emergent to a situation, any attempt to generalize from the totality of each situation (as in the kind of abstracting theories taught in MBA classrooms and then forgotten in everyday strategic life) becomes fraught because what matters to the strategists themselves is not what is right in all cases (which seems to be the concern of strategy researchers), but what is right in order to better recover a sense of ongoing, organized settlement with the world understood instrumentally. The second way is less developed by Chia and Holt, but following Heidegger they suggest that dwelling not only describes an unthinking, dispositional relationship with the world as one of coping, but also describes the potential creativity inherent in becoming aware of the possibilities experienced through absence rather than presence and so beyond the impress of strategy entirely. So in addition to encouraging strategy researchers to engage with an inherently relational condition of human agency (including an awareness of the researchers’ own complicity with the language of strategic practice), Chia and Holt argue that more research might be usefully directed to bringing into question our instrumental relationship with the world understood as a world of resources, or assets with which we are deemed to relate through capabilities. What the above two examples illustrate is that a more ‘‘genuine’’ phenomenological perspective that transcends the subject–object dichotomy in social science, such as Heidegger’s existential phenomenology utilized in the two examples, enables researchers to more closely adapt themselves to the phenomena in question without fear of ‘‘data contamination’’ or ‘‘neutrality,’’ given that the idea of a separate observer looking upon an already constituted world has been brought into question. This will make research increasingly responsive to questions facing organizations as they are lived and enacted, both pragmatic problems associated with recovery from equipmental breakdown and the more occasional but important questions of the meaning of organizational life elicited by moods of anxiety, boredom, or wonder that can sometimes penetrate the confident language of practices such as corporate law and strategy. In other words, taking beingin-the-world as the point of departure enables the researchers to more closely identify and describe how organizational practice is constituted in its enactment or performance without the conceit that a definitive identification is possible. Although other philosophical orientations such as those advocated by pragmatism and the later Wittgenstein are similar in these concerns with ordinary, everyday descriptions, phenomenology offers


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probably the most thorough and systematic philosophical foundation for such engaged approach.

NOTE 1. The studies listed in the table come from the database search. They should therefore not be seen as core ‘‘exemplars’’ of studies influenced by phenomenology.

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Robin Holt continues to enjoy a serpentine academic career at the University of Liverpool Management School, having worked in the disciplines of philosophy and politics prior to that of business and management. His current work investigates the epistemological, ethical, aesthetic, and ontological aspects of strategic and entrepreneurial practice, and how these might influence more broadly the ways we make sense of ‘‘being in business.’’ He recently co-authored the book Strategy without Design with Robert Chia, and has published in a number of journals including Organization Studies, Human Relations, and Research Policy. He is also co-editor of the Sage Dictionary of Qualitative Management Research. Jo¨rgen Sandberg is a Reader in Management in the School of Business at the University of Queensland, Australia, and leads its research program Knowledge in Organizations. His research interests include competence and learning in organizations, leadership, qualitative research methods, and philosophy of science. He is currently carrying out research on practice theory in organization studies, frameworks, and methodologies for developing more


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interesting and relevant theories, and sensemaking in organizations. His work has appeared in several journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Management Studies, Organization, Organisational Research Methods, and Organization Studies, in books and book chapters published by Sage, Thomson, Routledge, and Kluwer. His most recent book is Managing Understanding in Organizations published by Sage in 2007. He is a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Organization Behaviour, Leadership, and Organization Studies.

ORGANIZING DERRIDA ORGANIZING: DECONSTRUCTION AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Andreas Rasche ABSTRACT This chapter explores the connection between the philosophy of Jacques Derrida (i.e. deconstruction) and organizational analysis from an aporetic perspective. In the first part, I introduce Derrida’s philosophy as a way to expose the aporetic nature of theorizing about organizations. I label this part of the discussion ‘Organizing Derrida’ as I attempt to organize parts of his philosophy. In the second part of the chapter, after reviewing the existing literature on Derrida and organization theory, I discuss three aporias – regarding environmental adaptation, decisionmaking and rule following – and show how Derridian philosophy can help us to better understand how the experience of the impossible acts as a necessary limit to our theorizing about the functioning of organizations. I argue that the recognition of aporias turns against well-established oppositions within organization theory and helps us to better understand the rich interplay between the formerly separated poles of these oppositions. This second part is labelled ‘Derrida Organizing’ as it


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shows what implications Derridian philosophy can have for organization theory. Keywords: Derrida; organization theory; deconstruction; organizational rules; decision-making. Where to start when there is no origin, as Derrida claims? One possibility is to start with oneself. This is my story of Derrida and organization theory. Saying this I realize that there are scholars who might not share this story and understand Derrida in a different way; scholars who highlight other aspects of his extensive body of work and/or disagree with my interpretation of his philosophy. Saying this, however, also means being indebted to those who have discussed Derrida with regard to organization theory and thus enriched our knowledge about what deconstruction can add to our understanding of organizations (recently see Jones, 2007; Rhodes & Brown, 2005; Weitzner, 2007; for an earlier detailed overview see Jones, 2003). Particularly, since Cooper and Burrell’s (1988) series of articles on ‘Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis’, of which a discussion of Derrida’s philosophy was one important part (Cooper, 1989), deconstruction has made it on the agenda of what is often called critical management studies. Deconstructive analyses have occurred with regard to a variety of different phenomena, for example, the question of the status of the organization itself (Cooper 1986), the possibility and limits of business ethics (Jones, Parker, & ten Bos, 2005), and the concept of decision-making (Chia, 1994), to name but a few. Considering the rich pool of literature on Derrida and organization theory, this contribution has two main objectives. On the one hand, I am Organizing Derrida, particularly with regard to the field of organization studies. I want to (a) give a summary of certain principles of his philosophy and (b) also take stock of the available literature on deconstruction and organization studies to illustrate how his work has been received by organizational scholars. Necessarily, this will involve a certain degree of replication of already existing arguments. Any iteration, however, as Derrida (1995a) teaches us, also brings about something new, something unique, something contextual. On the other hand, I want to ‘watch’ Derrida Organizing by demonstrating how we can understand organizations and organizing differently once we approach important phenomena (e.g. rules) from a deconstructive perspective. Organizing Derrida and Derrida Organizing are both concerned with the aporetic (i.e. impossible) operations which are often suppressed in writings on organizations and organizing. For me, as for others (Cooper, 1989; Jones, 2003, 2005; Weitzner, 2007), a deconstructive discussion implies uncovering

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the numerous aporias that our discourse on organizations and organizing rests on. Many of Derrida’s (1995b, 1993, 1992a, 1987) writings focus on the inevitable aporias that we ignore to make our world appear to be undeconstructible. Originating in the Greek, aporia entails perplexity, doubt and that which is impassable. Aporias, for Derrida, are a necessity, something that does not involve paralysis but, in contrast, acts as the condition of possibility of (reflected) action (Derrida, 1992a). Considering the aporetic dimension of deconstructive thinking, this chapter supplements, and through supplementing also extends, those contributions concerned with the impossibilities of organizing (Clegg, Cunha, & Cunha, 2002; Czarniawska, 2005; Lado, Boyd-Lillie, Kroll, & Wright, 2006; Lewis, 2000; Lewis & Kelemen, 2002). Although Derrida’s work has often been discussed under the label postmodernism and/or post-structuralism, particularly in critical management studies (Chia, 1994; Cooper, 1989; Hassard, 1994), I make no attempt to link my perspective on Derridian philosophy to these debates. This is because, as remarked by Alvesson (1995), the word postmodernism has been used in too many ways, often in ways that obscure the message of philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Lyotard, who are conventionally identified with this debate. In addition, as discussed by Jones (2003, p. 35), Derrida never perceived himself as a postmodernist or post-structuralist and in no way identified deconstruction as belonging to what has been labelled postmodernism/post-structuralism. Identifying Derrida as not being a postmodernist/ post-structuralist also implies to reach beyond epistemological debates (which postmodernism/post-structuralism is often identified with). For me, Derrida’s philosophy has an effect on many questions which, although influenced by epistemological debates, are not directly concerned with the status and nature of knowledge. My analysis proceeds as follows. In the first section, I attempt to introduce selected aspects of Derrida’s philosophy. I will focus on those aspects that have influenced Derridian analyses within organization theory and also pay special attention to the role of aporias within his thinking. Necessarily, this attempt on Organizing Derrida is limited and cannot reflect the richness of his thinking and the many details of his own analyses. In the next section, and still being concerned with Organizing Derrida, I offer a brief review of the literature on Derrida and organization theory. This review makes no claim for completeness, but attempts to show how his philosophy has been received in organization studies. Following this section, and attempting to see Derrida Organizing, I introduce three exemplary aporias based on Derrida’s philosophy and demonstrate how these aporias

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relate to organization theory. I close with some implications of deconstructive thinking for future theorizing in organization theory.

DECONSTRUCTION: ORGANIZING DERRIDA Deconstruction: Against the Metaphysics of Presence Deconstruction is not an analysis, a method, an act or an operation (Derrida 1985). Faced with the question of what deconstruction is, Derrida (1985, p. 4) replies: ‘I have no simple and formalizable response to this question. All my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable question’. A good way to start grasping what Derrida means by deconstruction is to recognize that any origin from which we could start exploring ‘the core’ of deconstruction remains insecure. Deconstruction is exactly about questioning the security which we usually attach to categories such as ‘beginning’ or ‘origin’. Considering that the metaphysical question aims to discover the definitive essence of something (an essence which is an origin that is independent of what comes after), deconstruction is, if we want to start this way, an attempt to criticize the metaphysical embeddedness of Western thinking. Derrida’s critique of metaphysics rests on his belief that any kind of conceptual opposition is problematic insofar as one pole of the opposition is classically conceived as original and superior, while the other is thought of as secondary. One pole of the opposition is conceived of as being ‘pure’ and full of meaning, whereas the other is conceptualized as a derivative of the former and defined in terms of a lack of presence. Oppositions such as environment/ organization, decision/action, rule/application and structure/process are thus conceived to be problematic since no part of the opposition can exist as an origin ‘on its own’. To understand the necessity for deconstruction therefore means to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a`-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiological, logical, etc.) or has the upper hand. (Derrida, 2002a, pp. 38–39)

The ambition of the Western culture to view the core of an idea (e.g. the essence of ‘being’ or ‘truth’) in a way that something else appears as secondary is what Derrida (1977) calls logocentrism. A philosophy favouring logocentric thinking conceives an order of meaning as existing in itself. Deconstruction is an attempt to dismantle the hierarchical oppositions that govern our thinking (Derrida, 2002a). Dismantling does not mean


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destroying the oppositions, but showing that by acknowledging their mutual dependence one can create something new. By disclosing the supplementary logic between the two poles of an opposition, deconstruction demonstrates how logocentric thoughts always undercut their own presumptions. Derrida (1977) argues that the supplement, which is the formerly suppressed pole of the opposition, is something that gives rise to the other pole that is apparently thought of as the ‘origin’. The concern is to show how the pole that logocentrism deemed to be a derivation of the origin is needed for the origin to mean anything at all. The deconstruction of an opposition is not the same as its inversion (Dupuy & Varela, 1992, p. 3). An inversion would create another hierarchy, which once again requires overturning. A simple overturning does not move deconstruction beyond its original territory because one remains within the deconstructed system by establishing yet another opposition. It is only the supplementary logic – the thinking of the one within the other – that keeps the deconstructive process in motion and defies its relapse into a static opposition. For Derrida (1977, p. 12), logocentrism represents a metaphysics of presence as what is defined as secondary is always conceived to be absent, whereas the origin is present in the sense that it is self-defining without reference to ‘the other’ (i.e. the supplement). The idea of a metaphysics of presence suggests that everything has to have a fixed meaning by privileging that which is over the conditions of that appearance. Each identity is thought to denote a presence that is always there; a presence that is full of meaning and represents an undeconstructible origin. Deconstruction, then, is always a deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, although in different forms depending on what is defined as the metaphysical ‘origin’ (Lucy, 2004, p. 103).

Deconstruction and Diffe´rance: About Con(Texts) If there is no metaphysical origin in general, there is also no original and fixed meaning. Derrida’s (1982) deconstruction of the opposition signifier/ signified gives rise to the neologism ‘diffe´rance’. Diffe´rance unites two verbs – ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’ – and points out that differences among signs are held not only in space but also in time: to differ is at the same time to defer (Derrida, 1982). Concerning the spatial dimension, diffe´rance represents the creation of differences (to differ) among signs and thus helps to negatively define the sign’s meaning. For instance, we cannot know what ‘organization’ means without knowing its difference to terms like ‘environment’ or ‘society’. As a result, meaning is never present but scattered along the chain of signs

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that negatively define the sign in question. Diffe´rance thus states that the meaning of a sign can never be present, but is continuously postponed (to defer). The deferring and differing effects of diffe´rance move meaning to a future state that can never be fully grasped; meaning remains ‘to come’. Because there is diffe´rance, there is the impossibility of a metaphysical presence in the sense of an absolute meaning. For Derrida this logic takes the form of a law – a law that not only affects writing or speech but also experience in general. This is why he claims: ‘I shall even extend this law to all ‘‘experience’’ in general if it is conceded that there is no experience consisting of pure presence but only of chains of differential marks’ (Derrida, 1995a, p. 10, emphasis in the original). There is no predefined limit to the applicability of diffe´rance. As Caputo (1997, p. 104) claims: ‘diffe´rance is not restricted to language but leaves its ‘‘mark’’ on everything’. Deconstruction and diffe´rance can leave their mark on everything because ‘the text’, for Derrida (1995a), is not limited to the written. We can specify this claim by considering that the phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (‘there is nothing outside the text’ [il n’y a pas de hors-texte]), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. [y] Once again (and this probably makes a thousand times I have had to repeat this, but when will it finally be heard, and why this resistance?): as I understand it (and I have explained why), the text is not the book. (Derrida, 1995a, pp. 136–137, emphasis and annotations in the original)

Derrida (1989a, p. 873) specifies this by arguing that the statement ‘there is nothing outside context’ means that ‘there is nothing but context’. Meaning cannot be determined regardless of context; we always find ourselves in a context (Derrida, 1979, p. 81). The interrelation of texts and contexts implies that one of the definitions of deconstruction would be to consider as far as possible the incessant movement of the recontextualization of texts (Derrida, 1995a, p. 136). Recontextualization is a never-ending process because there is an infinite number of possibilities that can identify and shape contexts. No context permits saturation since ‘the-real-history-of-the-world’ is contingent and ensures the boundless nature of contexts (Derrida, 1982, p. 310). Deconstruction and Aporia: The Insolubility of Arguments Deconstruction represents a way to challenge hierarchically structured oppositions within a social (con)text and introduces concepts that cannot be adopted into such oppositional structures. To deconstruct something implies to turn oppositions into supplementary relations and by doing so to expose


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aporias. Aporias occur because the supplementary relation can, when attempting to justify one pole of the opposition as a metaphysical ground, be treated as a simultaneous occurrence of both ends of the opposition. Because one pole of the opposition needs the other to be meaningful, we, when attempting to justify one pole as an origin, end up with ‘the other’. This leads to an impassable non-road and thus impossibility, because the simultaneous ‘happening’ of the two ends of the opposition leads to contradiction. Accordingly, Derrida (1993, p. 67) talks about the ‘aporetic supplement’. The most serious consideration of the existence of any supplement adds the impossibility of aporia, while, at the same time, impossibility itself represents a supplement to possibility. That is why, strictly speaking, the impossible remains non-reducible to a form of possibility as such. Aporias cannot be resolved or even clarified by regular logic: the origin comes before the supplement only because it comes after the supplement. For Derrida, any aporia refers to the puzzling moments of metaphysical statements that cannot be explained through regular logic. An aporia describes an undecidable situation in which we cannot turn to or justify one side of the opposition (Derrida, 1993, p. 12). Since aporias are inevitable and not reducible, Derrida (1993, p. 16) speaks about their necessary and passionate endurance. To experience an aporia means to bear its un-logic with passion, or even more: ‘a passionate suffering’. At least we need to try to experience the impossible (although the impossible itself does not grant access; Derrida, 1992a) and give justice to its existence; we need to try not to become paralyzed but to get to know the necessary limits of reasoning (Derrida, 1992a, p. 16). The impossibility of any aporia, then, is the ‘ultimate’ aporia as such because it remains, and has to remain, incalculable (Derrida, 1993, p. 78). Because deconstructive thinking reveals the impossibility of fixing one side of an opposition as privileged and self-defining, it needs to pay special attention to concepts that favour a both/and logic to portray moments when meaning cannot be satisfactorily decided. Derrida (1995b, p. 86) calls these concepts undecidables because it becomes undecidable to which side of the opposition to turn. Undecidables operate from within oppositions and destabilize them; they represent the unity of the opposition. However, they cannot be reduced to oppositions because they do not allow for a Hegelean solution. A prominent example for an undecidable is the term diffe´rance which means to differ and to defer at the same time. Undecidables represent the sphere/space in which opposites are opposed and in which the meaning of one pole relates back to the other. The resulting concept of rationality no longer starts from a logos that represents the ‘real’ truth of things; it also creates no better theory of truth, but is ‘an intellectual

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predisposition specifically attuned to the aporias which arise in attempts to legitimize truth claims’ (Chia, 1996, p. 19). The impossibility of any aporia is a constant reminder that the world of organizations is not based on a pure and safe conceptual ground, but that we need to face the impossibility of organizations and organizing before we can meaningfully start to think about their possibility.

DECONSTRUCTION AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Existing Applications of Deconstruction in Organization Theory Although deconstruction has not been extensively applied within the broader field of management so far, scholars in the field of organization theory have adopted some of its central ideas. In the following, I look at and classify the existing literature as these writings relate to and supplement my discussion of aporias later on. I distinguish between four ways in which deconstruction has been applied so far (for a similar classification see Jones, 2003): (1) deconstruction as a strategy for an analysis of ‘classical texts’ within organization theory, (2) deconstruction as a way to discuss the conceptual opposition within the academic discourse on organizations, (3) deconstruction as a way to study the language occurring in organizations and (4) deconstruction as an epistemological and ontological frame of reference. Obviously, all four dimensions are interrelated, often within the same piece of scholarly work, and are distinguished only for analytical purposes. The Deconstruction of Classical Texts Deconstruction has been applied as a strategy for a literary analysis of ‘classical texts’ within organization theory. The aim is a deconstruction of oppositions within a particular publication to show that the neglected concept within a text/publication actually is constitutive of the privileged one. While Mumby and Putnam (1992) present a deconstructive reading of Herbert Simon’s (1971) Administrative Behavior to show that bounded rationality constantly undermines physical labour and femininity, Kilduff (1993) offers a fine-grained reading of March and Simon’s (1958/1993) book Organizations. Kilduff ‘opens’ this particular text for the reader to unravel conflicting relationships. By referring to the opposition non-machine/ machine model of the employee, Kilduff (1993, p. 17) shows that the nonmachine model is privileged for being able to capture what March and Simon


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label bounded rationality. Yet the deconstructive reading of the text demonstrates that March and Simon simultaneously criticize and acclaim the machine model as they, according to Kilduff (1993), still understand the human mind as being programmable to perform tasks. Deconstruction traces the aporia that resides in March and Simon’s text. That is why Kilduff (1993, p. 21) states that March and Simon ‘both accuse their predecessors of treating the employee as a machine and fill the absence they claim to have found in the literature with an updated machine model’. The assumption that human behaviour can be programmed reappraises the machine metaphor that March and Simon wanted to abandon in the first place. The formerly rejected concept – the machine model of the employee – is thus not abandoned by the book Organizations, but only reappraised. Deconstruction of Oppositions Underlying Organization Theory Deconstruction has also been applied to expose those conceptual oppositions that the academic discourse on organization theory has produced over time. Scholars of organization theory are used to thinking in an either/or way. Deconstruction has helped to unravel oppositions like organization/ disorganization (Cooper, 1986), decision/action (Chia, 1994), resources/ application (Rasche, 2007) and structure/agency (Knights, 1997). These dualisms are usually constructed in privileging one side over the other. For instance, decisions are given primacy over action and ‘the’ organization is seen as being superior to any form of disorganization. Organizational analysis when viewed as a deconstructive practice rejects such logocentric thinking, criticizes the existence of pure origins, and thus ‘peels away the layers of ideological obscuration’ (Martin, 1990, p. 340). To look at one specific example, we can refer to Cooper’s (1986) discussion of the opposition organization/disorganization. Starting with the assertion that many scholars who deal with organizations tend to treat them as ordered systems, Cooper (1986, p. 305) suggests that the work of organizations is focused upon ‘transforming an intrinsically ambiguous condition into one that is ordered so that organization, as a process, is constantly bound up with the contrary state of disorganization’. Refusing the traditional view that organizations appear to be a natural order, Cooper suggests a dynamic boundary concept that distinguishes system and environment, a kind of diffe´rance, so to speak. Hence, Cooper views order not as a static concept but rather as an emerging category occurring out of the process of organizing. If organization is the configuration of order out of disorder, there needs to be a situation that makes this process of differentiating between system and environment necessary, a state of disorder that constantly surrounds all

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organizations. Cooper (1986, p. 316) calls this state the ‘zero degree of organization’. This zero degree of organization represents a surplus – what Derrida calls a supplement – that is necessary for order to exist. Disorder and chaos do not destabilize organizations but enable them to be formed in the first place. Deconstruction as a Way to Study the Language of/in Organizations Some scholars used deconstruction to analyze the language occurring in organizations. Martin (1990, p. 342), for instance, reveals the silences of a story told by a corporate president regarding his organization’s efforts to assist women in balancing the demands of work and home. Martin shows that the organization’s efforts to ‘help’ women sustained the false opposition between public and private spheres of life and, as a consequence, suppressed gender conflict. Because work is conceptualized as being separate from family life, conflicts of working mothers are classified as ‘private’ problems beyond the influence of the corporation. Deconstruction has also been used to study ‘official’ texts released by corporations. Boje (1995), for instance, presents an analysis of stories within/ of Disney and thus reveals marginalized voices. As he mentions, ‘[t]o deconstruct is to actually analyze the relations between the dualities in stories – such as the positive and negative, the central and the marginal, the essential and the inessential, the insider and the outsider’ (Boje, 1995, p. 1007). A similar approach is used in Boje’s (1998) study of Nike’s storytelling practices. He shows that while the language used by Nike portrays the company as a representative of Western economic development, it, at the same time, suppresses alternative perspectives (i.e. Asian women working under inhumane conditions). Within this case deconstruction is applied to ‘read Nike ‘‘texts’’ both written and practiced, to decenter and otherwise unmask problematic centers. These centers have become reified or frozen, taken-for-granted and privileged’ (Boje, 1998, p. 462). Deconstruction as an Epistemological and Ontological Frame of Reference Deconstruction has also been applied as an epistemological and ontological frame of reference. Scholars following this approach try to establish a deconstructive perspective for conducting organizational analysis, but do not base their arguments on particular oppositions. Chia (1996), for instance, uses deconstruction as a strategy to obtain a different understanding of the assumptions underpinning organizational research in general. He distinguishes between ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ thinking. Downstream thinking is identified with the epistemological position of representationalism,


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the belief that organizational scholarship can truthfully represent reality ‘as it is’. Organizations are taken to be identifiable objects existing ‘out there’ (Chia, 1996, p. 4). To overcome these problems, Chia proposes an upstream mode of organizational analysis which highlights the contextuality of actions and views organizations not as things but as an emergent process. This process is based upon the premise that linguistic constructs (like organizations) cannot be objectively described because reality is not static and representable (Chia, 1996, p. 172). Chia refers to deconstruction as one possible way to show that meaning structures in organizations are never fixed, and hence representational, but subject to diffe´rance and thus depended on the differing and deferring effects of signs. Organizations, then, are not the supposedly ‘pure’ phenomena we are searching after.

Aporias: Deconstruction and the Impossible Possibility Although it is certainly dangerous to dump authors into ‘boxes’, as I have attempted through my review, the four dimensions give a good overview of how deconstruction has been applied in the field of organization theory. While there is much value in these studies, Derrida’s emphasis on aporias has only recently been acknowledged, although it has been ‘with us’, at least in an implicit manner, ever since. Jones (2005, p. 228), for instance, discusses the aporias related to business ethics and in particular corporate responsibility (see also Jones et al., 2005, pp. 121–124). Likewise Weitzner (2007, p. 45) discusses the ‘ ‘‘impossibility’’ of the ethical moment’ while referring to Derrida’s writings. Drawing on these (and other) contributions, I aim to unravel further exemplary aporias that relate in particular to organization theory. This way of ‘using’ deconstructive philosophy constantly reminds us of the self-contradictions of metaphysical arguments within organization theory; it also acknowledges that Derrida himself placed a lot of emphasis on aporias and even defined deconstruction as an aporetic experience of the impossible (Derrida, 1984, p. 27). As Caputo (1997, p. 32) remarks, ‘the paralysis and impossibility of an aporia is just what impels deconstruction’. In line with Derrida (1993, p. 68), I do not discuss aporias to merely reduce the impossible to some form of possibility. I treat aporias neither as a ‘bad’ thing nor as something that we should avoid at any expense. Rather, I expose aporias as the indispensable limits of knowledge about the functioning of organizations. Aporias are indispensable because they inevitably occur once we acknowledge that the oppositions that academic

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discourses are structured around are based on ideologies which suppress one part of the opposition as being a mere derivative of the ‘origin’. Instead of reducing the impossible to the possible, I illustrate that the impossibility of each aporia is the condition of possibility as such (Derrida, 2002b, p. 361). Acknowledging aporias helps us to find a novel ground for theorizing about organizations; a ground which does not conclude that we are stuck with impossibilities, but which considers these impossibilities as necessary limits to our knowledge about organizations and, based on this, allows us to recognize the consequences of the interplay between the (formerly separated) poles of an opposition. I thus agree with Poole and Van de Ven (1989, p. 564) that appreciating impossibilities within the research process implies to ‘discover different assumptions, shift perspectives, pose problems in fundamentally different ways, and focus on different research questions’ (see also Clegg et al., 2002; Lewis, 2000).

THREE APORIAS: DERRIDA ORGANIZING Environment/Organization: The Aporia of Adaptation Derrida and the Inside/Outside Debate ‘The market’ and ‘the environment’ are popular concepts among organization theorists. A variety of scholars have treated the environment as an ‘origin’ of their thinking about organizations. Williamson (1975, p. 20), for instance, assumes that ‘in the beginning there were ‘‘markets’’ ’, while Lawrence and Lorsch’s (1967) contingency theory of organizations makes the assumption that environmental circumstances dictate what is going on in organizations. This way of thinking leads to an adaptation-based logic which is present in much research on organizations and particularly strategic management (Ansoff, 1987b; Porter, 1981). Organizations are left with the task of adapting and fitting to the environment as well as possible. Adaptation-based research presumes that firms are part of their environment in a way that all actors refer to one reality (Vos 2002). This reality is relevant to all and provides the point of reference for change in organizations. To discuss the aporetic nature of the adaptation-based logic, we need to recognize that such thinking is based on the opposition environment/ organization. The distinction between environment and organization refers to the more general question of how relevant the opposition outside/inside really is. Derrida (1981, 1987) discussed this question several times and


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argues that the distinction between inside and outside is a metaphysical thought that is particularly revealed in the study of art. This permanent requirement – to distinguish between the internal proper sense and the circumstance of the object being talked about – organizes all philosophical discourses on art, the meaning of art and meaning as such, from Plato to Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. This requirement presupposes a discourse on the limit between the inside and outside of the art object, here a discourse on the frame. (Derrida, 1987, p. 45, emphasis in the original)

The frame distinguishes between inside and outside but is not ‘given’ in a way for us to simply accept the difference. Rather, the frame is undecidable in the sense that it is neither in the inside nor on the outside. The frame is not naturally imposed but constructed through differences that are never complete but perpetuated by diffe´rance. Such as there is no predefined limit to ‘the text’, there can be no natural boundary around what we believe to be inside an organization. If we apply this kind of thinking to the relation between environment and organization, we can argue that the environment exists only because of the organization, while at the same time the organization cannot exist without its environment (Cooper, 1986). The apparent purity of the environment is constantly supplemented by the organization that actively frames its own environment. The supplement is added to compensate for a lack in what is thought to be complete; the organization always adds a new dimension to the environment (Cooper, 1986, p. 315). That is why the conception of the environment cannot be grounded in what Derrida calls a metaphysics of presence. Organizational phenomena (e.g. structures and plans) cannot be derived from an objective and self-present environment, but are the outcome of the relation between organization and environment. Any adaptation-based logic, which is open to Derrida’s argument that the inside is in the outside and the outside also in the inside, needs to accept that at the limits of our knowledge about organizations rests an aporia. If it is true that the environment consists only because of the organization (i.e. it is a construction of the organization), every adaptation to the environment is only possible as self-adaptation. The implications of this finding lead to an aporia: you cannot distance yourself from the environment (for the sake of adaptation) and at the same time produce this very environment (Vos, 2002). While looking for organizational fit, organizations need to describe the environment that exists regardless of them (as otherwise they could not establish distance), whereas in fact the environment exists only because of the organization. However, the environment cannot exist at the same time

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because of and despite an organization. You cannot adapt to something (and take it as a reference point despite yourself) that at the same time exists only because of your own existence. Implications: The Diffe´rance of Competitive Advantage The aporia of adaptation, like any aporia, remains a limit to our knowledge about the relationship between organization and environment. We cannot simply experience the aporia and thus cross the oppositional line (Derrida, 1993, p. 15). What we can do, however, is to apprehend and endure its existence; we can give reference to the non-track and barred path within our thinking. Giving reference to the impossibility of environmental adaptation implies to rethink, among other things, the way we conceptualize the achievement of competitive advantage. Child (2005, p. 379), for instance, argues that ‘[c]ompetitive advantage can [y] be gained from a firm’s ability to adapt rapidly to external change’. Competitive advantage, here, is a ‘pure’ concept, something that an organization can and should derive out of its environment via adaptation. Then, the identity of competitive advantage (i.e. what organizational members believe competitive advantage to rest on) is ‘given’. But what identifies a competitive advantage? To answer this question, we need to turn to the concept of identity. Pondering about the possibility of a ‘pure’ identity, an identity which is simply ‘given’, Derrida (1998, 1992b) suggests that whatever entity is to acquire an identity is caught up in the movement of supplementarity. Identity is not a static concept, not something that imposes itself on us from the ‘outside’. Identity is a constant reinvention and nothing that we can derive from some metaphysical origin. The identity of competitive advantage is a product of the ‘play of differences’ between environment and organization; these differences are not stable but change constantly. Every difference is also a deference of a self-present identity into the future; every identity is subject to diffe´rance. Hence, the meaning of an organization’s competitive advantage is always moving, it is never fully ‘there’, because no identity can ever be identical to itself (Derrida, 1992b, p. 9). Accordingly, Derrida (1998, p. 28) argues that ‘an identity is never given, received, or attained; only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures’. Identity is identification – competitive advantage rests on identification. This process view on identity and competitive advantage defers the underlying aporia; the aporia remains in some sense present (as it cannot be defined away) but is less visible because the interplay (and not simultaneous occurrence) of organization and environment is now of relevance. ‘In the beginning’ of competitive advantage is neither the organization nor the


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environment, but, to speak with Derrida (2000a, p. 282): ‘in the beginning, there is the and’. Identification is neither a product of the organization nor the environment alone; it occurs as an effect of the relation between organization and environment (Derrida, 1987, p. 61). Identification draws our attention to the interrelatedness of both spheres: the organization creates its environment by the distinctions it draws, while at the same time this environment ‘constrains’ its future actions and thus identity. There is no environment or organization as such, but whenever an environment is framed the organization is framed as well (et vice versa). Such a perspective reveals the limits of adaptation-based thinking as outlined above. Competitive advantage is not based on ‘the logic which guides the process by which an organization adapts to its external environment’ (Ansoff, 1987a, p. 501), but instead rests on the play of differences (‘produced’ by diffe´rance) between organization and environment. There is no ultimate metaphysical origin of competitive advantage – an origin which can be objectively observed through different methods as assumed by Porter (1980). Competitive advantage cannot be simply possessed by an organization (e.g. like a tangible asset), but is enacted over time involving actors who make choices interactively and by doing so refer to their environment (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Smircich & Stubbart, 1985).

Decision/Action: The Aporia of Undecidability Deconstruction and the Impossibility of Decisions ‘Decisions’ and ‘decision-making’ are much-debated concepts within organization theory (Chia, 1994; Langley, Mintzberg, Pitcher, Posada, & Saint-Macary, 1995). While we know about the limits of rational (linear) decision-making (Mintzberg, 1994), we rarely question the deeply held assumption that thinking (‘the decision’) comes before execution (‘the action’). Thus, there is another opposition at work – decision/action – which favours one pole as being full of meaning (i.e. the decision) and treats the other one as a derivative (i.e. action). If scholars reflect on the nature of this opposition, as for instance in the case of Mintzberg and Waters (1990), they tend to reverse it and thus give primacy to the formerly neglected end. This becomes obvious when considering that Mintzberg and Waters (1985, p. 257) conceive of organizations’ strategies as ‘a pattern in a stream of actions’. Yet, overturning the opposition does not reveal the blind spot of oppositional thinking (Chia, 1994, p. 788).

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To uncover this blind spot, Derrida (1995b, pp. 386–387) claims that the future is something monstrous, something that we neither can nor should predict. [T]he future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprisingly, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by species of monsters. A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would already be a predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant, to welcome it, that is, to accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange, but also, one must add, to try to domesticate it, that is, to make it part of the household and have it assume the habits, to make us assume new habits. (emphasis in the original)

What does Derrida mean by the phrase ‘monstrous arrivant’? According to Royle (2003, p. 111), a monstrous arrivant comes to a threshold – a border that points towards the future – to eventually surprise us. We need to welcome this monstrous arrivant, since no decision would be possible without the singularity that is attached to this monstrosity. For Derrida (1992c, p. 200), deconstruction is about ‘the opening of the future itself ’ because a deconstructive thinking necessarily destabilizes any context. This destabilization is a necessary condition for the dangerous monstrosity of the future. As Derrida (1977, p. 5, emphasis in the original) claims: ‘The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity’. Derrida asserts that to make choice authentic, one needs to understand that the future cannot be certain, because if the future were certain, there would be no need for an authentic choice anymore. Why, then, is real/authentic choice based on an aporia? To answer this question, we have to get back to the supplementary logic that is at the heart of any deconstruction. If thinking (i.e. the decision) is not full of meaning, it is constantly supplemented by action. Action adds a new dimension to the ‘original’ (i.e. the decision) – a surplus that can turn out to be ‘dangerous’ because it modifies the premises that justified the decision ‘in the beginning’. Decision premises are not entirely the outcome of thinking but are constituted in the course of action. Not until the decision has finally been carried out does one decide how contingency has been fixed and what justification was chosen. Action constantly supplements, in fact ‘gives-newmeaning-to’, thinking in a way that makes it impossible to fully justify a decision a priori. The justification one chooses prior to action cannot ‘stand in’, at least not in a pure sense, for the decision one is about to make. These insights lead to aporia: a decision can only be justified with regard to action, but action needs a decision to come about. Decisions are impossible


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in the sense that the preferences, which give the good reasons why the decision is carried out, are fully constituted in actu only. Because the meaning of a decision is constituted in the course of action, we need to make decisions if, and only if, they are impossible to justify. The condition of the possibility of a decision, that is its justification, implies at the same time its impossibility since there is no full justification until the decision has finally been executed. In the words of Derrida (1995b, pp. 147–148): These are the only decisions possible: impossible ones. [y] It is when it is not possible to know what must be done, when knowledge is not and cannot be determining that a decision is possible as such. Otherwise the decision is an application: one knows what has to be done, it’s clear, there is no more decision possible; what one has here is an effect, an application, a programming. (emphasis in the original)

The defining characteristic of a decision (i.e. its concern with an uncertain future) excludes any form of constraint that would allow for calculable decisions. Decisions deserve their name only if they contain the ‘ghost of the undecidable’ (Derrida, 1992a, pp. 24–25). Every decision remains caught in a ghost that represents the undecidability of an open future. The undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension between two decisions; it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged – it is obligation that we must speak – to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules. A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision [y] That is why the ordeal of the undecidable that I just said must be gone through by any decision worthy of the name is never past or passed, it is not a surmounted or sublated (aufgehoben) moment in the decision. The undecidable remains caught, lodged, at least as a ghost – but an essential ghost – in every decision, in every event of decision. (emphasis and German annotation in the original)

The force of difference – which defers the meaning of a decision and thus makes it impossible to arrive at fully justified decision premises that determine action – makes us recognize the ghost that is inherent to every decision. For Derrida (1995a, p. 116), undecidability implies that no completeness of a decision is possible. Every decision is structured by this experience of the undecidable, the limits of decidability, to finally become a decision. The point here is not whether decisions exist or not, but to question in how far a decision can be ‘present’ in the sense that it offers a safe ground for action. The aporia of undecidability is at the heart of Derrida’s thinking about decisions. Once we recognize the undecidable nature of decisions, we can start asking the question of how decisions come into being (Derrida, 1995b, p. 147). Apparently, there is no moment in which a decision can be called present. That is why, according to Derrida (1989b, p. 79), monstrosity can

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only be recognized after a decision, when it has become the norm. However, once it has become the norm, it is no longer monstrous. The very idea of a justifiable/pure/genuine decision is irreducible to itself and owes its existence to ‘the other’ (action). The other, that constantly supplements, possesses a singularity that is forever new and different. Because diffe´rance is all about a deferral of meaning that makes presence impossible, a monster never presents itself but always remains ‘to come’. According to Derrida (2000b, p. 534), ‘[d]iffe´rance is a thought which wishes to yield to the imminence of what is coming or about to come’. At first, this sounds devastating for anyone who tries to think about organization theory. Yet, on closer examination, the monstrosity of the future turns out to be the very condition of organizational decisions as such. Without at least facing the aporia of undecidability, every organizational decision remains a programmable calculation – something that is not worth being called a decision.

Implications: Decisions as Incisions The aporia of undecidability remains a limit to our knowledge about organizational decisions. Like any aporia that deconstruction exposes, the impossibility of decisions is limited to the establishment of a metaphysics of presence; in this case a metaphysics of presence refers to decisions that are self-defining. Decisions are not impossible per se, but their rational justification becomes out of reach. The aporia that underlies Derrida’s notion of undecidability arises from the metaphysical desire to justify a decision prior to action. Considering that decisions in organizations, and particularly strategic decisions, call for justification because they include considerable resource commitments and are usually irreversible (Mintzberg, Raisinghani, & Theóret, 1976, p. 246; Schilit, 1990, p. 436), this aporia seems to be much relevant. How, then, should we think about decisionmaking in organizations? Decisions cannot be construed as an unproblematic identifiable event ‘out there’ but come into being (just as Cooper (1986) conceptualizes organizations as emerging from the zero degree of organization). Derrida’s aporia requires that we move beyond the uncontested acceptance of ‘the decision’ as the principal focus of analysis (Harmon, 1989). According to Chia (1994), a decision is an operation of ‘cutting off’ parts of reality (i.e. an ‘incision’) helping to configure a version of reality to which we then subsequently respond. Decisions are active operations of reality construction that retrospectively appear meaningful; they are not in any way objectively given but are retrospective objectifications arising/emerging within the flow of


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social processes. Whatever we regard as ‘decisions’ within our research are to some extent constructs allowing us to fix our actions (Harmon, 1989, p. 149). Deconstruction helps us to rethink the status of decisions as such. Neither ‘decisions’ nor ‘actions’ are pure concepts. On the one hand, action already is a part of decision because the very act of decision-making represents a fundamental ontological act of making an ‘incision’ into the flow of experiences. On the other hand, decisions are also part of action since every act involves a decision (i.e. the decision to act in a certain, and not a different, way). To speak with Chia (1994, p. 795), decisions and actions, when viewed from a deconstructive perspective, need to be understood as a becoming process of configuring reality. This perspective on decision-making helps us to rethink many phenomena that have been of central interest to scholars within the domain of organization theory. Plans, for instance, do not reflect ‘decisions’ which are followed by ‘actions’. Rather, as suggested by Weick (1979, p. 11), plans are ‘excuses for actions’. They provide a fictional ground upon which reality constructing incisions rest. Such fictions reflect the ‘quivering’ ground helping us to cross the abyss of undecidability. Plans are meaningful because they spur peoples’ confidence and thus provide excuses for further incisions. The decisions on which plans rest are by no means objectively given, but represent objectifications of fluid processes which motivate further actions. A similar argumentation relates to organizational values. Simon (1971), for instance, sees values as coming logically first because they reflect the basis for suitable actions. A Derridian perspective not only questions the analytical independence of values from action, but helps us to understand how values are ‘discovered’ in and through the ongoing creation of factual contexts within and beyond organizations. The consequences of such a perspective on decision-making have not yet been fully integrated into our organizational theories.

Rule/Application: The Aporia of Rule Following Deconstruction and the Impossibility of Iteration Organizations are made up of rules (Giddens, 1984) and numerous studies have reflected on the role of rules in organizations (Bozeman & Rainey, 1998; Jabs, 2005; Rushing, 1966). In its most general sense, a rule can be characterized as a formalized prescription regulating (and eventually sanctioning) human behaviour (Weber, 1968, p. 217). Rules have one aspect to them which is of central importance when thinking about their nature: they need to be generalizable and thus applicable over a range of contexts

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(Giddens, 1984, p. 20). A rule that is just applicable once is not a rule since every rule, by definition, is repeatable. For any rule to be repeatable (and thus applicable), one would need not only to anticipate its context of application but also to regulate this very context. Can we ‘manage’ those contexts? According to Derrida, contexts always remain open and are thus non-saturable. Deconstruction implies paying the sharpest attention possible to context, acknowledging its limitless nature, and giving reference to the never-ending movement of recontextualization (Derrida, 1995a, p. 136). Contexts must remain open for two reasons. First, every context is not simply given, in the sense of some harder reality that imposes on people, but produced – in fact enacted – through incisions (see above). People, while making sense of their world, fix what belongs to a context and by doing so draw distinctions which cannot be justified in advance. Contexts are not a simple natural ground on which managers can base their activity but emerge because of them (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). Accordingly, contexts always remain open to further descriptions, as there is no predescribed limit of what might be included. Second, any effort to describe/codify a context (e.g. ‘the project’) already yields another context that escapes the prior formulation (Culler, 1982, p. 124). In other words, any attempt to describe the limits of a context upsets those limits. Contexts always draw upon previous contexts, which are themselves embedded in still other contexts (Dixon & Jones, 2005, p. 243). This inter-contextual character entails that there is no stability that allows us to completely iterate a context without modification. Moving towards the aporetic nature of rules, Derrida (1995a, p. 117) discusses the question of repetition (iteration) in some depth. According to him, the perfect repetition that is needed to make generalizations valid is impossible. This, however, does not mean that Derrida abandons generalizations. Deconstruction does not neglect the general but tells us that ‘[t]he singular is in fact always bound up with the general’ (Royle, 2003, p. 120). Every repetition creates a difference that alters and defers the meaning of a rule. Diffe´rance is at the heart of repeatability and ensures that the meaning of rules is never fully present. This relationship of sameness and difference reminds us that repetition is never pure but always leads to alterations. As Lucy (2004, p. 59) argues, ‘[t]o repeat something is to alter it, to make a difference’. The alteration of the meaning of an organizational rule is already included in its repetition, constantly contaminating its purity (presence). If organizational rules were present, it would be a presence without difference, which is impossible (Bennington, 1989, p. 84). This repetition-as-difference enables and limits


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rules to make us aware that no organizational rule can exist only for itself in a state of self-presence. What permits pureness to occur is ‘this dangerous supplement’ (Derrida, 1977) which constantly adds a new dimension of meaning to the ‘origin’. In our case, the supplement is application – the action that is required for rules to mean anything at all. We cannot refrain from applying rules as this would make them unessential. Yet application (i.e. reality constructing ‘incisions’) means modification and thus partly destroys rules. The impossibility of perfect repetition points towards an aporia. We cannot replicate rules in their purest sense, which is to say without modification. The condition of their possibility (which is their iteration), already modifies, alters, perverts, sometimes even replaces them. Rules do not apply themselves; people apply them within a specific context, a context that cannot be perfectly regulated a priori but remains open and thus calls for adjustment. Organizational members need to regulate and, at the same time, need to distance themselves from regulation to ‘invent’ the rule anew. As Derrida (1997, p. 6) argues: ‘So, at the same time, you have to follow the rule and to invent a new rule, a new norm, a new criterion, a new law’. The supplement ‘forces’ the meaning of rules to be contextualized, to be valid for a single case only. But contexts are open and unsaturable and cannot be regulated in advance, at least not in a satisfactory way. To think of perfectly repeatable rules means to establish a metaphysics of presence (i.e. an ‘origin’ that is self-defining and does not need any application to create meaning). Implications: The Iterability of Rules The discussed aporia that makes generalizations impossible is based upon Derrida’s (1992a) claim that every repetition also brings about alteration. Derrida (1995a) discusses this interconnectedness of repetition and alteration with regard to the term: iterability. Iterability comes from the Latin iter (‘again’) and the Sanskrit itara (‘other’) and is the logic that ties repetition to alteration (Derrida, 1995a, p. 7; Royle, 2003, p. 67). Iterability asks us to think replication and modification together to consider that reproduction/ replication is the possibility of singularity. Looking at iterability, organizational rules remain in some sense identifiable within and among organizations, but only in, through, and in view of their alteration (Derrida, 1995a, p. 53). Conceiving of rules as being reproduced by iterability entails accepting that they are modified within and through their repetition. Iterability implies that organizations do not completely neglect the sameness that makes rules in some way repeatable. Organizations base their actions on an indispensable emptiness of rules, which is necessary for

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repetition, and a gradual filling of this emptiness to take specific circumstances into account (Ortmann & Salzman, 2002, p. 212). People in organizations consider general (empty) prescriptions and modify (fill) these prescriptions over time. Emptiness, then, represents the repeatability of rules in principle, while fullness characterizes ‘the other’ that each context brings about and without which no rule gains meaning in praxis. Emptiness implies that rules can be repeated and act as a ground for organizing, whereas fullness points out that this repetition fills rules with contextualized meaning and modifies them to account for the specific circumstances at hand. Based on this discussion, Ortmann (2003, p. 33) draws our attention to the unavoidable necessity of rule modification within the process of ‘filling’. Because organizational rules need to be applied, they cannot avoid the dangerous supplement that modifies their meaning. Organizational members thus need to know that to break with a rule is not necessarily a bad thing, but often indispensable to address the context they face. Pfeffer (1994, pp. 3–4), for instance, shows that one cannot simply adhere to Porter’s five forces framework (i.e. a strategic rule) to make out competitive advantage because competitiveness is a dynamic concept that changes over time. He argues that when identifying the five top performing US firms for the 1972 to 1992 period, which according to Porter’s logic of competitive advantage should be in industries with high barriers to entry and patent protection, one ends up with a list of organizations that operate in industries characterized by massive competition, widespread bankruptcy, and almost no barrier to entry. The point is not to believe that Porter offers a false analytical tool, but that the general nature of his framework does not present a reasonable explanation of competitive advantage in every industry and country. The application of organizational rules is not a secondary operation that can simply be deduced. Application acts as a Derridian supplement that may be restricted (but not determined) by existing meaning structures. Rule application necessarily leads to modification that puts the rule into a unique context and thus preserves peoples’ capacity to act. Like signs, which are unstable and only gain meaning in and through social praxis (Derrida, 2002a), to know a universal rule by itself in no way guarantees that its general nature is enabled in the context of application. The supplement always undermines what we think is generally valid. Like a parasite, the social practices of people constantly recontextualize and revise rules. That is why Derrida (1995b, p. 234) remarks ‘deconstruction is always a discourse about the parasite’.


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IMPLICATIONS OF DECONSTRUCTIVE THINKING This chapter aimed at introducing the consequences of Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy for organization studies by putting a special emphasis on the role of aporias. While many things could be said about possible implications of deconstructive thinking for theorizing about organizations (see, e.g. Jones, 2003; Knights, 1997; Martin, 1990; Ortmann & Salzman, 2002), I would like to highlight (1) the necessity of future research to face and discuss the impossible moments of organizations and organizing and (2) the need to put more emphasis on the political and ethical dimension of Derrida’s writings when thinking about deconstruction and/as organization theory. While the latter aspect may seem decoupled from the points raised within this chapter (at least at first glance), I intend to show that it is the recognition of the impossible which calls for an engagement with Derrida’s political and ethical writings.

Theorizing Organizations and the Importance of the ‘And’ Although we have called up some of the aporias that organization theory tries to suppress, there are other oppositions which separate: resources/application, knowing/not knowing, control/flexibility, self/other, old/new. Deconstruction is an invitation; an invitation to experience these aporias and pay serious attention to them within the process of theorizing and, based on this, start thinking about the possibility of organizations and organizing from a different perspective. Considering aporias requires to more radically acknowledge the ‘and’ within organization theory – the word which connects oppositions not in a linear but in a mutually enhancing manner. As Derrida (2000a, p. 285) remarks: Wondering what the ‘and’ is, what and [y] means and does not mean, does and does not do, that is perhaps, before any enumeration of all possible titles of the type ‘deconstruction and y’, the most constant task of any deconstruction. (emphasis in the original)

Paying the most serious attention to the ‘and’ reveals a deconstructive position, one that takes aporia as a starting point to think about the conditions of the possibility of organizations and organizing. Recognizing the importance of the ‘and’ implies to not treat the impossibility of an operation as negative or something we should avoid,

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but requires us to consider the impossible acts as a precondition for the possible. Without acknowledging the impossible moments of organizing, we may arrive too quickly at the possible and thus forget about the conditions of its occurrence. Powell (2006, p. 220), while discussing Derrida’s thinking, argues in this context: The gift of the impossible is the precondition for the possible to occur, for how can anything happen at all, how not be machinal and pre-programmed, spectral, if everything is pre-possible and simply possible.

Too often there is no discussion of the pre-possible moments of organizations and organizing while building theories. We take the prepossible for granted and hence forget about the impossible conditions upon which our nice and elegant theories rest. The impossible, as argued throughout this chapter, is not supposed to bring about paralysis or should hinder theory building. From the perspective of deconstruction, any acknowledgement of the impossible makes us think about whether we did not too easily accept an ‘origin’ as given without challenging the conditions of its existence. As Mitroff (1995, p. 750) argued 15 years ago: ‘One of the reasons why I find the current literature on management so repulsive is that for the most part it eschews paradox’. Recognizing deconstruction’s link with the impossible presents an excellent opportunity to give more voice to aporias within the process of theorizing. Having said this, we should accept that the aporias which deconstruction uncovers are not negative. Deconstruction’s critique is strongly affirmative (Jones, 2003, p. 42); it is about ‘welcoming’ the supplement, not to suppress the former origin but to show that one cannot exist without the other. As Derrida (1995b, p. 83) notes, deconstruction ‘is not negative, even though it has often been interpreted as such despite all sorts of warnings. For me, it always accompanies an affirmative exigency, I would even say that it never proceeds without love y’ To treat deconstruction merely as critique would reinscribe another opposition (i.e. positive/negative) into the process of theorizing (Derrida, 1995b, p. 211). Deconstructive organizational analysis is affirmative because it is about thinking the possibility of organizations and organizing from another, non-metaphysical, border. Deconstruction thinks about the possibility of organizations and organizing by displacing an either/or and applying a both/and logic. The point is not to distance oneself from the phenomenon under deconstruction, but to give it the possibility of being thought in another way. Paradoxically, this passage is paved by the impassage of aporia.


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Deconstruction and the Impossible Moments of Justice An appraisal of the impossible as the condition of the possibility of organizations and organizing leads us directly to another implication: organization theory not only suppresses the aporias inherent to the operation of organizations, but also does not pay adequate attention to the impossibility of justice which Derrida (1992a, 1992b) discussed in some of his writings. In a time where the responsibility of corporations and the ethical dimension of business are debated in the context of organization theory (see, e.g. Wempe, 2008), we should not risk neglecting this part of Derrida’s philosophy but treat it as one promising contribution to organization studies. Although the ethical dimension of Derridian philosophy has been discussed recently (Jones, 2005, 2007; Jones et al., 2005), I agree with Weitzner (2007) that more can be done to tease out the implications of Derrida’s writings for studying the ethics in/of/beyond organizations. Once again, this brings us to the impossible moments of organizing as for Derrida authentic justice is impossible. His thoughts, expressed in the essay Force of Law (1992a), are based on the argument that law and justice are different. Justice by itself can guide the application of the law; however real/true/genuine/authentic justice remains impossible. As Derrida (1997, pp. 16–17) remarks in an interview: But justice is not the law. Justice is what gives us the impulse, the drive, or the moment to improve the law, that is, to deconstruct the law. [y] A judge, if he wants to be just, cannot content himself with applying the law. He has to reinvent the law each time.

If justice cannot be ensured by the law, it remains locked in an aporia (Derrida, 1992a, p. 25). Justice becomes incalculable and thus undecidable because the idea of justice (in its purest form) cannot be reduced to some sort of pre-programmed law. Hence, the aporia of undecidability acts as the condition of the possibility of justice. This aporia opens up the singularity and unique context of each case. As with any aporia, the impossibility of justice remains a limit which does not allow passage (Derrida, 1992a, p. 16). In practice, however, the aporia highlights the need to question ‘easy’ solutions regarding organizational justice and thus makes us consider the contextual circumstances of just decisions to the largest possible extent. I believe that Derrida’s thinking should inspire our discourses on whether and how organizations exercise justice and how they can be held accountable for their doings and omissions. In a time where standards for organizational accountability are proliferating (e.g. the recent ISO 26000; for an overview see Waddock, 2008), Derrida’s thinking about the impossibility of justice

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seems both necessary and timely. Deconstruction, then, calls for questioning the desire of standards to pre-regulate justice in a universal way. Future research on organizations needs to critically examine whether and to what degree standards are helpful tools to hold organizations accountable. Examining the limits of standardizing the exercise of justice gives the application of Derridian thinking a very practical and timely twist. Such research could show the significance of deconstructive thinking for contemporary problems in organization studies and thus counter De George’s (2008, p. 85) argument that ‘the relevance of Derrida to CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] and business ethics remains tenuous and elusive’ (annotation added).

Prospects y Deconstruction has always been with us because it is nothing that we can define away (although we can suppress it). We have to think of organizations as being always already in deconstruction. Acknowledging this helps us to uncover the unstable ground upon which some of our theories about organizations are built. ‘Applying Derrida’ is nothing which is brought in from the outside, although it might sometimes appear as if this were the case. Deconstruction already is at work in the ‘inside’ of our theories and thoughts about organizations and strongly affirms what is ‘to come’. Thus, a deconstructionist organization theory – but there is no such thing – could not be the result of a successful application of Derrida’s theory. Deconstruction has always already begun (Derrida, 1987, p. 19, 1986, p. 123); it is happening and does not wait for someone to complete a theoretical analysis (Derrida, 1995b, p. 356); it is existing in many more critical, yet affirmative, contributions to organization theory than we think. Hence, we need to broaden our understanding of deconstruction and not limit it to the writings of/on Derrida. There are many writings which ‘bear’ deconstructive effects in them without exclusively focusing on Derridian philosophy (see, e.g. the discussion by Chia, 1996). Hence, there is no ‘hard core’ of deconstruction which could be uncovered and then turned into some sort of method. Even my necessarily simplifying argument that deconstruction is about destabilizing oppositions and uncovering the belonging aporias cannot and should not be treated as a pre-programmed solution to ‘perform’ deconstruction. Derrida and Norris (1989, p. 75) recognize in this context that each deconstruction speaks with a single voice.


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Every deconstruction can be deconstructed (Agger, 1991). Neither authors nor readers have privileged access to the meaning of texts. In this sense, a text, like this one, is always beyond our control. It carries a burden of meaning that constantly escapes, slips away and breaks out. We then have to ask: Can there be an end to an article on deconstruction? Derrida (1977, p. 18) refers to the idea of the book as a ‘natural totality’ that is alien to the diffe´rance of meaning it carries. Is not the end of a journal article its beginning and its beginning the end? Maybe the best way to end this chapter is the recognition of the ‘and’.

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Andreas Rasche is Assistant Professor of Business in Society at Warwick Business School. He also acts as a consultant to the United Nations Global Compact Office in New York and is visiting professor at European Business School, Germany. He holds a PhD (Dr. rer. pol.) degree from European Business School, Germany and a Habilitation (Dr. habil.) from HelmutSchmidt University, Hamburg. Andreas regularly publishes in leading international journals on topics related to organization theory and corporate responsibility.

THINKING BECOMING AND EMERGENCE: PROCESS PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES Ajit Nayak and Robert Chia ABSTRACT Process is an ambivalent term. Its use in organizational research and theorizing is widespread. Yet, there are important subtle differences in how the term is understood and employed in the study of organizing/ organization. In this chapter, we show that thinking in terms of ceaseless change, emergence and the immanent becoming of things, entities and events are central to a proper appreciation of what it means to truly understand process in genuinely processual terms. From this process philosophical perspective, social entities such as individuals and organizations are construed as temporarily stabilized event clusters abstracted from a sea of constant flux and change. Such an approach to the understanding of organizational phenomena draws its inspiration from a tradition of thinkers from Heraclitus to twentieth-century process philosophers such as William James, Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead and beyond all of who, in one way or another, viewed reality in terms of ceaseless process, flux and transformation rather than as a stable world of unchanging entities. In what follows, we outline the key principles and axioms of process philosophy. Philosophy and Organization Theory Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 32, 281–309 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2011)0000032012

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We show that from a process philosophical outlook, primacy is accorded to becoming over being, difference over self-identity, and time and temporality over simple spatial location. We then examine the implications of process thinking for understanding organization as an ongoing ‘world-making’ phenomenon and show that the current interest in organizational sensemaking, organizational identity and entrepreneurial logic provides good illustrations of how and when process and emergence are taken seriously, our understanding of organizational situations can be vastly enriched. Keywords: being; change; collective action; entrepreneurship; identity; ontology; organizing; transformation.

INTRODUCTION That ‘all things flow’ is the first vague generalization which the y intuition of men has produced. y Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate integral experience, unwarped by the sophistication of theory y the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system. (Whitehead, 1929, p. 295) If my reader can succeed in abstracting from all conceptual interpretations and lapse back into his immediate sensible life y he will find y a big blooming buzzing confusion, as free from contradiction in its ‘much-at-onceness’ as it is alive and evidently there. (James, 1996, p. 50) Continuity of change, preservation of the past in the present, real duration y life, like conscious activity is invention, is unceasing creation. (Bergson, 1998, p. 23)

Process philosophical thinking invites us to think about individuals, organizations and social entities in terms of ceaseless change, emergence and self-transformation. It urges us to recognize that what really exist are ‘not things made but things in the making’ (James, 1925, p. 263). The social world, in particular, is not ‘ready-made’; rather, it is the material effect of an ongoing enactive process of ‘world-making’ (Goodman, 1978; Chia, 2003). Thus, organizations such as Nike, the European Union (EU), Oxford University and even al Qaeda ‘are not inscribed in the world as natural facts’ (Hernes, 2008, p. xix) out there, but instead are better conceptualized as relatively stabilized relational configurations that have evolved as actualities out of an infinite number of possibilities. They are collective social orders brought about through human interactions, oftentimes without any deliberate intention to do so on the part of individual actors themselves. What process philosophical thinking does is to alert us to attend more to the transformational process from

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the possible to the actual so that each instance of organization is viewed as an exceptional accomplishment in its own right. In this fundamental sense, process philosophical thinking privileges process over end-states, becoming over being; it is an intellectual orientation that accords primacy to ‘becoming and change – the origination, flourishing, and passing of the old and the innovative emergence of ever-new existence’ (Rescher, 1996, p. 28). Furthermore, social phenomena are not to be construed as solid entities with state-like qualities. Individuals, organizations and societies are deemed to be epiphenomena of primarily fluxing and changing patterns of relationships and event clusterings. Such an intellectual orientation has much to offer to the study of organization and organizational life. Instead of focusing on organizations and their attributes, attention is directed to the micro-practices of ‘everyday practical coping’ (Chia & Holt, 2006) and ongoing ‘sensemaking’ (Weick, 1995; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). Instead of thinking about organizations as ‘enduring totalities that resist change’ (Tsoukas, 2003, p. 608), process thinking recognizes that contingency, emergence, creativity and complexity are fundamental to our understanding of organizational life. To understand ‘organizations’ processually is to recognize them not as solid, stabilized entities but as ‘mediating networks’ (Cooper & Law, 1995, p. 239) that are ‘patterned yet indeterminate’ (Tsoukas, 2003, p. 619), secondary effects of ‘a scattered and heterogeneous social process’ (Chia, 1998b, pp. 6–7). Karl Weick (2009) insightfully labels these slower changing relationships and event clusters ‘organized impermanence’. Furthermore, according to process philosophical thought, not only are organizations to be construed in this way but even individuals themselves must similarly be understood as relatively stabilized effects of social relations and event clusterings instead of autonomous entities in their own right; socio-cultural practices and relationships precede individuality. The individual person is not to be understood as a discrete, bounded entity relating externally to its environment in such a way as to leave its basic, internally specified nature unaffected. Instead, each individual is essentially a socio-cultural nexus of historically shaped relationships such that their identity and characteristics are not bestowed upon them in advance of their involvement with others. Instead, the individual is ‘the condensation of histories of growth and maturation within fields of social relations’ (Ingold, 2000, p. 3). ‘The coming-into-being of the person is part and parcel of the process of the coming-into-being of the world’ (Ingold, 2000, p. 168). Thus, instead of the autonomous, intentional and purposeful agent, the individual themselves are to be understood as a relatively stabilized agglomeration of culturally acquired tendencies and predispositions that the French

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sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1990, p. 52) calls ‘habitus’. We are first and foremost ‘bundles’ of relationships and event clusters, not self-contained subjects. Ingold, paraphrasing the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, puts it especially well: ‘We are not things but dramas; we have no nature, only history; we are not, though we live’ (Ingold, 1986, p. 117, emphasis original). Every individual agency emerges as a locus of development within the context of a specific field of social practices. It is this fundamental form of ‘relational thinking’ that is inspired by a process philosophical outlook. To understand ‘individuals’ and ‘organizations’ processually is to regard them as temporary ‘assemblages of organizing’ (Cooper & Law, 1995, p. 239) that are abstracted from an underlying ‘sea of ceaseless change’ (Chia, 2003, p. 131). Entities such as individuals and organizations are theoretical reifications that refer to slower-changing configurations of social relationships resulting from the sustained regularizing of human exchanges (Chia, 2003, p. 123; Weick, 2009, p. 3). Process thinking rejects what Rescher (1996) calls the process reducibility thesis whereby processes are presumed to be secondary processes of primary things. Instead, it insists that things, social entities and generative mechanisms are no more than ‘stability waves in a sea of process’ (Rescher, 1996, p. 53). Such a process philosophical viewpoint promotes a de-centred and dispersive view of organizational reality as a fluxing concatenation of atomic event clusters that resists simple location and static representation. It emphasizes the precariousness, artificiality and constructedness of social existence and encourages a closer, more intimate ‘worm’s-eye’ view of organizational and social life. A process philosophical approach to the analysis of social life entails lying ‘flat on its belly in the middle of experience, in the very thick of its sand and gravel y never getting a peep at anything from above’ (James, 1925, p. 277) in order to savour the continuity and temporality of such experience. Such an approach has real consequences for how we understand the organization more intimately and hence the strategies we formulate and employ in dealing with them. In what follows, we elaborate on how a process philosophical viewpoint can help reorient our way of thinking about organizational life in a way that enables us to more effectively deal with it.

SUBSTANCE ONTOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Traditionally, with the exception of a small minority of organizational theorists, the field of organization theory has been underpinned by the


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premises of substance ontology that elevate ‘substance over activity, discrete individuality over interactive relatedness, descriptive fixity over productive energy, and classificatory stability over fluidity and evanescence’ (Rescher, 1996, pp. 31–35). What this means is that organizations and individual agents are taken as discrete entities, possessing unproblematic self-identities and endowed with the autonomy and freedom to act; deliberate choice and hence purposefulness and intention feature prominently in the analysis of individual and organizational behaviour. It is presumed that individuals and organizations are unified entities that can be spatially isolated and investigated as free-standing entities without taking into consideration the social contexts in which they manifest themselves. This presumption of the discreteness and solidity of social entities derives from a deeply embedded tradition of thought, which is traceable to the atomistic thinking of the ancient Greeks and is central to classical scientific thought. As Whitehead notes in Science and the Modern World: The answer, therefore, which the seventeenth century gave to the ancient question of the Ionian thinkers, ‘‘What is the world made of?’’ was that the world is a succession of instantaneous configurations of matter y. We cannot wonder that science rested content with this assumption as to the fundamental elements of nature y. This simple location of instantaneous material is y a distortion of nature due to the intellectual ‘‘spatialisation’’ of things. (1926, p. 64, our emphasis)

Whitehead goes on to show that by simple location he means that, in expressing its ‘spatio-temporal relations, it is adequate to state that it is where it is, in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time’ (1926, p. 72). Social entities such as individuals and organizations can therefore be conceived as clearly circumscribed entities locatable in space rather than as dynamic and evolving configurations of relations. Whitehead maintains that this dominant view is fallacious (what he calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) because ‘among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location’ (ibid.). Yet, despite this trenchant critique of simple location and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness associated with it, contemporary organization theory continues to construe organizations and individuals in simply located terms and to concentrate attention on their innate properties and characteristics instead of construing them in fundamentally relational terms.

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The unquestioned assumption of boundedness and simple location of individuals and organizations in organization theory leads to an overwhelming preoccupation with the formal organization, its environment, its infrastructural qualities, its people and technology, and its preoccupation with actor intentions, rational deliberations and calculative action. Such an assumption prevails, whether it is the organization taken as a whole or as an aggregate of individual actors each with their own goals, intentions and preoccupations. The notion of ‘organizational change’, for instance, is therefore explained as the result of deliberate intervention on the part of purposeful agents so that, despite the reservations of more thoughtful organizational scholars such as Rosebeth Moss Kanter, Andrew Van de Ven and others (see Chia, 1999), Kurt Lewin’s (1951) three-stage process of change involving ‘unfreeze–change–refreeze’ remains a popular model for understanding organizational change processes. As Hendry (1996, p. 624, quoted in Weick, 2009, p. 225) notes: scratch any account of creating and managing change and the idea that change is a threestage process which necessarily begins with a process of unfreezing will not be far below the surface.

This model of organizational change and many of the variants proffered do not get at the heart of change because they attempt to explain change in terms of stasis and equilibrium and the substance ontology underpinning it. What is badly needed is a theory of change that acknowledges the inherently changeful nature of organizational reality. There is little appetite to understand ‘change on its own terms and to treat stability, order, and organization as exceptional states’ (Chia, 1999, p. 210). Weick (2009, p. 225) rightly points out that if organizing is really about the ceaseless and ongoing effort to ‘reaccomplish the impermanent patterns that had been created’, then why do the extensive literature on organizational change tend to be preoccupied with creating change than with how to ‘cease change’? The answer is simply because most accounts of organizational change, like most accounts in organizational analysis, are predicated on the principles and axioms of a substance ontology that takes stasis and equilibrium as natural conditions of reality and that therefore accords primacy to substantial and stable entities over process and change. Much of mainstream organizational research remains underpinned by this atomistic thinking that treats substance, presentness and self-identity as ontologically unproblematic. As Cobb reminds us: We should note that ‘atom’ means indivisible. These atoms were understood to be lumps of matter that cannot change except in location. Nothing has any influence on what they are in themselves. Hence, they are understood to be related to each other only


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‘externally’. That means they change only in relative location, not in their own character or being. (2007, p. 569)

Things, events and situations are believed to present themselves fully to us at any moment in time so much so that their meaning and significance is fully exhausted by the immediacy of their presence; there is no hidden remainder that we need consider in our analysis. Such an intellectual orientation biases us towards the explicit, the overt and the manifest; structures, observable behaviour, explicit documents and stated goals and intentions provide the basis for organizational analysis. A means-ends thinking that focuses on intended end-states prevails. This helps explains why the unfreeze–change–refreeze model of organizational change that starts and ends with an end-state remains attractive. Such an intellectual predisposition has significant consequences for how we understand and deal with the social world in practical terms. One example that comes to mind is the current ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) programme (Roxborough, 2004) initiated by the West after the events of 9/11. The sociologist John Foran (2004) (in Hernes, 2008, pp. 1–2) maintains controversially that the global terror crisis is essentially of a US making. He argues that, after 9/11, the attempt to invade Afghanistan and to root out Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda was based on an erroneous ‘state-centric assumption’ that viewed the latter as a solid tangible target like a state or even a ‘network’ of permanent cells rather than as a much more loosely linked amorphous transnational social movement. In its initial GWOT stages, there was much talk of a ‘terrorist organization’ led by Bin Laden. Thus, when they did get into Afghanistan, they were looking for something that resembled a formal organization with established infrastructure, staff, technology and other familiar characteristics of a formal organization. There was an unwavering belief in the inevitable state sponsorship of the al-Qaeda movement. However, ‘[s]hortly after the forces arrived y the spokespersons were quick to point out that al-Qaeda could not be understood as an organization, that it resembled more a network. Worse, it resembled a loosely coupled network, with cells in many countries. Worse still, it seemed that many of its cells could not be traced through their activities because they had the capacity to lie dormant for years before springing into action again’ (Hernes, 2008, p. 1). Such a ‘rhizomic’ tendency (Chia, 1999) meant that it was virtually impossible to simply locate, identify and distinguish the terrorists from ordinary innocent individuals. By asking questions about positions (did they go to Pakistan/Afghanistan training camps?), properties (do they have characteristics of a ‘fundamental’ Muslim?) and possessions

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(do they possess ways of linking to the state-sponsored al-Qaeda?), GWOT was unable to conceive of organization without discretely isolatable structures or properties. Roxborough argues that the state-centrism implicit in GWOT created ideological blinders leading to strategic blunders: Although terrorists are, by and large, non-state actors, the global war on terror assumes – quite explicitly – that terrorists cannot be effective without state sponsors. It is far from clear that this is true. As an empirical statement, it is too bold and assertive, too unqualified. Nevertheless, a whole series of policy documents repeat the assertion that terrorists need state sponsors. (2004, p. 204)

The key point that Roxborough and Foran are making is that global terrorism is not a homogenized, simply locatable organizational phenomenon so that attacking a country such as Afghanistan and rooting out Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda would bring an end to global terror. For Roxborough and Foran, and those more sympathetic to a process philosophical understanding, the failure to comprehend al-Qaeda in much more dispersive, nonlocatable and ‘distributed’ terms is one reason why the coalition forces continue to struggle to achieve their stated aims of bringing peace to Afghanistan, the elimination of al-Qaeda and a genuine end to global terrorism. Here is one instance of how dogmatic adherence to substance ontology limits our way of thinking about social phenomena and organization. To summarize, according to substance ontology, process is invariably construed as processes of things; they are the deliberate ‘doings’ of discrete individual and organizational entities. These presuppositions place the emphasis on positions, properties and possessions of things. Movement and change are construed as a transitory phase between two otherwise identifiable and fixed states. Such a mode of theorizing is ‘founded on closed entities, such as substance, identity y causality, subject, object’, etc. (Morin, 2008, p. 34). The spatial is elevated over the temporal; self-identity is privileged over difference and external causality over immanent self-transformation. Thus, properties such as unity, identity, structure and essences are taken as proper focus of organizational analysis. These are deemed to easily lend themselves to linguistic representation and precise conceptualization.

PROCESS PHILOSOPHY AND BECOMING ONTOLOGY In contrast to substance ontology, a process philosophical approach gives primacy to an ontology of becoming (Bergson, 1911, 1998; Whitehead, 1929)


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in which processes, relations and interactions are construed as primary attributes of reality. As Whitehead puts it succinctly: the actual world is a process, and that process is the becoming of actual entities y how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is y. It’s ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming’. (1929, pp. 30–31)

Ontologically, process philosophy views process, flux and transformation as the primary ‘stuff’ of reality. It acknowledges that the immediate sensible life as we experience it is ‘a big blooming buzzing confusion’ (James, 1996, p. 50) so that everyday acts of practical coping, interpretation and sensemaking are in effect acts of ‘world-making’ and identity construction. The activities of naming and symbolic representation provide the first deliberate impulse at ordering and fixing and structuring our human life-worlds. As such, language is first and foremost a technology for organizing our experiences. Through naming and identifying bits of our sensible life, we carve out objects from the ‘aboriginal sensible muchness’ that is the reality of our immediate experience. Thus: in the sky ‘constellation’, on the earth ‘beach’, ‘sea’, ‘cliff’, ‘bushes’ y Out of time we cut ‘days’ and ‘nights’, ‘summers’ and ‘winters’. We say what each part of the sensible continuum is. (James, 1996, p. 50)

Even our individuality and identity must be understood as socially constructed in this way so that we are not naturally autonomous units but instead are relatively stabilized nodes in a dynamic and evolving network of relations. Who we are and what we make of our ‘environment’ is very much a consequence of how we respond to the demands we face on a day-to-day basis. Much of individual and organizational activity involves iterative ‘wayfinding’ rather than ‘cognitive mapping’ (Ingold, 2000). Our searching actions create ever-new pathways that radiate outwards from our concrete existential situations. We feel our way ‘through a world that is itself in motion, continually coming into being through the combined action of human and non-human agencies’ (Ingold, 2000, p. 155). In such an autopoietic dwelling mode of existential engagement (Gibson, 1979; Heidegger, 1971; Ingold, 2000; Maturana & Varela, 1980), the world emerges with its properties alongside the emergence of the perceiver. It is through these everyday practical coping actions and sensemaking interactions, prior to the existence of any form of explicit conceptualization and representation, that we collectively forge out a more coherent and liveable world. This is how social orders and organization emerge.

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Epistemologically, process philosophy recognizes formal knowledge to be a secondary intellectual product. For James, our entire intellectual life consists wholly in substituting a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which y experience originally comes (James, 1996, p. 51). We ‘chop up’ reality into discrete pieces to aid linguistic representation, and in so doing inevitably distort or leave out vital aspects of our lived experiences. Hence, ‘to understand life by concepts is to arrest its movement, cutting it up into bits as if with a scissors, and immobilizing these in our logical herbarium where, comparing them as dried specimen, we can ascertain which of them statically includes or excludes which other’ (James, 1925, p. 244). Such conceptual knowledge is ‘forever inadequate to the fullness of the reality to be known’ (James, 1996, pp. 78–79). There is a tacit dimension (Polanyi, 2009) to our understanding; an inarticulate and inarticulable aspect that is not openly acknowledged by those adhering to substance ontological premises because language can only deal with the fixed and the static. Bergson similarly recognized the futility of conceptual knowledge in fully grasping the true essence of life. For him all forms of conceptual analysis of an object of experience are ‘a translation, a development into symbols, a representation taken from successive points of view’, yet in so doing: In its eternal unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is compelled to turn, analysis multiplies endlessly the points of view in order to complete its always incomplete representation, varies interminably the symbols with the hope of perfecting the always imperfect translation. (Bergson, 2002, p. 162)

Yet, because we necessarily rely on linguistic representations and expressions to articulate our understanding, it means that what we can know explicitly is entirely dependent on the linguistic structure and system we have inherited. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the Phonecian-invented alphabet that works by breaking up the seamless flow of speech into individual sound syllables has inspired the analytical breaking up and objectification of phenomena for the purpose of analysis such that the ‘abstract and the static’ are privileged over the ‘fluxing and concrete particular’ (Carothers, 1959, p. 31). It was therefore no accident that ‘formal logic was invented in an alphabetic culture’ (Ong, 1967, p. 45), and it is this alphabetization of the Western consciousness that led to the almost obsessive preoccupation with fixing, naming, classifying and thematizing of the material and social worlds to create order and predictability in an otherwise fluxing and amorphous life-world. This pervasive method for dealing with our experiences has been understandably carried over into the discipline of organization theory.


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We can therefore see why it is that genuine process thinking takes considerable effort because it is, for the most part, unfamiliar terrain for many organizational theorists. By and large, we are not good at thinking process, movement, flux or transformation on their own terms. Our conceptual skills favour the static, the separate and the self-contained. Taxonomies, hierarchies, systems, structures and isolatable agencies represent the instinctive vocabulary of institutionalized thought in its determined subordination of dynamic complexity, inextricable relationality and precarious emergence that is so characteristic of lived experiences. Consequently, the kind of knowledge acquired through substance ontology presents a distorted and reductive view of reality, one that causes us to miss much of what life as actively lived offers. When you ‘understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth’, says the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, ‘you may still miss the radiance of the sunset’ (1926, p. 248). In what follows, we examine three key features of a process philosophical orientation.

Becoming Reality One cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal substance in a stable condition, but it scatters and again gathers; it forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs. (Heraclitus, in Kahn, 1981, p. 53)

Processual thinking belongs to a rich vein of philosophy that eschews an entitive way of thinking and that presupposes becoming to be the ultimate reality (Ansell-Pearson, 2002; Bergson, 1910, 1911, 1998, 2002; Capek, 1971; Cooper, 1976, 2005, 2007; Deleuze, 1991, 1994; Ingold, 2000; Massumi, 2002; Mullarkey, 1999a, 1999b; Papanicolaou & Gunter, 1987; Rescher, 1996). Thinking in terms of the reality of becoming creates an inevitable tension with the ordering impulses of language that in its very structure is oriented towards the representation of static states; repetition and sameness rather than novelty and creativity are privileged. Whilst language and action arrest and organize this flow (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Weick et al., 2005), the creative flow of reality is hidden from our everyday action-oriented experience. As Heraclitus (in Geldard, 2000, p. 157) states, ‘nature prefers to hide’. A genuine processual form of thinking, therefore, must always wrestle with language in order to creatively extend its scope of expression. It is a question of extending it and making it ‘more supple, and adapt(ing) it to a duration in which evolution is creative’ (Bergson, 2002, p. 26).

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Why should we concern ourselves with the reality of becoming? One crucial reason is that process as an ontological category is far more radical than we are often inclined to presuppose. In organization theory the term ‘process’ is generally employed in the context of answering the following question – how do things and events unfold over time? (Feldman, 2000; Ford & Ford, 1994; Pettigrew, 1992; Van de Ven & Poole, 1995, 2005). These quasi-processual approaches focus on how things evolve over time and concern themselves with life cycles, teleological, dialectical and evolutionary processes (Van de Ven & Poole, 1995), and how things can change radically without anything radical happening at any one point in time (Dunbar & Garud, 2009; Plowman et al., 2007). Whilst these are notable efforts to understand how events and things ‘unfold over time’, they fall shy of an ‘even more radically processoriented approach to organizational change’ (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002, p. 569). Tsoukas and Chia (2002, p. 580) point to ‘microscopic change’: that occurs naturally, incrementally, and inexorably through ‘creep,’ ‘slippage,’ and ‘drift’ as well as natural ‘spread.’ It is subtle, agglomerative, often subterranean, heterogeneous, and often surprising.

Change, in this radical sense, is not a mechanism that works on existing orders and things. It is not the realization (through human agency or natural selection) of the possible choices, forms and realities that ensue. A genuine process-oriented approach insists that reality is change, that what is possible is only thinkable because of the reality of change. We can only imagine what is possible because change always already is. We often confuse the indetermination of process with competing possible worlds. By introducing the notion of indetermination, a processual approach asks us to see change, not as mechanism or law or algorithm of reality, but as reality itself, and to place every other mechanism, including our habitual ways of thinking, within this reality. The emphasis is not so much on reality that is becoming, but becoming that is real.

Difference Over Identity In An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method, Cohen and Nagel (1939) provide two formulations of the laws of thought: propositional and ontological. The propositional formulation states that ‘the principle of identity asserts that: if any proposition is true, it is true. The principle of contradiction asserts that: no proposition can be both true and false. The principle of excluded middle states that: any proposition must be either true or


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false’ (Cohen & Nagel, 1939, pp. 73–74). The ontological formulation for the principle of identity states that ‘if anything is A it is A’, for the principle of contradiction ‘nothing can be both A and not A’ and for the principle of excluded middle ‘anything must be either A or not A’ (Cohen & Nagel, 1939, p. 73). This is an age-old argument about identity versus difference. Cohen and Nagel’s principle of identity and contradiction is a restatement of Plato’s concerns in the Republic, where Socrates, in trying to establish the point that the soul is composed of distinct parts, suggests that we should ‘approach the problem whether these elements are distinct or identical in this way. It is clear that the same thing cannot act in two opposite ways or be in two opposite states at the same time, with respect to the same part of itself, and in relation to the same object’ (Plato, 1941, p. 129). Socrates argues that for something to be a separate determinate something, it must exclude contradictions or opposites. If such contradictions are found, we can conclude that more than one thing is present. In contrast, Heraclitus challenges the assumption of non-contradiction in identity. For Heraclitus, becoming, in the form of qualitative change, is the most essential character of the world. ‘Cold warms up, warm cools off, moist parches, dry dampens’ (Heraclitus, in Kahn, 1981, p. 53). It is impossible to catch qualities or kinds of things without their passage. Heraclitus concludes that no thing is just what it is at any given moment; on the contrary, it is a result of the striving of ‘opposite tensions’. What a thing is, as an individual entity, then, is the result of difference and tension. If these tensions are not present, the individual entity does not exist. The very existence of separate, individual things is thus dependent on the internal strife within them. Noncontradiction, far from being the precondition for identity, is inimical to it. To think processually, therefore, is to think opposing tendencies because the subject–object of thought, the world, is itself always already becoming. It is important to emphasize that Heraclitus is not denying identity. For him identity is a consequence of the tension-filled co-existence of opposites; identity is the effect difference. To think in genuinely processual terms is to think in terms of difference in kind and their union. This difference and union of tendencies is neatly summarized in Bergson’s (2002, p. 225) analysis of white light (also see Deleuze, 1999, p. 54; Borradori, 2001, pp. 8–9). White light is an admixture of all the different primary colours. As redness, blueness, etc., combine, they become the universal white. White is not a general concept that unites the primary colours, but it is the union that produces whiteness. Jullien (2004) similarly analyses taste as an admixture of sweet, sour, salty

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and bitter. ‘Blandness’, in contrast to being without taste, is ‘flavour-full’, universal and holds all the tendencies of taste in its union. It is ‘that phase when different flavors no longer stand in opposition to each other but, rather, abide within plenitude’ (Jullien, 2004, p. 24). Processual thinking reminds us to consider the opposing tendency jointly at work in the becoming of things. Tendencies are ‘not only primary in relation to its product, but in relation to the causes of this product in time, causes always being obtained retroactively starting from the product itself: a thing in itself and in its true nature is the expression of a tendency before being the effect of a cause’ (Deleuze, 1999, p. 45). Thinking in Time If I draw my finger across a sheet of paper without looking at it, the motion I perform is, perceived from within, a continuity of consciousness, something of my own flow, in a word, duration. If I now open my eyes, I see that my finger is tracing on the sheet of paper a line that is preserved, where all is juxtaposition and no longer succession; this is the unfolded, which is the record of the result of motion, and which will be its symbol as well. (Bergson, 1965, p. 208)

To think in terms of qualitative difference is to avoid the illusion of time as a spatial quantity. The shift from thinking quality to quantity results from a habit of thought that is often unnoticed. As Bergson’s quote illustrates, time becomes line as it lies unfolded in front of us on a piece of paper. Language in general always translates movement into spatial trajectory in order to make use of it. The tendency towards utility and action means that we ‘have no more concern with the interior organization of movement than a workman has with the molecular structure of his tools’ (Bergson, 1911, p. 251). By turning temporality into a line of trajectory, ‘common sense merely expresses the two facts which alone are of importance in practical life: first, that every movement describes a space; second, that at every point of this space the moving body might stop’ (ibid., p. 251, emphasis original). The spatialization of time is best illustrated by Bergson’s (1911) exposition of Zeno’s paradoxes. Zeno of Elea (born around 490 BC) is credited with posing four paradoxes of motion: the dichotomy, Achilles and the tortoise, the arrow, and the stadium. The paradox of the Arrow, to expand on one of them, states that an arrow can only be in one place at any one point in time. At every moment in time the arrow is motionless, for it cannot occupy more space than its own fixed length. It cannot at once occupy two successive positions mapped by two distinct points in time because this would suggest the capability of extension. Hence, if we follow


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this to its logical conclusion, the arrow never moves! Bergson uses the paradox to demonstrate how time is converted to space and how easy it is to replace time with line and then divide the line into infinite points. ‘The assimilation of time into space makes us think that the whole is given, even if only in principle, even if only in the eyes of God. Time is only there now as a screen that hides the eternal from us, or that shows us successively what a God or a super-human intelligence would see in a single glance. Now this illusion is inevitable as soon as we spatialize time’ (Deleuze, 1991, p. 104). If one thinks in time, on the other hand, the arrow is in process, ‘absorbed in occupying its field of potential’ (Massumi, 2002, p. 7). When the arrow fulfils its potential by coming to stop at its target, it will have undergone a qualitative change. It is nominally the same arrow, but the essence of the arrow is in its changing and becoming the successfully shot arrow. If it misses, one can certainly say it might have hit and give reasons for missing the target. But this makes it a very different arrow. Logically the arrow can stop anywhere in flight. The ability to rewind, fast forward, pause and digitally manipulate can give the impression that the temporal sequence is alterable. But where did the arrow actually stop? The answer to this leads to a qualitative difference – celebration or disappointment. The challenge of the processual approach is to think in time, where time is not the counterfeit movement from point A to B in space (Bergson, 1910, pp. 113–115; Chia, 1998a, pp. 352–354), represented by t0, t1, t2 and so on. When we translate time in terms of space, we replace flight with trajectory, process with end-states and becoming with being. Movement is seen as a series of discontinuities. To think processually is to recover the continuities and to view the process of transformation as a whole indivisible movement. For process thinkers, ‘Time is invention or it is nothing at all’ (Bergson, 1998, p. 341). Time is an efficacious force. To think in terms of time is to think counter to our accepted way of understanding past, present and future. We are used to thinking about the past as the present that no longer exists. The present is; the past was. The absence of the past means that we think it does not now exist. The past is not related to the present. However, for process thinkers, the past and present interact. What we experience as pure presence is ‘the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future’ (Bergson, 1911, p. 194, emphasis original). Hence, to think in time is to take the problem of the existence of the past in the present seriously; the past is immanent in the present. The past is not the present that once was, but is inextricably implicated in the present; its absence constitutes a presence in the present. So, far from being a mere dimension of time, the past ‘is the synthesis of all time of which the present and the future are only dimensions. We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists,

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it does not exist, it insists, it consists, it is’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 80). What differentiates past from the present is action and movement. The present is ‘that which is acting’ (Bergson, 1911, p. 74) as it transmits external movement through the body. The past is ‘that which acts no longer’ (ibid.). Process philosophy orients us to a different understanding of time as an immanent unfolding force that carries the past into the present and the future rather than a ‘container’ or ‘axis’ in which events are deemed to ‘unfold over time’. This understanding is particularly important in our analysis and understanding of individual, social and organizational phenomena.

IMPLICATIONS: A PROCESSUAL UNDERSTANDING OF COLLECTIVE SENSEMAKING, ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP [T]he problem with the dominant models y is not that they are too abstract to grasp the concreteness of the real. The problem is that they are not abstract enough to grasp the real incorporeality of the concrete y A thing is when it isn’t doing. (Massumi, 2002, pp. 5–6)

‘A thing is when it isn’t doing’ implies that ‘things’ refer only to the inert and lifeless. Hence, thinking in terms of ‘things’ render them incapable of becoming. Real process, on the other hand, is indivisible and irreversible; past, present and future implicate each other. The challenge posed by process philosophical thinking is to reverse our conventional ways of understanding social phenomena as solid entities and to chart their emergence and cominginto-existence. To think genuinely processually is to explain how process leads to end-states, how becoming constitutes being, how difference leads to identity and how the past is implicated in the present. Understanding organization and human agency in processual terms has profound implications for a whole host of research themes. We concentrate on three exemplars of process thinking in organization theory in order to illustrate how it matters. We demonstrate how the three examples draw inspiration from process thinking and enrich our understanding of organizational phenomena.

Collective Action: We Dwell in Them You need to restore the past to its own present with all its incoherence, complications, and ‘might-have-beens.’ Capturing more of the present moment is important to offset our tendency to rely too heavily on the specious clarity of rolling 20/20 hindsight. (Weick, 2007, p. 17, quoted in Quinn & Worline, 2008, p. 498)


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Our first exemplar of process thinking is Quinn and Worline’s (QW’s) (2008) analysis of ‘courageous collective action’ aboard the ill-fated United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11/2001. QW’s analysis is a deeply moving account of human organization that illustrates how events unfold in real time and challenge our taken-for-granted notions of sense, meaning and action. Although QW draw their inspiration from Weick’s (1993) classic study of the Mann Gulch disaster, they extend our understanding of organization by incorporating sensemaking, resourcing (Feldman, 2004) and communication (Cooren, 2000; Quinn & Dutton, 2005). Their aim is to add richness to OT ‘because it functions in ways that enlarge our understanding of the human condition and y is important in restraining our hubris by ‘‘point[ing] up fear’’ and ‘‘thrust[ing] death in our face’’ ’ (ibid., p. 510). The richness that QW’s analysis surfaces leads to a realization that meaning, movement and emotions are inextricably linked. A case of extreme duress exemplified by the events about Flight 93 is meaning-full, moves us into thinking anew about the human conditions and scratches the sterile analytical language to create emotional resonance. Whilst we are unable to do full justice to the people who lost their lives on Flight 93, nor to QW’s analysis of the conversations and accounts of friends and relatives, we hope to indicate the underlying processual assumptions that guide their thinking and the marked difference in process-inspired accounts of organization. At the outset, QW state that their aim is ‘to restore some of the uncertainty that was present on that day’ (ibid., p. 498). Rather than fix the events that occurred through stylized facts, they emphasize the unknowability and unpredictability of how things might have turned out. QW demonstrate that the collective that acted was not given in advance and could have constituted itself differently. They emphasize that ‘when people act as if there is a collective, they create the collective that they are enacting’ (ibid., p. 509). The people on the flight were strangers to each other before the hijack happened and transformed themselves into a collective with a shared narrative and identity that enabled them to act. The process of defining a collective (‘We have to do something!’), building ‘a fragile trust’ by voting on confronting the hijackers and ‘improvising their collective action in real time’ in the execution of the counter-attack vividly illustrates the oftentimes spontaneous emergence and impermanence of collective organization. QW also demonstrate that one does not have to predefine individual action in terms of the property of the person. The courage demonstrated by the people on board the flight is not attributable to individuals; ‘courage inheres in a pattern of actions rather than in dispositions or emotions that people feel’ (ibid., p. 498). QW privilege ‘event clusters’ and show how

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‘structure and action are recursively implicated in human events’ (ibid., p. 501). Whilst each individual’s personal narrative is called upon by the event, the narrative is always relational and changing. What may appear as a mundane activity such as ‘simply connecting’ plays an important part in reconstructing the individual: For example, Mark Bingham called his mother, Alice Hoglan. He told her what was happening on the airplane and asked her, ‘‘Do you believe me? It’s true.’’ Alice replied, ‘‘I believe you,’’ and then the phone went dead. (QW, 2008, p. 505)

QW illustrate how the conversation between Mark Bingham and his mother Alice Hoglan, although brief and fleeting, is infused with meaning. By not predefining notions such as ‘collective’ and ‘individual’, QW demonstrate their precarious emergence and transformation in practically coping with the situation at hand. They develop a ‘practice-based view of resource mobilization [which] encourages researchers to see a wide range of resources – not simply material wealth or social connections, but also things like identity, emotion, narrative, and trust – as being created in practice [and] emphasizes the practices that people use to do things every day as potentially generative’ (ibid., p. 513). QW’s analysis of the impermanent and emergent pattern of collective courageous action reverses our everyday distinction between building and dwelling (Heidegger, 1971; Chia & Holt, 2006, 2009). Conventionally, we might consider building to precede dwelling since houses, for instance, are first built before they are dwelt in. Heidegger, however, undertakes an exhaustive exercise in etymology and comes to the surprising conclusion that the reverse is true. ‘We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell y Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build’ (Heidegger, 1971, p. 148, emphasis original). In other words, as QW illustrate, it is only through the physical experience of actual living in and coping with the exigencies of a multitude of situations – of being-in-the-world – that we subsequently develop the capacity for distancing, reflection, linguistic articulation, cognitive representation and conscious thought. Building implies intellectual distancing and forethought but this is only possible because we have always already experienced the pragmatics of dwelling in the variety of circumstances we found ourselves in the past. Dwelling is a more primary mode of engagement with the world, one that precedes building and one that is exemplified by analysis of extreme events such as those that unfolded on Flight 93. It is only by taking the individual-in-its-environment continually generating forms that eventually become crystallizations of human purposive activities as our starting point of analysis that we can then begin to fully


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appreciate what practical coping, sensemaking, being resourceful and courageous are really all about. Human purposive actions that take place on an everyday basis are thus to be construed not in terms of navigation but in terms of wayfinding (Ingold, 2000; Chia & Holt, 2009) where we can only ‘know as we go’ and not in advance of our existential encounter. Thinking in terms of the primacy of dwelling is central to a genuinely processual understanding of collective action in all spheres of organizational life. Before we reflect and theorize, we are firstly and foremost practically coping dwellers totally immersed in our day-to-day-activities and oftentimes reacting unthinkingly to the exigencies of the circumstances we find ourselves in. The passengers aboard Flight 93 would never have considered themselves as taking ‘heroic’ action; they simply responded to the urgencies of the desperate situation they found themselves in and in so doing inscribed themselves indelibly into the pages of history.

Organizational Identity as Generalized Outsourcing [K]nowledge is fundamentally indeterminate and inheres in the specific activities that individuals engage in to deal with their day-to-day interactions with the world. (Nag, Corley, & Gioia, 2007, p. 823)

Our second exemplar of process thinking is Nag et al.’s (NCG’s) (2007) analysis of organizational identity, knowledge and practice in which they move away from the tendency to highlight success stories and instead focus on analysing one high-tech organization’s failed attempt at transformation in order to ‘understand deeper theoretical issues’ (ibid., p. 823). Whilst not as evocative and provocative as the Flight 93 illustration, NCG also aim to foreground process by coining the term ‘knowledge grafting’ rather than the dominant substance-based approaches to knowledge. Their case examines TekMar’s (a pseudonym) journey from being a dedicated research laboratory of a large American electronics firm in the 1940s to an independent firm in the early 1990s. They draw on pragmatism (Dewey, 1938; Dewey & Bentley, 1949; James, 1963/1910) and social practice theorists (Brown & Duguid, 2001; Cook & Brown, 1999; Pentland, 1992; Orlikowski, 2002) to recapture and reassert the significance of the often missed ongoing and everyday engagement with the world. By illustrating ‘local pockets of adaptation but no organization-level change’ (ibid., p. 838), they point to the significant yet mundane events that play an important role in strategic transformation. As with our use of QW’s analysis, our aim is not to analyse the NCG’s case study, but point to the processual underpinning of their theorizing.

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NCG’s analysis demonstrates that knowledge is not ‘a free-standing entity’ but relationally constituted. This assertion resonates with Nonaka, Toyama, and Hirata’s (2008) insistence that knowledge is a ‘processrelational’ phenomenon that emerges from experience and that is ‘created and used in relation with the knowledge of other human beings who exist in relation with others’ (Nonaka et al., 2008, p. 10). In contrast to the dominant literature on knowledge ‘wherein the focus is on the objective and measurable characteristics of the knowledge being transferred’ (NCG, 2007, p. 823), NCG argue that ‘focusing on the stocks and flows of knowledge misses the manner in which knowledge use and value emerge from the ongoing and situated actions of organizational members as they engage in the world’ (ibid., p. 824, our emphasis). If the focus was on outcomes before process, as is the case with majority studies on strategic transformation, change would be identified first and retrospectively the question – what changed? – would be asked. However, NCG privilege the tendency towards change or inertia over the outcome. By examining the knowledge-in-use, they illustrate how the informal knowledge-use practices are effected by changes, and how they provide insights into the in doing deterrent to change that would not be addressed by looking at the knowledge content. As NCG illustrate using a quote from one of the employees: What happened is, while the geeks [scientists] were developing a fairly sophisticated, unconventional skill achieving something, the system didn’t recognize what they were doing. y In fact, the geeks have worked out an approach to do this – they found a backdoor way to satisfy the demands of the market that was consistent with their geek way of doing things. (2007, p. 837)

NCG also demonstrate that organizational identity is processual. They argue that there is a ‘need to transcend purely cognitive views by accounting for identity’s relationship with the collective practices that characterize how organization members conduct their daily work’ (ibid., p. 824). The organizational identity of TekMar as ‘We are a technology organization!’ (ibid., p. 833) was intrinsically linked to the way people went about their daily work. The attempts to change the organizational identity to incorporate market pressures preserved as well as extended current practices. As the following quote from NCG’s data illustrates: I got together with a fellow here, Bob Johnson [a pseudonym], and I said Bob you know we need to do something different. And at that time I had a little project with a leading pharmaceutical company and I said, ‘‘Why don’t we focus on this whole biomedical area. We’re not doing anything in it. Maybe pieces here and there, but that would be interesting.’’ So we used to sit in my room and make phone calls to presidents of pharmaceutical companies. We would get invited to Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lily, and we


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would go to these places and basically say, ‘‘We’re TekMar. We’re smart technologists.’’ We knew a lot about how to think differently. We tried to apply it to their industry. And as we were doing that we were actually kind of successful. (2007, p. 837)

The quote goes on to illustrate how the two scientists solved a specific problem for a pharmaceutical company. As NCG emphasize, the main issue here is not one of change or inertia in the organizational identity but the interpenetration with daily work. The overarching label of ‘We are a technology organization!’ as a fixed outcome is always impermanent and continually put to use in daily practice in new and emergent ways. The central conclusion reached by NCG is that ‘identity, knowledge, knowledge-use practices, and power relations – become recursively interlinked as the members of an organization come to understand how proposed changes will affect their day-to-day lives’ (ibid., p. 840) and the need ‘to understand the ‘‘deep processes’’ attending organizational change’ (ibid., p. 844). Consistent with processual thinking, NCG argue that: Even though labels might remain the same (Fiol, 2002), the adaptation of practices consistent with those labels can nonetheless facilitate changes in their meanings (Gioia, Schultz, & Corley, 2000), thus providing a way to ‘‘remain the same while changing’’ (cf. Gagliardi, 1986). (NCG, 2007, p. 843)

NCG’s analysis of TekMar reverses our understanding of the abstracted permanence of knowledge and organizational identity. Rather than view knowledge in terms of its content, they demonstrate the importance of, in our terms, dwelling that is prior to building. The knowledge-in-use practices play an important role in the process of change, one that would be missed in analysis of the structures and procedures. Rather than view identity atemporally or chronologically, NCG focus on the ‘protensive or future-oriented dimension of praxis as the living through of embodied potentialities, and as the anticipatory aspects inherent within subject formation’ (McNay, 2000, pp. 4–5) that are revealed in the way the scientists practically cope with the new initiatives. They capture the ambivalence inherent in constructing organizational and individual identity by focusing on the everyday practices. They demonstrate ‘identity work’ that ‘refers to people being engaged in forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the constructions that are productive of a sense of coherence and distinctiveness’ (Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003, p. 1165). In this sense, organizational identity, knowledge and practices are outcomes of a movement of ‘generalized outsourcing’ (Thrift, 2006), one that precedes technological and human accomplishments and that proceeds beyond the people, knowledge and practices that are gathered in its movement.

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The Hesitant Entrepreneur [N]obody thrives better on acknowledging and appropriating contingency than the effectual entrepreneur. It is in this sense that effectual entrepreneurs are to a socioeconomic system what a strong poet is to transformative politics and culture. The effectual entrepreneur acknowledges and appropriates contingency not by redescribing reality in words but by remaking it into new products and services that embody new ways of living and being and meaning for herself and her stakeholders. (Sarasvathy, 2008, p. 189)

Our final exemplar of process thinking is on the periphery of OT. In the spirit of cross-fertilization of ideas in neighbouring disciplines, we show how the literature on effectuation in entrepreneurship (Sarasvathy, 2008) challenges assumptions that underpin causal logic by drawing on a tentative and impermanent logic for action and the importance of ‘hesitancy, indecisiveness and procrastination’ (McMullen & Shepherd, 2006, p. 136). Effectuation focuses on how entrepreneurs ‘get going’, ‘move things forward’ and ‘endure’ in their efforts to create something that speaks to a genuinely processual theme. The central premise of effectuation draws on three key processual ideas: firstly, the significance of uncertainty in which the future is not only unpredictable ‘but unknowable even in principle’ (Sarasvathy, 2008, p. 26); secondly, James March’s notion of goal ambiguity where ‘although goals at the highest levels might be clear, their operationalizations at lower levels may be highly ambiguous y an actor may experience high levels of goal ambiguity even in the face of a clear vision of what he or she wants down the road’ (ibid., p. 113); thirdly, Weick’s enactment where ‘[r]eality as perceived by the members becomes more the source of selection within the organization than does reality as perceived by some omniscient, less involved observer’ (Sarasvathy, 2008, p. 70). These three ideas demonstrate the dwelling mode that is distorted by extreme events such as the Flight 93 hijack and by change initiatives such as the transformation of TekMar. For entrepreneurs, as Sarasvathy argues, the mode of dwelling is about living with the uncertainty, ambiguity and enacted world. Sarasvathy draws on Pierre Omidyar’s (founder of eBay) example to illustrate the point: Almost every industry analyst and business reporter I talk to observes that eBay’s strength is that its system is self-sustaining – able to adapt to user needs, without any heavy intervention from a central authority of some sort. So people often say to me – ‘when you built the system, you must have known that making it self-sustainable was the only way eBay could grow to serve 40 million users a day’. Well y nope. I made the system self-sustaining for one reason: Back when I launched eBay on Labor Day 1995, eBay wasn’t my business – it was my hobby. I had to build a


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system that was self-sustaining y Because I had a real job to go to every morning. I was working as a software engineer from 10 to 7, and I wanted to have a life on the weekends. So I built a system that could keep working – catching complaints and capturing feedback – even when Pam and I were out mountain-biking, and the only one home was our cat. (Omidyar, 2002, quoted in Sarasvathy, 2008, p. 190)

The lack of certainties, fixities and given-ness of the world does not mean a total loss of orientation or inability to act. On the contrary, all human action is confronted with the existence of uncertainty, goal ambiguity and enactment. ‘In an effectual logic, action is primitive, action is necessary for ideas to matter and words to acquire meaning; and action transforms matter and experience into useful artifacts’ (Sarasvathy, 2008, p. 190). The logic is not irrational or passionate but the link between logic and passion is one of movement towards doing, and at the same time towards thinking. Effectual logic enables the actor to ‘explore more opportunities’ and take ‘more shots at the jackpot’ (Dew, Read, Sarasvathy, & Wiltbank, 2009). The cumulative effect of an incessant drive to find different uses with others and mitigating against the loss from failures are not all actualized, but endure in the actions of the entrepreneur as s/he moves in reaction to a world that is also moving. A great deal of hesitation, doubt and procrastination goes into dreaming, contemplating and experiencing failure. ‘[U]ncertainty in the context of action acts as a sense of doubt that (1) produces hesitancy by interrupting routine action (Dewey, 1933), (2) promotes indecision by perpetuating continued competition among alternatives (Goldman, 1986), and (3) encourages procrastination by making prospective options less appealing (Yates & Stone, 1992)’ (McMullen & Shepherd, 2006, p. 135). Whereas failure is the outcome of a process of failing to respond appropriately to perception, the key to understanding effectuation is how the experience accumulated through the process of responding gnaws at the future in response to the world-at-hand. By focusing on the outcomes at t1, t2 and t3, as conventional entrepreneurship studies do, one can only see the change in state from idea to successfully starting a venture to growing the business to exit. Effectuation in contrast highlights the significance of the accumulated effort of moving from each of the time points that offers deeper processual insights into entrepreneurship. Effectuation illustrates that we do not act when we know; we act, and then we know. Human action is about ‘wayfinding’ rather than navigating, and ‘knowing as you go’ rather than ‘know before you go’ (Chia & Holt, 2009; Ingold, 2000). By disassociating control from prediction, effectuation demonstrates how entrepreneurs prefer to control their future and make their future with others. In our terminology, effectual logic demonstrates the entrepreneurial worldview is always becoming. Positional thinking that aims

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to plan, forecast, calculate and fix the future outcomes before acting does not engage with the deep processual issues underpinning entrepreneurship. A processual approach reveals the significance of doubt, hesitation and wayfinding in understanding human action.

CONCLUSIONS The double movement of positive and negative, something and nothing, presence and absence, up and down, uncovering and concealing, truth and oblivion, articulate a processual approach. (Nayak, 2008, p. 184)

The main problem with management theories that we wish to address is not just that they are unable to grasp the reality of process, but also that they are not abstract enough to grasp the processes of the real. The challenge of processual thinking is that ‘questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and to their union, should be put in terms of time rather than space’ (Bergson, 1911, p. 77). Rather than capture, represent and functionally deploy the complexities of the real in terms of our knowledge, a processual approach aims to engage with creativity and open our imagination to ‘think beyond’ how things are and to point towards new connections and new lines of flight. Process thinking is directed towards understanding openness (Cooper, 1976) and becoming that characterizes living systems as their life unfolds. To think about living is to think about the intrinsic connection between movement and sensation: The slightest, most literal displacement convokes a qualitative difference, because as directly as it conducts itself it beckons a feeling, and feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably. Qualitative difference: the issue, immediately, is change. Felt and unforeseen. (Massumi, 2002, p. 1)

It follows the ups and downs (movement and sensation) rather than up and down (positional). Process philosophy has a distinct contribution to make to OT. It needs to function between the universal and particular and the general and individual, through that which articulates their differences in kind and their union. The vocabulary of past and present, and virtual and actual aims to recover the double and divergent movement of process. In this sense, process is synonymous with managing and organizing. Rather than view management and organization as the task of separating and analysing along predefined functional and conceptual lines, it aims to bring in more and more depth to things. Separate and join rather than separate and analyse. ‘It is an attuned


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empiricism that does not reduce its components and parts but expands them to connect’ (Grosz, 2005, p. 8). In process we find the ‘secret depth or complication’ (ibid., p. 9) that acts as the primary force. Process is not an exceptional or special activity that individuals and organizations undertake, as one might be tempted to think from the perspective of substance ontology. To think processually is to think process and substance, continuity and discontinuity, separate and connect, known and unknown, infinite and finite, not yet and no longer, and a part of and apart from, whose ‘pro- signifies a ceaseless moving forward and approaching and whose -cess signifies an equally ceaseless moving away and withdrawing’ (Cooper, 2007, p. 1549).

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Rescher, N. (1996). Process metaphysics. New York: SUNY Press. Roxborough, I. (2004). Iraq, Afghanistan, the global war on terrorism, and the Owl of Minerva. Political Power and Social Theory, 16, 185–211. Sarasvathy, S. D. (2008). Effectuation: Elements of entrepreneurial expertise. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Sveningsson, S., & Alvesson, M. (2003). Managing managerial identities: Organizational fragmentation, discourse and identity struggle. Human Relations, 56, 1163–1193. Thrift, N. (2006). Re-inventing invention: New tendencies in capitalist commodification. Economy and Society, 35, 279–306. Tsoukas, H. (2003). New times, fresh challenges: Reflections on the past and the future of organization theory. In: H. Tsoukas & C. Knudsen (Eds), The Oxford handbook of organization theory: Meta-theoretical perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsoukas, H., & Chia, R. (2002). On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13, 567–582. Van De Ven, A. H., & Poole, M. S. (1995). Explaining development and change in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 20, 510–540. Van De Ven, A. H. V., & Poole, M. S. (2005). Alternative approaches for studying organizational change. Organization Studies, 26, 1377–1404. Weick, K. E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations – The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 628–652. Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. London: Sage. Weick, K. E. (2007). The generative properties of richness. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 14–19. Weick, K. E. (2009). Making sense of organization: The impermanent organization. New York: Wiley. Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the process of sensemaking. Organization Science, 16, 409–421. Whitehead, A. N. (1926). Science and the modern world. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology. New York: Free Press. Yates, J. F., & Stone, E. R. (1992). The risk construct. In: J. F. Yates (Ed.), Risk-taking behavior. New York: Wiley.

Ajit Nayak is a senior lecturer in Strategy at the University of Exeter Business School, UK. His research interests are relational and processual approaches to organization and management. Specifically, he is working on processual thinking and strategy emergence, entrepreneurship and identity. He is also researching the structures and practices of Indian corporate elites. Ajit has previously published in Organization Studies, Organization, Long Range Planning and Marketing Theory. Robert Chia is professor of management at the University of Strathclyde Business School and Emeritus Professor of Management, University of Aberdeen. He received his PhD in organization studies from Lancaster University and publishes regularly in the leading international journals in organization and management studies. He is the author/editor of four books


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and a significant number of international journal articles as well as book chapters in a variety of management sub-fields. His latest book with Robin Holt, published by Cambridge University Press in October 2009, is entitled Strategy without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action. His research interests revolve around the issues of strategic leadership and foresight, complexity and creative thinking, and the impact of contrasting East–West metaphysical mindsets on executive decision making.

THEORY AS THERAPY: WITTGENSTEINIAN REMINDERS FOR REFLECTIVE THEORIZING IN ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT THEORY$ John Shotter and Haridimos Tsoukas ABSTRACT In this chapter, drawing primarily on Wittgenstein, we argue that a representationalist view of theory in an applied or practical science such as organization and management theory (OMT) is unrealistic and misleading, since it fails to acknowledge theory’s ineradicable dependence on the dynamics of the life-world within which it has its ‘currency’. We explore some of the difficulties raised by the use of representational theorizing in OMT, and mainly explore the nature of a more reflective form of theorizing. Reflective theory, we argue, invites practitioners to attend to the grammar of their actions, namely to the rules and meanings that actors draw upon in their participation in social practices. In this view, the role of $

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at The Third Organization Studies Summer Workshop: ‘Organization Studies as Applied Science: The Generation and Use of Academic Knowledge about Organizations’, 7–9 June 2007, Crete, Greece.


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theory resembles the role Wittgenstein ascribed to philosophy: it is theoryas-therapy. The latter seeks to make action more perspicuous by providing the conceptual means to practitioners to engage in re-articulating, not only their taken-for-granted assumptions and models but also their modes of orientation and their ways of relating themselves to the situations in which they must work. Reflective theory works to draw their attention to aspects of people’s interactions in organizations not usually noticed, to bring to awareness unconscious habits, confusions, prejudices and pictures that hold practitioners captive, and, furthermore, to point out that other continuations of them than those routinely followed are possible. This view of theory – as perceptually reorienting rather than as cognitively explaining – is illustrated by looking at the Karl Weick’s sensemaking theory. Keywords: theory; Wittgenstein; epistemology; practice; sensemaking.

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning. (Wittgenstein, 1980a, p. 16) King Lear: O, ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light; yet you see how this world goes. Gloucester: I see it feelingly. (King Lear, Act 4, scene VI)

What is the status of theoretical knowledge in an applied science such as organization and management theory (OMT)? Following a Cartesian (and ultimately Platonic) line of thinking, it has often been suggested that theoretical knowledge is a superior form of knowledge, since it frees individuals from the notorious Cartesian ‘demon’, namely the misleading knowledge provided by the senses. The realm of theoria is pure and indisputable, so it is said, whereas the realm of practice is messy and uncertain. The superiority of theoretical reason has been echoed in OMT too. For example, in his best-selling Organization Theory, Robins (1990, pp. 8–9) provides the following answer to the question ‘why study organization theory?’ (very similar remarks are repeated in his twin textbook Organizational Behavior; see Robbins, 2005, pp. 10–11): At a more sophisticated level, you may want to replace your intuitive theories of organization with ones that have been derived scientifically and systematically. [y] The issue is not whether you should use theories for dealing with organizations – reality tells us that we use such theories every day. Doesn’t it make sense to use theories that have undergone systematic study? [y] The objective is to replace intuition or that ‘‘gut

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feeling’’ one has as to ‘‘why organizations are designed as they are’’ or ‘‘what works best when’’ with scientifically-based theories.

Echoes of this view are still to be found in mainstream OMT (Lawler et al., 1999; McKelvey, 1997; Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006; Vermeulen, 2007). Theory about organizations, it is argued or implied, should replace our intuitive understanding of organizations. Practitioners’ taken-for-granted assumptions are, ultimately, unreliable and should be expunged. Theory should replace lay knowledge (cf. Bruner, 1990). We call such theory representational theory, since its main objective is to represent the phenomenon of interest as accurately as possible in order to ascertain regularities, which can be submitted to scientific testing (Rorty, 1979; Thrift, 2007; Tsoukas, 1998). More specifically, representational theories are based on three commitments: firstly, the world has certain pre-given features; secondly, a cognitive system (be it lay or scientific) represents the key features of the world – thinking is a primarily representational activity in which the mind represents the world ‘outside’ as well as depicts ends desired ‘within’ the individual; and thirdly, the cognitive system acts on the basis of those representations (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991, p. 135). The cognitive system of science is able to generate valid knowledge – Plato’s ‘justified true beliefs’ – on the basis of systematic observations, which lead scientists to generate empirically testable hypotheses. In this chapter, drawing primarily on Wittgenstein, we will argue that a representationalist view of theory in an applied or practical science, as that outlined by Robbins (1990, 2005), is unrealistic and misleading. It fails to acknowledge theory’s ineradicable dependence on the dynamics of the lifeworld within which it has its ‘currency’. In other words, the attempt to replace ‘gut feeling’ and ‘intuition’ by objective theory not only ignores the world of taken-for-granted assumptions and lay knowledge but, more importantly, also ignores the dialogical structure of the ceaseless flow of spontaneously occurring bodily responses and reactions continually occurring between us in the background to all that we do – a stranded, self-intertwining flow of activity with its own distinctive characteristics in which we have been trained to participate when young by those around us. It is our participation within this structured flow that gives the theoretical formulations we express within it their sense and purchase on our affairs. In short, to try to replace our ‘feelings’ by theoretical formulations is to ignore our ways of being in the world, ways we must share with the others around us, ways that are of crucial importance to us in making sense of such formulations.

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As an alternative to the representational form of theory, we will outline a more reflective form of theory. Reflective theory, as we see it, invites practitioners to attend to the grammar of their actions, namely to the rules and meanings that actors draw upon in their participation in social practices (Harre´, 2004, p. 1450; Wittgenstein, 1953). In this view, the role of theory would resemble the role Wittgenstein ascribed to philosophy: it is theory-astherapy. It seeks to make action more perspicuous by providing the conceptual means to practitioners to engage in re-articulating not only their taken-for-granted assumptions and models but also their modes of orientation and their ways of relating themselves to the situations in which they must work (Baker, 2003, pp. 71–72). It works to draw their attention to aspects of people’s interactions in organizations not usually noticed, to bring to awareness unconscious habits, confusions, prejudices and pictures that hold practitioners captive, and, furthermore, to point out that other continuations of them than those routinely followed are possible. This view of theory – as perceptually reorienting rather than as cognitively explaining – will be illustrated by looking at Karl Weick’s sensemaking theory.

FOREGROUNDING OUR ‘BACKGROUND’ PRACTICES Central to the view of theory as reflective theory (as contrasted with representational theory) is the bringing of the nature of the spontaneously responsive activities ceaselessly occurring between us, which usually remains in the background to all that we do, into the foreground. This is crucial, for we cannot take our sensory achievements for granted; they are not neutral ways of merely gathering data in pursuit of objective certainty. Our perceptions depend on neurophysiological mechanisms and internalized cultural understandings. A medical student, for example, can read an X-ray, partly as a result of having learned a particular way of looking at an X-ray (Polanyi, 1962, p. 101). A lay person and a physician may ‘see’ the same thing only superficially; what they actually see depends essentially on what they are prepared to see. It is in that sense that Ryle (1949) aptly describes human phenomena not as ready-made but as ‘achievements’. To see something, we need to have developed a way of looking; to hear something, we need a way of listening; to touch an object (rather than just a ‘something’), we need a way of feeling (it over); and so on. Our experience with visually ambiguous figures tells us this much; our ways of looking, listening, touching, etc., work in terms of

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anticipations of what next we can expect to see or hear, given what we have seen or heard so far.1 Nowhere are our embodied, spontaneously aroused anticipations more crucial than in our use of language. ‘The word in living conversation’, notes Bakhtin (1981, p. 280), ‘is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word y Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation of any living dialogue’ (our emphasis). Our immersion in the continuous flow of spontaneously responsive and expressive, bodily activity in the cultural life-world of our community is essential to our being the kind of people we are – to our acting and making sense of things in ways that those around us find intelligible and are prepared to treat as legitimate. Although always immersed in it, like the proverbial fish being the last to discover water, it is only recently, with the work of such thinkers as Wittgenstein (1953), Taylor (1993, 1995), Polanyi (1962), Dreyfus (1995), Merleau-Ponty (1962), Garfinkel (1967) and Bakhtin (1981, 1986), amongst others, that it has begun to come to our intellectual attention. As Robbins’ (1990, 2005) account illustrates, in many classical accounts of scientific method, our practices of everyday life have remained in the background unnoticed (and thus, unexplored). The hope has been that, one day, when our understanding of human phenomena has advanced sufficiently, they can be ‘explained’ (in terms of a representational theory). Gradually, however, as that dream has begun to fade, ‘the background’ has, as we have indicated, begun to be foregrounded in our intellectual inquiries. Taylor (1980) discusses this background ‘know-how’ in terms of Gadamer’s (1976, 1989) and Heidegger’s (1962) notion of a pre-understanding: ‘Our preunderstanding of things is the knowledge (sense) we have of things prior to any formulation of how to deal with them. This know-how can be the basis of formulations, either statements about the objects, or recipes for how to deal with them to certain ends. But this pre-understanding can never be exhaustively expressed in any list, however long, of such formulations. Rather, there is a dependence in the other direction: the formulations are intelligible to us because we share the background pre-understanding’ (Taylor, 1980, p. 28). But here, Taylor’s argument has a negative thrust: it is against representational theory. Later, he turns in a more positive Wittgensteinian direction to discuss our sense of acting in accord with norms, as well as acting in ways that, at the moment of acting, both exert a relational influence on and make sense to those to whom our actions are addressed. For instance, an expression of ‘deference’ to someone is, Taylor (1995, p. 171) says, ‘carried in the distance I stand from you, in the way I fall

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silent when you start to speak, in the way I hold myself in your presence’. People with this kind of relational understanding in practice know when they have put a foot wrong – they feel it, they are embarrassed and their actions throughout are responsive to a sense of ‘rightness’. But the relevant ‘norms’ may be quite unformulated, or formulated only in a fragmentary fashion. What seems to be crucial here is that everyone involved in the joint activity feels a ‘movement’ in common, a particular and distinct ‘temporal shape’ (a rhythm) that arouses at each moment in the inter-acting a quite specific anticipation of ‘where next’ the activity will go. This anticipationarousing ‘movement’ is experienced by all those involved as having – just like the other persons involved in the activity – an agentic force: ‘it’ expresses ‘requirements’ that all involved must respect (hence the sense that a ‘rule’ or a ‘norm’ exists that should be followed). Some social constructionists, such as Gergen (1999) and Burr (2003), treat all such interactions as coordinated action, as a matter first of A acting and then of B acting to ‘give meaning’ to A’s acting. But as Taylor (1995) points out (using the notion of rhythm2 where we have used ‘temporal shape’): ‘this notion of coordination fails to capture the way in which some actions require and sustain an integrated agent y. They only come off when we can place ourselves in a common rhythm, in which our component action is taken up. This is a different experience from coordinating my action with yours y At a certain point the ‘‘semantic turn’’ passes over to the other by a common movement. The appropriate moment is felt by both partners together in virtue of the common rhythm’ (1995, pp. 171–172). Thus, as Taylor (1995, p. 172) goes on to say: ‘An action is dialogical, in the sense I’m using it here, when it is effected by an integrated, non-individual agent. This means that for those involved in it, its identity as this kind of action essentially depends on the agency being shared’. This is crucial to everything we want to say in this chapter. It is our participation in, and our sensing of, the anticipation-arousing ‘movements’ of an integrated (non-individual) agency as we interact with those around us that makes our actions intelligible to them, and theirs to us. Because of this, everything that we do ‘jointly’ is ‘out there’ in public space – hence Wittgenstein’s (1953, no. 435) remark: ‘Nothing is hidden’. So, although an individual may respond to another’s words as their words, to an extent also, he or she must respond to them as our words, that is, just as much belonging to those other’s over there as belonging to us over here.3 As language speakers we are always putting to use public property in our speaking, but we can, to an extent, put it to use in our own way. Thus, it is not in our repetition of linguistic forms, our use of them according to an already established system of

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rules, that we give our words their meaning, but in how we make varied use of an already existing, public set of anticipated responses to provoke to an extent novel responses in those we address. We express our meaning, our own unique meaning, in the use we make of our utterances in the circumstances of their use. As Wittgenstein (1980a) notes: ‘Life’s infinite variations are essential to our life. And so too even to the habitual character of life’ (p. 73). But in varying our use of words, juxtaposing them in our own combinations, pausing, intoning and unfolding our speech in a responsive movement characteristic in some way of our own unique circumstances, we cannot just speak in any old way we please. Why not? Because, as has been noted above, it is as if there is a third living agency at work in the space we create between us in our interactions. Beyond the other persons immediately before us, there is a shared agency at work in our dialogically structured interactions that ‘calls upon’ us with demands of its own.4 Thus, those such as Robbins (1990), who want to replace people’s intuitions or ‘gut feelings’ with scientifically based theories, are also (perhaps unwittingly) trying to replace our everyday flexible use of words with their variable contextualized meanings, with an inflexible use of words already with fixed definitions of a decontextualized kind. It is its lack of attention to the dynamics of the spontaneously occurring shared feelings5 that accounts for the failure of representational theory to provide practitioners with any ‘actionable knowledge’ – it is not a matter of the right theory or theoretical approach not yet having been found. Thus, while practitioners may be instructed in classrooms and seminar rooms in detailed, complex and sophisticated theories of organizational activities, which may seem to describe very accurately after the event the sequence of events that led up to a particular outcome, such accounts are beside the point, since they miss the richness of interacting (e.g. bodily gestures, intonation, situational uniqueness, etc.), the dynamic of the integrated agency and the open-endedness of interactional situations, which are intrinsically implicated in action (Bourdieu, 1977; Weick, 2003). Bourdieu (1977, pp. 4–8) famously criticized Levi-Strauss’s abstract account of the exchange of gifts for leaving out the most important feature of gift-giving: the tempo (the dynamic) of the exchange that determines what counts as gift (Dreyfus, 1995, p. 204). A counter-gift must be ‘deferred and different’, notes Bourdieu (1977, p. 5), if it is to count as a gift (and not as ‘swapping’ or ‘lending’). What in formal theory may count as gift, in everyday practice may not, if a gift is reciprocated too soon or too late. As Taylor (1995, p. 177) aptly remarks, ‘what on paper is a set of dictated exchanges under certainty, on the ground is lived out in suspense and uncertainty’.

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The issue here is the following: what counts as a useful outcome of inquiry to practitioners, to people actually at the point of contact with the reality of everyday affairs – (1) a retrospective, justificatory, reason-giving account of an already achieved outcome or (2) a prospective, action-guiding account of the detailed struggles required to achieve, develop or construct that outcome for the very first time in practice? Conventional research portrays practitioners as people who first reflect and then choose a course of action, and thus suggests that (1) would be most useful (see Argyris, 1993, 2004). However, it fails to portray them as participants caught up in an already ongoing process who must produce from within it – in the face of both the constraints and limited resources it offers them – recognizable, legitimate and, above all, successful (in relation to already existing criteria) actions and utterances (Boden, 1995). Our attempts to replace their ‘gut feelings’ and intuitions by objective, scientific theories fail to do any justice at all to the actual conditions within which practitioners actually work. Respecting these conditions leads us to suggest that (2) would be more useful.

WITTGENSTEIN’S PHILOSOPHY: A ‘PRECURSOR’ WORLD The revolutionary nature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy has still not been fully appreciated. We have still not been sufficiently struck by its very practical nature, by its highlighting of our ordinary everyday ways of making sense to and understanding each other, by the very different way of looking in order to see ourselves and our relations to our world that it requires of us as well as by the new methods of investigation to which he introduces us. If we had been, the idea that abstract, decontextualized language is sufficient for capturing ‘the logic of practice’ (Bourdieu, 1990) would not have taken such a strong hold in behavioural sciences. Instead, we might feel that as practitioners of a certain kind of reflective theory or noticing-talk (which we will be outlining below), it is our task to find ways of doing justice to the lay, intuitive, common-sense knowledge practitioners display in their actions. To help us in doing this, we might also be focusing on a number of Wittgenstein’s remarks (and those of other writers we have found useful) in order to remind ourselves of where we should look if we want to see new possibilities, new beginnings, for the refining and changing of our practices. For, as he puts it: ‘The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction: only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language – I want to say – is a refinement, ‘‘in the beginning was

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the deed’’ ’ (Wittgenstein, 1980a, p. 31). ‘But what is the word ‘‘primitive’’ meant to say here?’, he goes on to ask. ‘Presumably that this sort of behaviour is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought’ (Wittgenstein, 1981, no. 541). In these and other such remarks, Wittgenstein is drawing our attention to a possible role in our lives for our spontaneous bodily responses to some of the events occurring around us or to us. He is concerned not with the historical beginning of our current ways of understanding things, but with occurrences happening for yet ‘another first time’ (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 9) now, in the present moment, where each event is unique to the unique circumstances of its occurrence. Thus, with respect to such continually occurring first-time events, as he puts it: ‘We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. [For] these are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 109). In doing this, in seeking just to describe the detailed events we use in making sense of a person’s actions or utterances, ‘we shall constantly be giving prominence’, he says, ‘to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 132). In other words, our task is to notice what usually we fail to notice because we are looking in the wrong direction, with the wrong expectation in mind, aroused by a wrong use of words. For instance, in our theorizing we talk about all kinds of theoretical entities – such as ‘group dynamics’, ‘leadership’, ‘managerial roles’ and ‘environments’ – in a first step that seems utterly innocent and thus altogether escapes. We go on then to ‘talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided’, Wittgenstein (1953, no. 308) notes. ‘Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them – we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter y (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent)’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 308). The theoretical entities we construct bound certain phenomena and make them seem independent of our agency. Then the phenomena that those theoretical entities encapsulate are seen as mere applications of those concepts. In that way, empirical reality is seen as stemming from the application of concepts, rather than the other way around (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 374; Taylor, 1995, p. 169). Indeed, in the past, in behavioural studies, we have focused on two great realms of activity: (1) on behaviour, on naturally happening events beyond

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our agency to control to be explained in terms of natural causes, and (2) on action, on events for which we as individuals take responsibility and explain in terms of our reasons. Furthermore, without going into its whole Cartesian history, we have treated the world around us not only as an external world but also as a dead world of mechanisms, consisting in an assemblage of externally related objective parts – parts which can exist as the entities they are whether they are a part of a mechanism or not. The precursor world of spontaneous, relationally responsive, living, bodily activity or joint action, which we have begun to outline above, however, constitutes a third realm of internally related activities quite distinct from these other two realms, a realm in which our activity has the character it has not only in relation to yours (i.e. in relation to your response to it) but also, as we have seen, in relation to the ‘rules’ or ‘norms’ in operation in all our interactions – rules or norms that cannot, without consequence, be ignored. It is within this unfamiliar, third realm of living, responsive activity, this background, precursor world, that we can see Wittgenstein’s philosophy as operating. Thus, when he remarks that ‘our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 284), we think he should be taken very seriously. It is precisely the move from a dead, mechanically connected world to a living world of responsive relations that is so crucial. Thus, the great power of Wittgenstein’s ‘philosophy’ is that he outlines a set of methods that enable us to come to an understanding of at least some aspects of our activities in this sphere, to grasp the nature of some of our own human ‘doings’ from within the middle of our doing of them. His philosophy, then, is of a practical–descriptive kind: that is, rather than being aimed inwards towards thinking, prior to any action, about which features in a particular subject matter we should approach or address in our inquiries, it is aimed outwards towards helping us become more actively attentive towards previously unnoticed aspects of our surroundings of possible relevance in the shaping of our actions. In other words, he works – like an action researcher – from within our already existing practices with the aim of seeking previously unnoticed openings for their further refinement, elaboration and correction. ‘Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 124). ‘Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 126). This, clearly, is a very different kind of goal from the theoretical goals pursued in the classical, metaphysical philosophies of the past. Indeed,

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Wittgenstein wants in his investigations ‘to replace wild conjectures and explanations by the quiet weighing of linguistic facts’ (Wittgenstein, 1981, no. 447), thus to produce merely a description of the facts that matter in the issue concerned – a description that, if one was initially intellectually disoriented, if one did not know what was possible as a next practical step, would justify saying to those around one (at least for the immediate practical purposes in hand): ‘Now I know how to go on’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 154) – a prospective, action-guiding account of the tasks involved in achieving an outcome for the very ‘first time’ in practice, rather than a retrospective, justificatory, reason-giving account of an already achieved outcome. His investigations are thus not at all aimed at developing explanatory theories as to the nature of the world around us and of our possible knowledge of it, but at alerting us to what in fact is occurring in our involvements with each other, and with our surroundings (which makes such theorizing possible) – a perceptual rather than a cognitive aim. Illustrated here, then, is an important aspect of the new way of looking at our world to which Wittgenstein introduces us. But in so doing, he is also drawing our attention to another aspect of this new way of looking at our world: namely that to which we have been drawing attention in all our remarks above – to what goes on in the background to our lives. In other words, there is a whole unnoticed world ‘out there’ that, as we have said, is a precursor to the projects and to the consciousnesses of individuals existing prior to any thoughts, perceptions, actions, evaluations or words of our own. We owe what stable forms of life we live between us to not only their continual reproduction in this stream of spontaneously responsive activity but also, strangely, whatever possibilities that there are for their development and change. This background stream of activity, this precursor world, is full of beginnings and beginnings and beginnings (Shotter, 1984, 1996, 2002), and it is within such beginnings that we can find fleeting opportunities for change occurring.

WITTGENSTEIN’S WAYS WITH WORDS OMT has historically been in the thrall of science (Simon, 1997; McKelvey, 1997; Thompson, 1956–1957). Much of modern philosophy has been in its thrall also. It is only by following ‘the secure path of a science’, said Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, that philosophy can become more than ‘a merely random groping’ (Kant, 1970, p. 17). And even now, we are still under that spell: the belief that there is a form or pattern of reasoning, a

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methodology, that we must follow if we are to overcome the difficulties we face in our lives. Wittgenstein’s (1953) great achievement in his later philosophy is to have broken this spell, to have made it very clear to us that many of our difficulties are not of the form of problems that can, by the application of a science-like methodology, be solved by reasoning, nor are they ‘empirical problems’ that can be solved by discovering something currently unknown to us. They are difficulties of a quite another kind. They are difficulties of the will rather than of the intellect, that is, they are orientational or relational difficulties, to do with how we spontaneously respond to features in our surroundings with appropriate expectations and anticipations as to how next to ‘go on’ with our activities within them, without (mis)leading ourselves into taking an inappropriate next step.6 ‘What makes a subject hard to understand – if it’s something significant and important’, says Wittgenstein (1980a, p. 17), ‘is not that before you can understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things which are most obvious may become the hardest of all to understand. What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect’. Thus, if we are to overcome difficulties of this kind, we must work on our ways of seeing things, on what we expect of them. For, as Wittgenstein makes clear to us, our ways of talking can exert powerful, directive effects on us, unconsciously, without our being easily able to deliberate on how we might, in the course of our thought and talk, take pause, and seek alternative paths to those seemingly indicated by our current ways of ‘going on’. Such difficulties, he suggests, can be overcome ‘by looking into the workings of our language y in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 109). But besides releasing us from such bewitchments, it can also show us how new ways of looking, listening and thinking can be opened up in relation to a phenomenon before us. What Wittgenstein brings into the foreground of our consideration, then, is not only how all the attitudes, compulsions, urges, inclinations, etc., that usually lie in the background of our research activities can influence what we see (and our ways of talking and acting in relation to what we see), without our realizing it, but, even more importantly, how, in the moment of our looking over what is before us, someone’s talking (and their other activities,

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such as pointing and gesturing) can be intertwined into our looking to help us organize what we see into a unity. For, as we realize, we do not ‘take’ pictures with our eyes in an instant as a camera takes pictures; our eyes, in their saccades and fixations, dart about within a visual field as we ‘look over’ it, and thus we gather only fragments of data here and there. To integrate or to organize them into a visual unity or whole – the seeing of a ‘something’ within a ‘situation’ – we require a way of looking, a way of sequencing our looks such that the seeing of one aspect of a whole arouses in us an expectation that, were we to look for another aspect of it, there is a chance of finding it present also. In other words, there is an extra-sensory element in vision, an organized way of looking that leads us, as we ‘look over’ a visual scene, to ‘see that’ it is an X rather than a Y that is before us. It is Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the intertwining of our talk into our seeing at the moment of our looking at what is to become ‘a something’ for us that is crucial. Hanson (1958), a student of Wittgenstein’s, illustrates the working of this influence, and its results, by use of Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.

What Do You See?

With regard to Fig. 1, Hanson remarks: ‘Your retinas and visual cortices are affected as much as mine are; our sense-datum pictures would not differ. Surely we could all produce an accurate sketch of Fig. 1. Do we see the same thing? I see a bear climbing the other side of a tree’ (1958, pp. 12–13). For those who have never seen this drawing before, his talk of ‘a bear’ can produce an ‘oh yes, now I get it’ reaction. But the point here is that not so much that the word ‘bear’ gives us a particular picture (a mental representation) of an entity, but that the word ‘bear’ arouses in us all sorts of transitory understandings and action-guiding anticipations (Shotter, 2005), so that we are able, in practice, not only to know ‘where’ we are, so to speak,

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in our looking but also how to ‘go on’7 to entertain a whole range of further specific possibilities (but not just any). Thus, as Hanson (1958, p. 20) remarks, ‘seeing a bear in Fig. 1 [is] to see that were the ‘‘tree’’ circled we should come up behind the beast’, and (most likely) see the bear’s head towards the top of the tree and its tail towards the bottom of the tree (for bears do not usually climb up or down trees with their bodies inverted), and so on. In other words, by our use of certain words at an appropriate moment in relation to a puzzling circumstance, we can not only draw people’s attention to a particular feature of that circumstance but also arouse in them a range of action-guiding anticipations as to where they might look next for the next possible events occurring in that situation. To focus on our use of words to open up a whole mental landscape, to do with bears, trees and our possible relations to them, is a rather unusual focus. Our ways of thinking, talking and acting are too familiar to us. We are not very aware of the part our words can play in giving shape to, or in organizing, our thinking, talking and acting. Although we have talked in the past of thought as calculation, or as information processing, if Wittgenstein (1953) is correct,8 then we must think of our words, or better, our speaking – the inner mental movements we make in the uttering of our words – as being a very important medium of thought also.9 In his ‘grammatical’ investigations, Wittgenstein has focused our attention on at least two aspects of the role of words in our thinking: negatively, so to speak, on the bewitchments that can mislead us into in our unreflective uses of our words, but also positively, on how we can come to a clear understanding of an actual occasion of word use by means of an appropriate description of it – ‘We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place’ (1953, no. 109). Here, we will begin by focusing on his ‘positive’ investigations. Above, we noted in Bakhtin’s (1981, 1984) remarks on the responsive, future-oriented nature of our understanding of people’s utterances: in orienting us towards the future, they can provide us with ways of organizing, or ‘orchestrating’, fragments of thought and talk, action and perception, etc., into intelligible wholes. What Wittgenstein (1953) adds to Bakhtin’s general point here – in what he calls ‘grammatical investigations’ – is that if we attend to our actual use of words, we find that we use them in this manner in countless different ways, and our uses are both complex and uniquely intertwined in subtle detail into the deeds and actions of our lives. When considered in the abstract, as we do when theorizing or philosophizing, this complexity can be overwhelming. But what Wittgenstein shows us is that if we pay close attention to particular details

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noticeable in particular concrete circumstances – to tones of voice, bodily movements and gestures, facial expressions, eye direction and so on – and thus place our everyday utterances back into the circumstances of our everyday lives, then, rather than bewildering us, the detailed relations between particularities within the complexity can arouse quite specific responses in us. He describes our changed way of attending to relevant phenomena thus: ‘we are tempted to say ‘‘only this can be really seen’’ when we stare at unchanging surroundings, whereas we may not be at all tempted to say this when we look about us while walking’ (Wittgenstein, 1965, p. 66). In other words, Wittgenstein wants us to consider our use of words ‘from within’ the movements involved in our saying of them, rather than from the outside when we look only at the static forms of the words, that is, at what we finally said in our utterances. When we survey the actual step-by-step movements made by a person (their ‘expressions’), in relation to each aspect of the ‘terrain’ to which these movements were related, then it becomes obvious to us why the person spoke as he or she did. For instance, Katz and Shotter (1996) were concerned to study what could be ‘heard’ by doctors in a patient’s voicing of her/his replies to the doctor’s questions. While Katz (as a co-practitioner–researcher) was oriented towards noticing tones of ‘personal concern’ in a patient’s voice, the doctor wasn’t; the doctor’s concern was with the medical information provided in what the patient said; the doctor was thus oriented towards the patient simply as a source of such information. This, however, occasioned a cool and tense exchange, with expressions of anxiety by the patient. Katz’s suggestion to the doctor – that they attend to and respond to such expressions, and explore in some detail their meaning for the patient – worked to help the doctor create a very different kind of relationship, in which the medical examination proceeded in a much more warm, open and worthwhile manner. We can see what Wittgenstein (1953) is doing in his grammatical investigations in the same light: he is showing us how to display to ourselves, in the face of all the myriad forces that could be at work influencing us in what we do, how we might in fact achieve a resolution of them. Thus, in bringing ‘words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 116), he changes our point of view from that of a contemplative observer to that of an agent in motion, and by spelling out the small details of our movements, he enables us to appreciate our movements as if in ‘slow motion’. In so doing, we can begin to see how, in practice, we do in fact orient or relate ourselves to our surroundings, and it is this that dispels the need to hypothesize about special ‘mental

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processes’ hidden inside our heads in attempts to account for our actual achievements. So, for instance, in discussing, say, feelings of ‘confidence’, instead of asking questions about the distinct brain states that might be involved, Wittgenstein attends to the actions and expressions out in the world: ‘Is our confidence justified? – What people accept as a justification – is shown by how they think and live. We expect this, and are surprised at that. But the chain of reasons has an end’ (1953, nos. 325, 326). Something that usually, as he says, ‘goes by so quick’, we would like to see it, instead, ‘as it were laid open to view’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 435), and this can be done by setting an action within the details leading up to it, and those following from it. As we mentioned above, besides these more ‘positive’ grammatical investigations, besides these back and forth investigations into the diachronic links between words and their surrounding circumstances, Wittgenstein also investigates synchronic ones, the sideways linking of words simply with other words. Indeed, it is this particular aspect of language use, when people’s talk is not uniquely intertwined into the deeds and actions of their lives (rife among the talk of academics and intellectuals), that is the main target of his investigations. For, as he sees it, ‘philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 38). This divorcing of words from the practical contexts within which they can have a specific use occurs when sensible forms of talk are uttered in situations – usually by people seated in classrooms, seminar rooms or conference halls – that begin to cudgel their brains with such questions as: ‘What actually is ‘‘the scientific method’’?’ ‘What is practice?’ ‘How do sentences manage to represent this rather than that state of affairs?’, and so on. While we might be able to depict (picture, represent) a set of supposed entities for the words ‘method’, ‘practice’ and ‘represent’, and argue for the correctness of certain depictions over all others, no depiction as such would provide us with the way of looking needed to anticipate seeing these activities in all their appropriate relations with their surroundings. As Hanson (1958, p. 21) notes, ‘every perception involves an aetiology and a prognosis’, that is, it is situated not only in space but also in time and involves a before and after its occurrence. Wittgenstein (1953) seeks, then, in his grammatical investigations to provide us with methods for describing the precise sequential intertwining of our speech with other movements, as our actions unfold in time, that enables us to sort out the actual meaning of our words from their possible, that is, their meanings when unrelated to any actual practical circumstances. He brings out what is at issue here in a discussion of the circumstances surrounding an act of pointing: while there might be what can be called

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‘characteristic experiences’ which seem to accompany acts of pointing, no one characteristic process occurs in all cases. ‘Besides’, he adds, ‘even if something of the sort did recur in all cases, it would still depend on the circumstances – that is, on what happened before and after the pointing – whether we should say ‘‘He pointed to the shape and not to the colour’’’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 35). If this is done, in many circumstances a theoretical explanation of a human event not only is not needed but also may be misleading; a detailed description of the circumstances surrounding the event is often sufficient to render it intelligible – as, for instance, in a court of law in a murder trial.

PRACTICAL–DESCRIPTIVE ORGANIZATION THEORY: TOWARDS REFLECTIVE THEORIZING What then is reflective theorizing? As we have suggested above, rather than theory seeking to replace our ordinary, everyday understandings of our practices, it seeks to make them more reflective, hence the term reflective theorizing. To begin to appreciate reflective theorizing, it is important to understand the ineradicable embeddedness of knowledge into discursive practices, namely practices whose identity is constituted through the normative use of language (Harre´ & Gillett, 1994, pp. 28–29). At first, practitioners are socialized into a discursive practice by learning, in the ongoing course of that practice, to make relevant distinctions, to pick out the differences that matter to those within the practice – the ‘differences that make a difference’ (Bateson, 1973, p. 286). In other words, initially, practitioners relate spontaneously to their surroundings by drawing on the ‘background’ knowledge they have been socialized into; only later might they reflect on them thus to formulate rules, laws or principles in an attempt to represent their nature. Action is ontologically prior to knowledge. And it is a disastrous mistake to assume that anything like a formal representation of a rule or principle is the underlying or ‘hidden’ cause of our actions in the normal course of events. As we have already indicated, such rules or principles miss out not only the dynamics of how we take into account the norms we make use of in our actions, along with all the other kinds of useful ‘reminders’ we might draw on in determining a line of action, but they also miss out our uncertainties and anxieties, as well as our attempts to orient ourselves and to explore appropriate ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings. However, once a practitioner has developed a way of looking relevant to seeing phenomena constitutive of his or her practice, then we can insert at

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crucial moments verbal remarks that can help them, in various ways, to reorient or re-relate themselves to crucial aspects of the circumstances of their practice. Hanson’s (1958) ‘bear’ example is already a case in point. Here, the role of theory resembles the role Wittgenstein ascribed to philosophy: it is theory-as-therapy. It seeks to make action more perspicuous by providing the conceptual means to practitioners so that they can engage in rearticulating not only their taken-for-granted assumptions, reality pictures and ways of thinking, but also their ways of acting, their unexamined next step in an action. This is like children whose mother once stopped them as they brought dirty footprints into a clean kitchen with an immediate verbal reminder: ‘Stop! Look at the dirty marks you’ve made on the floor! Wipe your feet next time’, so they can remind themselves at a particular point in mid-act of other possible next directions in which they might go. The effect of the verbal reminder is to direct practitioners at a particular moment in their practice towards a different way of acting, not of thinking. Reflective theory, then, seeks to make practitioners’ lay knowledge more reflective by providing them with concepts, which have been produced in another life-world, that of scholarship, that might help them become reflective theorists of their own actions (Scho¨n, 1983; Yanow & Tsoukas, 2009). Reflective theory invites practitioners to focus on crucial moments in their actions, moments when more possibilities of next steps might be available than at first thought, thus to re-articulate them in order either to overcome difficulties or to refine or elaborate in new ways. These issues will be further illustrated by examining Karl Weick’s theory of sensemaking.

An Illustration of Reflective Theorizing: Weick’s Theory of Sensemaking Weick’s theory of sensemaking illustrates well our argument in this chapter in favour of reflective theorizing. Sensemaking is literally making something sensible. It is different from interpretation, since the latter is based on something already given, which may be interpreted in several ways. Inquiry into sensemaking involves studying how a phenomenon is turned into a sensible entity and how something is first invented as a sensible object and then rediscovered through interpretation. The most important feature of Weick’s view of sensemaking is its retrospective character. He argues that people can know what they are doing after they have done it. As he remarks, ‘an action can become an object of attention only after it has occurred. At the time it is noticed, several possible

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antecedents can be posited. The choice of ‘‘the’’ stimulus affects the choice of what the action ‘‘means’’. And both choices are heavily influenced by the situational context’ (Weick, 1995, p. 26). The retrospective character of sensemaking and the forward character of action account for the ‘strange loops’ (Hofstadter, 2008) Weick is positing: ‘people make sense of things by seeing a world on which they already imposed what they believe. People discover their own inventions, which is why sensemaking understood as invention, and interpretation understood as discovery, can be complementary ideas’ (1995, p. 15). How is such a strange loop possible? Heidegger’s (1962) notion of ‘thrownness’ is relevant here, and Weick does make several references to the Heideggerian understanding of the human condition. People are ‘thrown’ into tasks and act according to the beliefs into which they have been socialized, of which they are not necessarily aware. Actors are embedded in historical traditions – ways of thinking, feeling and acting (i.e. ways of being) – which equip them with what Gadamer (1976) calls ‘prejudices’ (pre-judgements). We experience the world by applying categories that have been given to us as historical beings in the context of discursive practices. ‘The historicity of our existence’, notes Gadamer (1976, p. 9), ‘entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience. Prejudices are biases of our openness to the world. They are simply conditions whereby we experience something – whereby what we encounter says something to us’. In other words, actors start from a set of initial conditions, which, arbitrary though they are, form both the ground and the necessary preconditions for all understanding. So, when Weick says that ‘people make sense of things by seeing a world on which they already imposed what they believe’, what he means is that when people act, they necessarily do so on the basis of their already formed pre-judgements; action is an opportunity to, among other things, find out – discover – what they think and what they have done. It is the ever-developing dialogue between action outcomes and cognitive representations – probing actions and thinking – that is at the heart of sensemaking. As noted earlier, sensemaking is not a merely interpretative activity – interpreting something given – but a constructive one: how actors generate what they interpret, the sort of distinctions they make through which a form emerges and the objects they choose to pay attention to. As well as sensemaking being retrospective, it is deeply social and identity-preserving, namely it is influenced by the real or imagined presence of others and by a person’s sense of self. Sensemaking is grounded on the ability to bound the continuous flow of human experience – the ability to put boundaries around

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some portion of the flow into which one is thrown when engaging in an activity or project – and involves focusing on salient cues of a developing situation and developing them into a plausible story for ‘what is going on’. Sensemaking occurs when ‘people concerned with identity in the social context of other actors engage ongoing events from which they extract cues and make plausible sense retrospectively while enacting more or less order into those ongoing events’ (Weick, 2001, p. 463). Sensemaking collapses when identity is unclear, the social context and cues become ambiguous, retrospect becomes more difficult, ongoing events become resistant to bounding, plausibility is strained and probing action becomes more constrained. Weick and his associates have investigated several organizational accidents and crisis management processes, and have shown how profoundly important sensemaking is for the effective functioning of an organization or group (Weick, 2001; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001). The collapse of sensemaking in the Mann Gulch fire, for example, accounted for the death of several firefighters. As Weick remarks: ‘[Mann Gulch firefighters] had to make sense of something not of their own making. They faced a dynamic fire environment, had to spot its tendencies, and had to herd the fire and eventually suppress it. But, in coping with the fire, the Mann Gulch firefighters chose which aspects of the fire they noticed to infer its severity (selection), they had prior experience largely with small fires they could suppress in 24 h (retention), and they treated Mann Gulch as a small fire which was the kind of fire they knew how to handle (use of retained knowledge to guide both action and perception). They treated an equivocal situation as if it were unequivocal’ (2001, p. xi). Weick advises practitioners and organizations to retain an ambivalent stance towards the reality they face, since this enhances an organization’s requisite variety: trust and be incredulous at the same time; have faith but also question; seek knowledge but be aware of your ignorance; adapt but make sure you are adaptable (Weick, 1979, pp. 135–136; 1994, p. 183). Moreover, he is deeply wary of admonitions such as ‘keep it simple’. For him the reverse is true: individuals in organizations, and organizations at large, are more likely to be effective the more complex they become. Only complexity can fight complexity. ‘Leaders’, he argues, ‘must complicate themselves in order to keep their organizations in touch with the realities of the business world’ (Coutu & Weick, 2003, p. 86; Weick, 2007). Weick’s initial interest in the collapse of sensemaking during organizational crises also led him to investigate the reverse: the ways in which successful sensemaking sustains organizational effectiveness, especially in High Reliability Organizations (HRO), such as nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers, air-traffic control teams, firefighting units or hospital

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emergency departments, which manage to maintain reliability and avert accidents over long stretches of time (Weick, 2001; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001). Reliability is preserved, Weick argues, through a well-developed organizational mind. Following Ryle (1949), the mind for Weick is understood to be not a given property but a style of action – a pattern that is manifested in action. Just as the individual mind is manifested in the specific activities an individual engages in, so the collective mind is manifested in the manner in which individuals interrelate their actions. For example, investigating activities on board an aircraft carrier, Weick and Roberts (1993, p. 363) argue that individuals ‘construct their actions (contribute) while envisaging a social system of joint actions (represent), and interrelate that constructed action with the system that is envisaged (subordinate)’. The individual contributions and the collective mind they help enact are mutually constituted: a contribution helps enact the collective mind to the extent to which it is heedfully interrelated with the imagined requirements of other contributing individuals in a situation of joint action. The collective mind is an emergent joint accomplishment rather than an already defined representation of any one individual: the collective mind is constituted as individual contributions become more heedful interrelated in time. Being an emergent phenomenon, the collective mind is known in entirety to no one, although portions of it are known differentially to all. In Weick’s work, his preference for pointing out the emergent and processual character of organizational phenomena is visible. He points this out by highlighting the active role of individual agency in the ongoing accomplishment of reality, in the context of others. He consistently emphasizes the responsibility agents have for the maintenance or change of organizational reality, through engaging in sensemaking processes. Weick’s sensemaking theory is an apt illustration of theory-as-therapy in OMT. Through the concept of enactment, arguably the most central concept in Weick’s theory of sensemaking, he draws organizational members’ attention to what they already do, either when they help preserve HRO or in coping with unexpected events such as organizational crises. His theory serves the role of reminding practitioners of the actions they have already been carrying out, so that practitioners may become more mindful of what they already do and do it better. Practitioners are thus provided with the means to re-articulate their patterns of action, or, in Wittgensteinian terms, to obtain a clearer picture of their grammar of action, namely of the spontaneous ways in which they dialogically inter-enact their actions. For example, Weick (1995, p. 31) writes: ‘Two cops are driving in a squad car on patrol, and a teenager gives them the finger as they drive by. The cops can ignore the kind, stop, or,

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as is most common, return the gesture’ (Weick, 1995, p. 31). Notice the argument: depending on the manner in which the cops respond, they will create the ‘environment’ they will have to deal with subsequently. The cops act, and in doing so ‘they create the materials that become the constraints and opportunities they face’ (Weick, 1995, p. 31). Weick’s analysis reminds actors of their fundamental involvement in making a phenomenon, such as a teenager’s gesture, a sensible object, which they subsequently confront as an independent entity. Like Wittgenstein, Weick explicitly uses the language of issuing reminders to draw actors’ attention to what they already do. He says: ‘There is not some impersonal ‘‘they’’ who puts these environments in front of passive people. Instead, the ‘‘they’’ is people who are more active. All too often people in organizations forget this. They fall victim to this blind spot because of an innocent sounding phrase, ‘‘the environment’’. The word the suggests something that is singular and fixed; the word environment suggests that this singular, fixed something is set apart from the individual. Both implications are nonsense’ (Weick, 1995, pp. 31–32). Weick’s theorizing is reflective insofar as it makes agents’ agency visible to themselves. As a result, agents are reminded of the several possibilities that exist in their action, and, insofar as this is the case, they obtain a more perspicuous account of what they do and, crucially, of what they may do. Sensemaking may be retrospective but action taking is always prospective.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: FROM MAPS TO PORTRAYALS In this chapter we have explored some of the difficulties raised by the use of representational theorizing in organization studies, and mainly explored the nature of a more reflective form of theorizing. Rather than seeking a framework or system within which to think about how to sequence or plan a course of action prior to its execution, we have been concerned to explore a quite different set of tasks: those that very generally, in Wittgenstein’s (1953) terms, fall under the heading of ‘knowing our way about’ and ‘knowing how to go on’. Central to our argument has been the foregrounding of the background. This has entailed bringing to the forefront of our attention aspects of our inter-activities not usually noticed – unique, only once-occurrent (Bakhtin, 1993) aspects of our inter-activities that occur spontaneously and have only a fleeting existence. About this aspect of our inquiry, Wittgenstein

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(1953, no. 129) notes: ‘The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. – And this means; we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful’ (no. 129). This, then, the noticing of what is not usually noticed, is one unusual aspect of our inquiries. Another entails the task, somehow, of forming from all these fleeting fragments an integrated whole, a sense of the ‘landscape’ within which these fragments have their place, and thus their meaning. How is this to be done? Laboriously, is the answer! Just like getting to know one’s way around in a new city, one must walk the streets, and not just the main streets, but the back streets and suburbs too – and perhaps, even, do a bit of archaeology and environmental studies, to understand the layers of the old that the present city is built on, as well as the more wild surroundings of the countryside within which it is placed. True to form, Wittgenstein (1953, no. 66) lays out this strategy, not in general terms, but in an example: in a discussion of our uses of the word ‘game’. He begins with a question: ‘Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘‘games’’. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?’ And straight away admonishes us: ‘Don’t say: ‘‘There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’’’ – but look and see whether there is anything common to all’. In other words, tramp over the landscape of all the games possible, those you perhaps already know about, along with others that you can find out about. If you do this, then ‘you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 66). He then starts to list the many possibilities, demonstrating that, in fact, all attempts to find a single feature common to all games is impossible. ‘And the result of this examination is’, Wittgenstein (1953, no. 66) says, ‘[that] we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail’. Wittgenstein characterizes these similarities as constituting a set of ‘family resemblances’ (1953, no. 67); as such, they constitute a landscape of internally related entities having a common style to them. That is, to talk of an activity as a ‘game’ arouses in us a whole range of anticipated possibilities that can – as when looking over the faces/vase ambiguous figure with the word ‘vase’ in mind to guide us in our looking – guide us in picking out aspects of the activity before us to focus our attention on; just like in the case of Weick’s

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cops, to call it a ‘conversation of gestures’ would lead to different foci, while calling it a ‘fight’ would lead to still more possible foci. ‘It is in language’, Wittgenstein (1953, no. 445) notes, ‘that an expectation and its fulfilment make contact’ – and intertwining different words into our dealings with a thing or event will arouse different expectations of how it is, or might be placed in, or connected into its surrounding circumstances.10 While the result of research leading to a representational theory might be likened to the production of a map of the possible places to go in a terrain of possibilities – and what could be wrong with that? – our suggestion for pursuing reflective theorizing would not result but in an enlarged embodied sense by those who were beneficiaries of it of how to ‘move about’ within the situation of their practice. For, as Taylor (1995, p. 176) brings out, a significant distortion occurs when we take a person’s situated embodied sense of a practice and provide an express depiction of it. ‘We can illustrate the difference [between such a sense and its representation] in the gap that separates our inarticulate familiarity with a certain environment, enabling us to get around in it without hesitation, on the one hand, and a map of this terrain on the other. The practical ability exists only in its exercise, which unfolds in time and space. As you get around a familiar environment, the different locations in their interrelation don’t all impinge at once. Your sense of them is different, depending on where you are and here you are going. And some relations never impinge at all. The route and the relation of the landmarks look different on the way out and on the way back; the way stations on the high road bear no relation to those on the low road. A way is essentially something you go through in time. The map, on the other hand, lays out everything simultaneously, and related very point to every point without discrimination’ (Taylor, 1995, p. 176). But in moving on through a world that they are making as they go, participants are not able to reflect on that world: they know what they are trying to do; they perhaps know why they are doing it, but what they don’t yet know is what they have succeeded in doing in their doing. That is why Weick has emphasized the retrospective character of sensemaking. In the midst of action, practitioners are not fully aware of what they are doing. Only by looking back they can see what they have accomplished. Yet action itself has a prospective character. Actors are facing situational choices; unique contingencies baffle them and possibilities unfold – provided actors become aware of the processual character of their actions and the accomplishments they are capable of. Standard scientific research approaches the everyday world in which we all participate in both sustaining and further developing, as a world already

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made, a fait accompli, and reflects on it with the aim of mastering its reproduction, that is, making it for a second time. It fails to capture what it was participants had to attend to in the first place in creating that world (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). This, clearly, is one of the most fundamental problems in the social sciences: already accomplished social events present themselves retrospectively as a series of steps towards a foregone conclusion (Tsoukas, 2010; Tsoukas & Knudsen, 2002). It is tempting to reconstruct the process as if it was meant to lead to an already known outcome. Prospectively, however, the situation looks different. As we have already noted above, a retrospective, reason-giving account of an already achieved outcome can function as an after-the-fact justificatory account, and can no doubt serve a useful purpose in helping practitioners stave off challenging criticisms of their practices when they run into difficulties. But what might be useful to them – as people already immersed in an ongoing process and who must produce successful outcomes from within it – is a prospective account, an account that draws their attention to difficult-to-notice, fleeting incidents that provide opportunities for the beginnings of new language games. How might such prospective accounts be formulated? We have already met an aspect of what is involved here in Wittgenstein’s (1953) discussion of the difficulty of defining, not just the word ‘game’, but all the terms that matter to us in our inquiries into our uses of language, including the word ‘language’! As we noted above, in discussing this issue, Wittgenstein did not attempt to produce a general discussion, but focused on the specific example of how the word ‘game’ could be used, and on the task of finding something common to all of them. And as he took us on a ‘journey’ through a whole range of possible uses, we experienced the ‘no-go’ directions encountered at each step, until, after a great range of similar such experiences, we feel that no further twists or turns are possible. In taking us on this journey, although specific to an inquiry into the use of the word ‘game’, we are learning (without any explicit teaching on Wittgenstein’s part) a way of inquiring into the use of words, a way that we can extend to other important words in our inquiries. Indeed, this was Wittgenstein’s (1953) purpose in providing this illustration, for he is very aware of the fact that as he has not provided any definitions of, for instance, the term ‘language-games’ in his discussions, he is bound to be challenged as to its meaning. He discusses this challenge as follows: ‘Someone might object against me: ‘‘You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a languagegame, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you yourself most headache,

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the part about the general form of propositions and of language’’. And this is true. – Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, – but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all ‘‘language’’’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no. 65). And he tries to explain this by his example of the use of the word ‘games’, as we have seen. Thus, instead of producing a general, representational theory of word use, as we noted above, Wittgenstein took us on a ‘feeling journey’ in which we experienced for ourselves the workings of the logical grammar inherent in our language – the essentially inarticulate logical grammar that we exhibit to ourselves only in our use of words. He did this by portraying for us a particular region of language use so that we could, so to speak, get a sense of our ‘way around’ within it, the ‘moves’ that were open and those that were closed to us. And this in general is what could be the result of reflective theorizing in OMT: the production of portraits of an organizational circumstance that, as an aid to perception, can guide us towards both noticing details of that circumstance not previously noticed, as well as seeing relations or connections between those details also not previously noticed. For example, the seven properties of Weick’s (1995) sensemaking theory serve as aspect-noticing and action-guiding devices that orient practitioners in action. Concepts in reflective theorizing are not seen as representations of a pre-given world but as partly emergent creations: open-ended constructions that are not fully defined a priori, nor are they connected to the empirical world in a definite manner (Weick, 1989, p. 519), but are partly determined through the particular practices in which they are enacted. While in representational theories concepts are taken to reflect the features of a pregiven world, in reflective theories, concepts are seen as indicators that guide the search for better understanding, encouraging practitioners to look for family resemblances (Tsoukas, 2009). Thus, practitioners are invited to become quasi-theorists of their own unique situations. Qua theories, reflective theories abstract from concrete data. However, insofar as they are empirically under-determined, concepts are open to situational uniqueness and further specificity (Tsoukas, 2009). No situation will be as unique as the Mann Gulch fire, or the Nimitz aircraft carrier, but other fires and other HROs share family resemblances with them. Relevant concepts, albeit generated within particular circumstances, can serve as anticipation-forming devices, thus helping practitioners undertake reflective situational action. What we require, then, if we are to get to ‘know our way around’ inside a human circumstance, is not a map, a static, accurate word picture of a state

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of affairs – for that, as it were, lies dead on the page, and needs further interpretation – but a living portrayal. Drawing upon the knowledge we already possess of the circumstance, what we need is a prospective account of it that, in its telling, ‘moves’ us this or that way through the ‘terrain’ of the circumstance, so to speak, sufficiently for us to gain a conceptual grasp of the whole, even though we lack a vantage point from which to view it. Such a ‘seeing’ would give us a view ‘from the inside’ of the circumstance, much as we can get to know the street plan of a city, by living within it, rather than from seeing it all at once from an external standpoint. It is a grasp that allows us to ‘see’ the different aspects of the circumstance as if arrayed within a ‘landscape’, all in relation to one another, from all the standpoints within it – it is also a grasp that allows us to locate regions within that landscape that are still ‘terra incognita’ for us. In developing a qualitative portrait, we aim less at exact prediction and control than at gaining a felt grasp of the potentials for working with it. To make prediction and control the primary goal of science is to alienate ourselves from the fullness of a reality that can continually ‘teach’ us – if we allow ourselves to enter into a responsive relation with it – the openings it itself provides for its own further development (Tsoukas, 2009). In conclusion, we are suggesting here, then, a move from the kind of thinking-before-the-fact-in-order-to-act to a doing-from-within-the-fact-inorder-to-think, a move from a ‘just-in-case’ kind of general understanding to a learning how to conduct a ‘just-in-time’ kind of understanding in terms of the details of the situation one is currently inhabiting. Our view of the role of theory in OMT, inspired by Wittgenstein, is that theory helps actors rearticulate (or re-punctuate) their grammar of actions: not only to refine the assumptions they necessarily internalize in their socialization into the organizational life-world they are part of, but also to use theoretical concepts perceptually, so to speak, as a telescope or microscope to look through to see new ‘openings’ in their practices for their further development, refinement and (perhaps) correction.

NOTES 1. With the well-known faces/vase or duck/rabbit figures, for instance, to use Michael Polanyi’s (1962) terminology, we first look from a forehead to an expected eye region, and then to an expected nose region, and so on, looking eventually from all these details (if each of these expectations is fulfilled) to the overall perception of a face. Similarly, with a vase way of looking, we look from a bowl region to a stem region to a base region. About our acts of seeing, Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: ‘We

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find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough’ (p. 212). It is precisely the feeling that we need to puzzle over our acts of seeing that we wish to arouse here. 2. We have avoided the word ‘rhythm’ as it implies the possibility of repetitive patterns, whereas we want to suggest that no repetitions at all may be involved. 3. ‘The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘‘one’s own’’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own’ (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 293–294). 4. It is as if there is a public evaluator who ‘calls’ each individual speaker to use his or her words as we use them. Bakhtin (1986) calls it the ‘superaddressee’ (p. 126) or ‘a superperson, a supra-I, the witness and the judge of the whole human being’ (p. 137). Wittgenstein too remarks in a similar fashion that symbols ‘appear of their nature to be unsatisfied’, and he goes on to remark about a proposition that it ‘seems set over against us as a judge and we feel answerable to it. – It seems to demand that reality be compared with it’ (1974, no. 85, p. 132). 5. Such ‘feelings’ are not emotions, but action-guiding feelings – see later sections. 6. ‘A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about’ (1953, no. 123). 7. As we shall see, Wittgenstein (1953) talks of understanding as being not something that happens mysteriously inside someone’s head, but as something that a person becomes able, in practice, to do: ‘Try not to think of understanding as a ‘‘mental process’’ at all. – For that is the expression which confuses you. But ask yourself: in what sort of case, in what kind of circumstances, do we say, ‘‘Now I know how to go on’’, when, that is, the formula has occurred to me?’ (no. 154). 8. Along with many others, of course, notable among them being Vygotsky (1978, 1986), Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1993) and Merleau-Ponty (1962). 9. Elsewhere, Shotter (2005) has emphasized the importance of Bakhtin’s (1981, 1984) relationally responsive account of our understanding of people’s words as they utter them (in contrast to the usual representational–referential account of their meaning once uttered). For, as we have already seen, among the many other features of such responsive talk is its capacity to arouse anticipations of future possibilities. 10. With respect to the representativeness logical systems, Wittgenstein (1980b) remarks: ‘The basic evil of Russell’s logic, as also of mine in the Tractatus, is that what a proposition is illustrated by a few commonplace examples, and then presupposed as understood in full generality’’ (no. 38).

ACKNOWLEDGMENT We thank Robert Chia for his perceptive comments on an earlier version.

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John Shotter is Emeritus Professor of communication in the Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, and a tutor on the Professional Doctorate in System Practice in KCCF, London. He is the author of Social Accountability and Selfhood (Blackwell, 1984), Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric, and Knowing of the Third Kind (Open University, 1993), Conversational Realities: The Construction of Life through Language (Sage, 1993), Conversational Realities Revisited; Life, Language, Body, and World (Taos Publications, 2009) and ‘Getting It’: ‘Withness’-Thinking and the Dialogical y in Practice (Hampton Press, 2010). Haridimos Tsoukas is the Columbia Ship Management Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Cyprus, Cyprus, and a Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK. He has published widely in several leading academic journals, and was

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the editor-in-chief of Organization Studies (2003–2008). His research interests include knowledge-based perspectives on organizations, organizational becoming, practical reason in management and epistemological issues in organization theory. He is the editor (with Christian Knudsen) of The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory: Meta-Theoretical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2003). He has also edited Organizations as Knowledge Systems, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 (with N. Mylonopoulos), and Managing the Future: Foresight in the Knowledge Economy, Blackwell, 2004 (with J. Shepherd). His book Complex Knowledge: Studies in Organizational Epistemology was published by Oxford University Press in 2005. He is also the author of the book If Aristotle were a CEO (in Greek, Kastaniotis, 2005, 2nd ed.).

TRIANGULATING PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE TO UNDERSTAND COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONAL AND MANAGERIAL PROBLEMS John Bechara and Andrew H. Van de Ven ABSTRACT We propose that management scholars can improve their research by triangulating alternative philosophies of science to gain a richer and more holistic understanding of complex managerial problems. We illustrate the proposition by triangulating with three scientific philosophies – positivism, postmodernism, and critical realism – to design a study in response to a debate in the sociology of professions. After summarizing and applying positivism, postmodernism, and critical realism to reveal their differing research approaches, we discuss how to deal with the convergent and divergent information often produced by triangulating philosophies of science. Although common views of triangulation emphasize reliability by focusing on convergent information from different methods, we emphasize validity by discussing how divergent information from different methods reveal important aspects and values of a complex phenomenon that often go unrecognized without triangulation.


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Keywords: Philosophy of science; triangulation; pluralism.

INTRODUCTION The study of management often involves complex social phenomena or problems that are seldom understood adequately from one point of view. Multiple perspectives are needed to appreciate various aspects and dimensions of complex phenomena. To accomplish this, a triangulation strategy is often recommended using multiple methods, models, data sources, and investigators to represent the phenomenon or problem. Although triangulation is a widely endorsed and used strategy in the social sciences (Mathison, 1988), it is seldom applied by using multiple philosophies of science to investigate complex phenomena. Unfortunately, as evident in the so-called ‘‘science wars’’ among management scholars (e.g., Pfeffer, 1995; Van Maanen, 1995), philosophy of science is sometimes treated as a religion that should be practiced faithfully throughout a scholar’s career. Using different philosophies of science to examine a research question is considered ‘‘opportunistic’’ at best and ‘‘heretical’’ at worst by the true believers of a community of researchers practicing a particular philosophy of science. This commitment to a single philosophy of science has the cost of limiting a researcher’s capabilities. Many real-world problems are too ambiguous and complex to be represented adequately by one perspective or methodology. This chapter advances the proposition that management scholars can substantially expand their research repertoire by triangulating alternative philosophies of science to gain a richer and more holistic understanding of a complex organizational and managerial problem being investigated. Although we acknowledge that the incommensurability among philosophies of science might pose a theoretical problem given that each philosophy espouses different ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions, in practice each philosophy sheds light on a different aspect of the organizational and managerial problems that can only be elucidated by adopting each philosophy. More importantly, triangulating philosophies of science might also reveal the interdependence among various aspects of the problem and hence highlight inherent instability in privileging one perspective or assuming that each perspective sheds light on a nonoverlapping aspect of the problem. In addition, triangulating philosophies of science is part of a chorus of work, although focused on paradigms,1 which

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highlights and shows the importance of multiparadigm inquiry of complex phenomena in organizational life (Lewis & Grimes, 1999; Schultz & Hatch, 1996; Gioia & Pitre, 1990; Weaver & Gioia, 1994; Hassard, 1991; Tsoukas, 1994). We illustrate the proposition by applying three philosophies of science – positivism, postmodernism, and critical realism2 – to design a study in response to a debate in the sociology of professions to study the impact of the organizational structure on the professional’s work autonomy. We first summarize positivism, postmodernism, and critical realism to reveal their differing research approaches and perspectives; we then apply each philosophy of science to our case. Finally, we discuss the convergent and divergent information often produced by triangulating philosophies of science. Although common views of triangulation emphasize reliability by focusing on convergent information from different methods, we emphasize validity by discussing how divergent information from different methods reveal important aspects and values of a complex phenomenon that do not become salient without triangulation.

PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE We now provide a brief overview of the main conceptual tenets of positivism, postmodernism, and critical realism. Obviously, we cannot provide a detailed review in the limited space here. Table 1 summarizes the characteristics of these philosophies and provides an outline for the review discussed below.

Positivism Logical positivism was an extension of the Enlightenment and modernism’s faith in objectivity, reason, and the progress of scientific knowledge. It emphasizes sensory observation and induction3 as the foundation of scientific knowledge (Giere, 1988). Underlying this assumption is a valuefree and neutral observer and language. It denies all metaphysical statements as having any correspondence with reality and considers them meaningless due to their failure to pass the verifiability theory of meaning or verificationism (Boyd, 1991; Blumberg & Feigl, 1948). This also leads to conflating epistemology with ontology. It also reduces causal relations or explanations to Humean4 constant conjunction of events and emphasizes the unity of science or the primacy of the physical sciences as the model for

Moritz, Schlick (1882–1936), Reichenbach, Hans (1891–1953), Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970), Hempel, Carl (1905–)

Objective: reality is the empirical world

Objective: the correspondence between our statements and reality through inductive verification or deductive falsification 1. Absolute truth (value free) 2. Causal explanation (constant conjunction) 3. Analytic/synthetic distinction 4. Verificationism (inductive verification/deductive falsification) 5. Rational reconstruction (operationalism) 6. Unity of science 7. Neutral observer and language

Some key authors

Ontology

Epistemology

Methodology principles

Philosophical movement inspired by empiricism, instrumentalism, and positivism

Positivism

Critical Realism

1. Truth is sociolinguistically constructed (value laden) 2. Anti-essentialism – no underlying causal mechanisms 3. Rejection of grand narratives 4. Lack of linguistic essentialism–linguistic turn–‘‘difference’’–self-referential

1. Truthlikeness/verisimilitude 2. Causal explanation (underlying mechanism and structure, i.e., metaphysical) 3. Intransitive/transitive entities 4. Fallabalism of scientific knowledge 5. Epistemic relativism and judgmental relativism

Contemporary intellectual movement Philosophical movement characterized by characterized by its skepticism about the the existence of a mind-independent foundations of Western philosophy reality and the ability of a theory to capture partial aspects of reality Archer, Margaret Jean Baudrillard (1929), Gilles (194x–), Campbell, Donald Deleuze (1925–1995), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Michel Foucault (1916–1996), Bhaskar, Roy (1944–) (1926–1984), Jean-Francois Lyotard (1928) Subjective: reality is sociolinguistically Objective: reality, whether social or constructed natural, is intransitive (i.e., independent of human cognition). It is construed subjectively using different perspectives and paradigms to create transitive (socially created) knowledge. The products of science are always transitive, but they refer to intransitive objects Subjective: there is no privileged Subjectivist: there is no predefined or epistemology due to the predetermined methodology or criterion incommensurability of discourses to judge the veracity of our knowledge

Postmodernism

Comparison of the Characteristics of Positivism, Postmodernism, and Critical Realism.

Definition

Dimensions

Table 1.

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all sciences. Hence, positivism is only concerned with the material/empirical world that exists independent of human cognition. Logical positivism construes the aim of research as the identification of general causal explanations and fundamental laws that would describe the regularity of events observed. To achieve this goal, the social sciences adopt natural sciences’ methods that are usually preoccupied with internal validity, external validity, reliability and consistency, and operationalization of concepts. Research questions and hypotheses are formulated in propositional form and require the use of empirical tests for their verification through careful control (manipulation) to avoid confounding conditions and outcomes. The researcher is assumed to be independent of the objects observed in the world, and capable of studying the objects without influencing, or being influenced by, them. When influence in either direction (threats to validity) is recognized or suspected, various strategies are followed to reduce or eliminate it. Inquiry takes place ‘‘through a one-way mirror’’ (Guba & Lincoln, 1994, p. 110) in a sort of correspondence between our thoughts/signs and reality. By following rigorous experimental procedures, values, and biases are prevented from influencing outcomes, and empirical truth is established through replicable findings. Hence, the researcher has a ‘‘God’s eye’’ frame of reference.

Postmodernism Postmodernism reacted to positivism’s emphasis on certainty, its antimetaphysical attitude, its reliance on sensory observation, and its modernistic values (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996; Dallmayr, 1987; Sim, 2001). Postmodernism construes truth as socially constructed and theory laden. It adopts an antiessentialist stance that denies science its objectivity and indisputably rational basis, and an anti-foundationalist stance that denies any privileged way of acquiring knowledge of it. Anti-essentialism refers to a rejection of the essence of phenomena and the causal mechanisms underlying them. The essentialist notion is the cornerstone of classic scientific inquiry. As Sim (2001) suggests, essentialism regards the attainment of truth, meaning, and origin as its goal. Anti-foundationalism refers to the rejection of foundational or self-evident beliefs required in the pursuit and acquisition of knowledge. For example, postmodernism rejects the basis of epistemology that asserts the existence of self-justifying or self-evident first principles that guide and provide the basis for scientific inquiry. Finally, postmodernism provides access to the personal and social worlds. The personal world consists of our own individual thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. We experience the world and participate in

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constituting this world. Hence, the world is subjective and only accessible to us by sharing and appreciating each other’s conception of the world. Similarly, in the social world we are part of and constitute the social system. Hence, our relationship with the world is intersubjective and a socially constructed. We are both constrained by preexisting material conditions, but we also have the power to change these systems albeit very gradually. Postmodernism rejects the progressive accumulation of knowledge and overarching theories or grand narratives. Knowledge is seen as outcomes of various discourses that have their own rules, structure, and evaluative criteria. Postmodernism aims to decenter the subject and rejects the individual as the center of meaning (Cahoone, 1996; Calas & Smircich, 1999). It also aims at exposing the power relationships implicit in any discourse that empower some individuals and marginalize others. Unlike critical theory, postmodernism does not have emancipatory goals but seeks to critically expose the nature and function of our social and mental worlds.

Critical Realism Critical realism (Bhaskar, 1979, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c) was developed as an alternative between logical positivism and the more relativistic positions such as postmodernism. It presupposes a mind-independent and stratified reality that consists of underlying structures and mechanisms that determine how things come to behave (transcendental realism). It also holds that theoretical entities have referential value (i.e., theoretical entities genuinely reflect the way the world is). From postmodernism, critical realism adopts a subjective or anti-foundationalist epistemology whereby there are no self-evident methodologies or criteria that provide privileged access to reality. From positivism, critical realism emphasizes empirical experimentation, although it denies the possibility of generalizing its experimental outcomes due to the nature of reality that is stratified and dynamic consisting of underlying contingent structures. Critical realism repudiates positivism for its anthropocentric view of the world that confounds constant conjunction of events with causality and reduces the world to sense experience (material/empirical world). This anthropocentricity is also known as the epistemic fallacy that is the reduction of reality to what can be known about reality. According to Bhaskar (1979, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c), reality consists of three domains: the empirical, the actual, and the real5 that are also the stages of scientific discovery. Stage 1 or


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the domain of the empirical consists of regularities or constant conjunctions of events that constitute the basis for our empirical studies in science. Stage 2 or the domain of the actual consists of causal laws that exist independent of agents and may be unperceived. Finally, stage 3 or the domain of the real consists of the generative underlying mechanisms that determine the behavior of entities. Hence, the process of scientific explanation begins with the observation of partial regularities (the domain of the empirical), the separation of the causal components (the domain of the actual), the inference of the underlying mechanism(s) (the domain of the real) that can account for these regularities and, finally, the validation of the mechanism(s) empirically and the elimination of rival explanations. Thus, the explanation shifts from the intransitive dimension to the transitive with the postulation of underlying mechanisms regulating the phenomena that are the essence of scientific discovery.

TRIANGULATION Using positivism, postmodernism, and critical realism, we reviewed how each philosophy of science emphasizes and de-emphasizes aspects of a problem and might offer inconsistent or contradictory solutions or outcomes. Each philosophy of science dictates the nature of the problem (ontology), the ways of knowing the problem (epistemology), the methods for understanding or explaining the problem, and criteria for evaluating solutions. However, given these different outcomes, how might a researcher proceed? One alternative is traditional triangulation that focuses on using common or convergent outcomes from each perspective. Traditional triangulation refers to the use of multiple theories, methods, and data sources. It is based on the concept introduced by Campbell and Fiske (1959) as a procedure for establishing the convergent and discriminant validity of measures. According to Mathison (1988), it assumes that the bias inherent in any particular theory, method, or data source will be eliminated, or at least minimized, by relying on the convergent information from different methods. But reliability should not be confused with validity. Mathison (1988) raises the question of whether arguments for triangulation have confused validity with reliability. The evidence produced by alternative sources and methods might be different because of bias in data sources (reliability), or it may be that different methods and sources tap different dimensions or domains of knowing the phenomenon (validity). If we restrict ourselves to a reliability view of triangulation, we would report only the convergent

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findings on which all data sources and methods agree. ‘‘By doing this, one would necessarily be unduly restrictive in making valid claims about social phenomena’’ (Mathison, 1988, p. 16). Buchanan (2003, p. 18) states a more critical postmodern position – ‘‘The singular, coherent account which fails to expose conflicting views of the change process is deeply suspect.’’ A metaphor from geometry may be helpful to distinguish valid from reliable representations of a phenomenon through a triangulation strategy. In geometry increasing numbers of dimensions are needed to represent (or plot all points) of more complex systems. For example, all points in a line can be represented completely in one dimension, all points in a square (or along two axes) requires two dimensions, all points in a cube or box require three dimensions, etc. The question is how many dimensions are needed to represent (or plot) the key features of a problem being investigated? To be considered valid, the dimensionality of the methods used should match the dimensionality of the phenomena observed. When unidimensional methods are used to study a multidimensional phenomenon, the result will obviously be a myopic and only partially valid representation of the phenomenon. Conversely, use of multidimensional methods to examine unidimensional phenomena will converge in a reliable way to the number of dimensions of the phenomenon observed. Valid measurement first requires establishing the dimensionality or complexity of the phenomena under investigation. Then one can examine the reliability (or convergence) of alternative methods in representing that complexity. To a postmodernist, the dimensionality or complexity of a problem does not objectively exist ‘‘out there’’ as this geometric metaphor implies. Dimensionality is as much a property of the theories and methods used to represent a problem as it is with the problem itself. A single observer (with a given philosophy of science) tends to represent a problem in fewer dimensions than do multiple observers with different perspectives. Triangulation increases the richness (and complexity) of problem representations, which decreases the likelihood of myopic representations that other stakeholders may perceive as being biased and misdiagnosed. When different philosophies and methods of science converge on the same dimensions of a problem, this reliability provides confidence in having a valid representation of the problem domain. But when the views of different stakeholders do not converge, this indicates that the dimensionality of a problem domain may not have been mapped in a valid and reliable way. All one can conclude is that ‘‘there is more to this problem domain than I envisioned.’’


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So given different outcomes of triangulation, how might a researcher make sense of convergent and divergent information from different philosophies and methods of science? It is often easier to construct meaningful explanations in cases where the evidence is convergent. For example, Azevedo (1997) advocates the use of multiple models for mapping a problem being investigated, and argues that knowledge that is reliable is invariant (or converges) across these models. Convergent explanations rely on similarities, consensus, and central tendencies in explaining a problem or issue under investigation. They tend to treat differences and inconsistencies as bias, errors, outliers, or noise. More difficult (but often more insightful) explanations emerge when different data sources yield inconsistent or contradictory information. Arbitrage provides a strategy for developing holistic explanations based on different accounts of the same phenomenon. Friedman (2000, p. 24) points out that in academe and elsewhere, ‘‘there is a deeply ingrained tendency to think in terms of highly segmented, narrow areas of expertise, which ignores the fact that the real world is not divided up into such neat little bits.’’ He argues that the way to see, understand, and explain complex problems in the world is to systematically connect the different dots, bits, and pieces of information through arbitrage – ‘‘assigning different weights to different perspectives at different times in different situations, but always understanding that it is the interaction of all of them together that is really the defining feature of the [system] y and thereby order the chaos’’ (Friedman, 2000, pp. 23–24). Arbitrage is a process that Wilson (1999) calls ‘‘consilience,’’ integrating fragmented perspectives and bits of knowledge into a larger (gestalt) appreciation of the question being addressed. It is a strategy of explaining differences by seeing the interdependencies and webs of entanglements between different and divergent dimensions of a problem, its boundaries, and its context. Arbitrage, similar to previous multiple paradigm techniques (e.g., Lewis & Grimes, 1999, among others), highlights the convergent and divergent findings among philosophical results and attempts to reconcile or preserve the tension among the results. The reconciliation of divergent results could be conducted at the boundaries or transition zones by developing secondorder theoretical concepts that provide bridges across results from various philosophies of science (Gioia & Pitre, 1990). Alternatively, the preservation of tensions across the results of different philosophies of science can be achieved by moving back and forth between philosophical perspectives and

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cross-fertilizing each perspective’s results without having to integrate them into one perspective (Schultz & Hatch, 1996). Paradoxical thinking provides a way to reconcile and maintain divergent results and also highlights interdependencies and relationships among the divergent dimensions of the problem, its context, and its boundaries. Poole and Van de Ven (1989) discuss four general methods of paradoxical thinking: balancing between opposites, shifting levels of analysis, alternating positions over time, and introducing new conception. Van de Ven (2007) states: In particular, we proposed four different ways to approach apparent paradoxes observed in practice and our theories about the phenomenon. First, accept the paradox or inconsistency, and learn to live with it constructively in a pluralistic world with principles of respect for and balance between oppositions or ‘moderation in all things.’ Second, clarify levels of reference from which different perspectives or interests of a problem arise (e.g., part–whole, micro–macro, or individual–society) and the connections among them. Third, take into account the time needed to explore when contradictory interests or processes each exert a separate influence on the problem. Fourth, introduce new concepts that either correct flaws in logic or provide a more encompassing perspective that dissolves the paradox. (Chapter 8, p. 19)

In sum, unlike traditional triangulation that emphasizes reliability, divergent triangulation emphasizes validity, and provides a means of incorporating, assimilating, and maintaining pluralistic perspectives or outcomes that can be inconsistent or contradictory. Divergent triangulation is consistent with the postmodernist anti-foundational stance (Calas & Smircich, 1999) since it embraces pluralism and denies any ‘‘privileged’’ philosophy of science. Implicitly it asserts that each philosophy does not reflect intrinsic properties of a phenomenon or problem but rather relational, perspectival, idealistic, and provisional properties, and hence the maintenance of inconsistent and contradictory outcomes is unproblematic. It is also a technique for comparative appraisal and evaluation of different philosophies that in turn facilitates communicating across philosophical boundaries and increases reflexivity (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2000; Harley, Hardy, & Alvesson, 2004; Johnson & Duberely, 2003; Lynch, 2000).

CASE OF PROFESSIONAL GROUPS We now provide an example of triangulating philosophies of science by examining a debate in the sociology of professions. Professionals are increasingly becoming part of larger business organizations. The impact of


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such organizations on the individual professionals is an area of particular interest (e.g., Wallace, 1995; Briscoe, 2006). The main concern has been impact of the organizational structure on the professional’s work autonomy (Tolbert & Stern, 1991). Competing theories about the state of professionals’ work autonomy continue to be part of an ongoing debate in the sociology of professions. According to the proletarianization thesis (Braverman, 1974; Larson, 1977), work autonomy is threatened by the imposed administrative procedures such as work rhythms, hours, and technology use that are all subject to managerial approval and review. In contrast, according to the mutation thesis (Freidson, 1983, 1984), hybrid forms for organizations have emerged (e.g., hospitals and law firms) that deviate from the bureaucratic administrative model and provide a setting to accommodate professionals (e.g., professional organizations/bureaucracies; Scott, 1965; Smigel, 1969). With this research opportunity, how might researchers address this debate? Using positivism, postmodernism, and critical realism, we show how each philosophy of science emphasizes and de-emphasizes different aspects of the debate and might offer divergent solutions or outcomes. Each philosophy of science dictates the nature of the problem (ontology), the ways of knowing the problem (epistemology), the methods for understanding or explaining the problem, and the criterion for appraising the solutions or outcomes. Table 2 summarizes the application of these philosophies to the debate.

Table 2. Application of Positivism, Postmodernism, and Critical Realism to the Relationship between Work Standardization and Work Autonomy. Work Standardization - Work Autonomy Positivism

Postmodernism

Critical realism

Focuses on the empirical association between observable variables that are used to operationalize and measure work standardization and work autonomy constructs Focuses on uncovering the subversive and underlying power relations by introducing an ideological dimension to proletarianization thesis that reveals processes of subordination and exploitation where the organizational power brokers are setting and enforcing the goals of work Focuses on alternative plausible models and suggests a cognitive model and an affective model that moderates the underlying mechanisms of ideological and technical proletarianization

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We then discuss the implications of such outcomes especially for our conception of triangulation and adoption of one ‘‘privileged’’ philosophy of science. The adoption of one ‘‘privileged’’ philosophy of science neglects the multidimensionality of reality. We conclude by discussing different types of problems and stakeholders that might benefit from this type of triangulation.

Positivism In response to the debate about the state of professionals’ work autonomy, researchers adopting a positivist philosophy would be preoccupied with the identification of the empirically measurable variables that can be inputs for assessing causal relationships using various statistical techniques. For example, one effect of the employment of professionals in large bureaucratic organizations is the standardization of professional tasks. Wilensky (1964) argues that the degree of codifiability of professional knowledge is inversely proportional to professional autonomy within the organization. In order to assess this effect, the theoretical terms – work standardization and work autonomy – are operationalized using observable terms such as the number of administrative procedures enforced by the organization and the number of tasks performed that deviate from the procedures, respectively. Based on the proletarianization thesis (Braverman, 1974; Larson, 1977), work standardization is inversely proportional to work autonomy. The validity of this conjecture is dependent on the statistical results that should reveal a negative correlation between number of administrative procedures enforced and number of tasks performed that deviate from the procedures. In contrast, the mutation thesis (Freidson, 1983, 1984) suggests that hybrid forms for organizations have emerged where professionals tend to manage and supervise other professionals and hence the predictions of the proletarianization thesis inadequately describe the state of professional employees. The mutation thesis predicts that work standardization is proportional to work autonomy, and the validity of the relationship is dependent on the results that should reveal a positive correlation between observable terms. However, the existence of statistical correlation or event regularities does not provide an adequate explanation of the relationship and the potentially relevant implications of work standardization on work autonomy. An explanation would require elucidating the mechanisms underlying the statistical correlation and an assessment of the role of context.


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As we will see later, postmodernists and critical realists raise some of the implicit assumptions regarding the work standardization construct, as well as the relationship between work standardization and work autonomy, respectively. The postmodernist and critical realist accounts provide alternative explanations of the observed relationship or regularity and their relationship with the unobservables.

Postmodernism In response to the debate about the state of professionals’ work autonomy, postmodern researchers would be preoccupied with challenging the takenfor-granted assumptions of existing positivistic studies to uncover subversive histories or power relations. For example, the positivistic notion of work standardization overlooks more profound processes of subjugation. For postmodernists, instead, concepts such as ‘‘work standardization’’ are placed in inverted commas to indicate their discursively constructed nature. Thus, a possible genealogical analysis of the notion of ‘‘work standardization’’ would entail revealing its development as an outcome of processes of conformity and subordination and would uncover its multidimensional impact on work autonomy. Using Derber’s (1983) distinction between technical proletarianization and ideological proletarianization, postmodernists might highlight the relation between work standardization and work autonomy and illustrate the multilayered process of conformity and subordination that includes the work process as well as the work goals. Technical proletarianization occurs when the professional losses control over the labor process that is now managed by the organization’s administration that purchased the labor, whereas ideological proletarianization occurs when the professional losses control over the uses of the product that is now owned by the organization. More specifically, this distinction highlights the loss of control over the process of conducting work and the loss of control over the goals and social purposes to which work is directed in the relationship between work standardization and work autonomy. Overall, work standardization is related to the specific job attributes and functioning of the entire production-cum-consumption system that dictates the goals and social purposes of work. Forms of work standardization do not reveal some timeless human nature, nor certain characteristics inherent in jobs, but rather ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are effected through particular discourses of work standardization that have arisen in late capitalism.

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Critical Realism Similar to positivism, critical realist researchers would respond to the debate about the state of professionals’ work autonomy by focusing on empirically measurable variables and identifying regularities or covariation between variables using various statistical techniques. After these relationships are established, researchers identify the unobservable generative mechanisms underlying the observable regularity of events and relationships. Using Derber’s (1983) distinction between technical proletarianization and ideological proletarianization, critical realists might highlight the multiple mechanisms underlying the relation between work standardization and work autonomy, namely the constraints on the work process as well as the work goals. However, they might also highlight different plausible alternative models by considering the cognitive and affective aspects of the work and their role in mitigating or accentuating the relationship between work standardization and work autonomy. A cognitive model emphasizes the inherent uncertainty and difficulty in codifying professional tasks that might result in the standardization of work goals that are more amenable to administrative procedures rather than work processes that are much more technical and require a higher level of expertise. Hence, as the technical uncertainty of work increases, organizations are less likely to rely on technical proletarianization. An affective model emphasizes the socialization and training of professionals, their community, and other-regarding orientation and their values. Therefore, professionals with more extended professional training and experience are more likely to resist ideological proletarianization. Overall, work standardization can be viewed from a cognitive and an affective model whereby each specifies the extent to which the mechanisms underlying the work standardization and work autonomy are more or less likely to occur.

Triangulating Philosophies of Science Using these outcomes, different dimensions of reality can be explored and explained. In our case, applying positivism, we explored the relationship between work standardization and work autonomy. However, this relationship neglects the technical and ideological dimension of work standardization. The ideological dimension is exposed using postmodernism that reveals processes of subordination and exploitation where the organizational power


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brokers are defining the goals of work. Finally, critical realism distinguishes between a cognitive model and an affective model in an attempt to show how each moderates the underlying mechanisms of ideological and technical proletarianization of work. We now apply arbitrage and paradoxical thinking to gain a coherent and holistic conception of the relationships between work standardization and work autonomy. More specifically, we link outcomes of each philosophy of science by shifting levels of analysis, alternating positions over time, and introducing new concepts. From postmodernism, we distinguish between technical and ideological proletarianization. Shifting levels of analysis provides an understanding of the underlying complexity of the relationship between work standardization and work autonomy. Whereas technical proletarianization is more likely to vary at the individual level, ideological proletarianization is more likely to vary at the organizational level. More specifically, technical proletarianization begins with the individual’s loss of control over work hours and place of work followed by the routinization of work according to the organization’s plans. Ideological proletarianization, however, refers to the loss of control over the overarching goals and orientations of work that are imposed across organizational members. The interdependence among technical and ideological proletarianization mechanisms can be understood using the cognitive and affective models suggested by critical realism. Whereas the cognitive perspective suggests that organizations resort to ideological proletarianization when the codifiability of professional tasks is high, the affective perspective suggests that organizations might be prohibited from using ideological proletarianization when dealing with professionals that have extended training and experience due to their resistance to change in their work goals and orientations. Understanding the dynamics of technical and ideological proletarianization requires adding a temporal element. By alternating positions over time, Derber (1983) states that the process of proletarianization follows several stages where ideological proletarianization precedes technical proletarianization given that work goals are more amenable to administrative procedures and policies. In addition, technical proletarianization follows two stages beginning with the loss of control over work hours and place of work followed by the routinization of work according to management’s plans. However, the cognitive aspect of professional tasks, namely their uncertainty, has prevented complete technical proletarianization and specifically has prevented the routinization of tasks. Hence, professionals have succumbed to ideological proletarianization that influences the control

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over the goals to which work is put and reduces the domain of professional autonomy to problems technique. Finally, introducing the concepts of ideological desensitization and ideological co-optation (Derber, 1983) that emerged as responses to ideological proletarianization, we can explain the maintenance of such processes of proletarianization. First, ideological desensitization refers to a process where professionals separate themselves from their work, the context in which they conduct their work, and the uses of their work. More specifically, ideological desensitization refers to the refusal to accept the ideological or moral dimensions of work and that work serves certain interests and not others. This process of separation and desensitization prevents discontent on the part of the professionals who are not expecting any ideological or moral dimension to their work. Second, ideological cooptation refers to a process where professionals redefine their goals to be consistent with the organizational goals. In other words, professionals conform to the organizational procedures with their underlying values and expectations to justify their work within their employing organizations. Overall, we apply arbitrage and paradoxical thinking to gain a coherent and holistic conception of the relationship between work standardization and work autonomy. In response to the debate in sociology of professions, we show that the proletarianization thesis provides a partial account of the relationship that is restricted to the ideological domain of work. The mutation thesis, however, complements the proletarianization thesis but is restricted to the technical domain of work. In addition, we show that neither thesis reveals the interdependence among the ideological and technical domains, the underlying temporal dynamics of the relationship, or the factors maintaining proletarianization.

TYPES OF PROBLEMS THAT REQUIRE TRIANGULATION Many phenomena contain inconsistent and contradictory elements. Rendering such problems as incommensurable denies their reality. As Suppe (1977) insightfully questioned about Kuhn’s claims of incommensurability, if pluralistic perspectives are truly incommensurable, how is it possible that scholars (and practitioners) can compare different paradigms and communicate constructively across paradigms? One implication of the divergent triangulation is that researchers need to expand their traditional explanations that emphasize convergent central tendencies to include


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explanations based on inconsistent findings through arbitrage and contradictory findings with methods of paradoxical reasoning (Weaver & Gioia, 1994). Two problems that require this type of triangulation are those requiring the views of multiple stakeholders and distributed cognition. Understanding the views of multiple stakeholders requires compiling and coordinating between and among perspectives, world views and accounts, and appraising their interrelationships. In so far as convergence is possible, then a unified and integrated position can be developed and addressed. However, more often than not, the perspectives, world views, and accounts do not share a complete part–whole relationship, and hence unification, integration, or even elimination cannot be accomplished, at least not to the detriment of developing a solution. To address such problems, nonconvergent triangulation provides tools such as arbitrage and paradoxical reasoning to recognize and compare pluralistic accounts and views of different stakeholders. Similarly, distributed problems require more than one human being to accomplish the cognitive requirements (Hutchins, 1991). As Giere (2002) argues, understanding such problems requires coordinating knowledge rather than simply pooling knowledge statistically by different people or units. Divergent triangulation, through arbitrage, facilitates the coordination of individual bits of knowledge and organizes them into an organized system operating in real time. Hence, the problems are appraised and resolved without the mediating reductionism, parsimony, and unification of traditional triangulation.

CONCLUSION Management scholars in each philosophy of science use a repertoire of wellestablished methods and techniques to identify event regularities in the empirical world. Positivism, postmodernism, and critical realism treat the regularities as expressions of historical, contextual, and developmental processes of discourses or mechanisms, respectively. However, the assumptions and presuppositions of each philosophy impede any unification, integration, or elimination. Some of these assumptions are ontological, which have implications for the nature of the world, and epistemological, which have implications for the ways of knowing the world such as the causal relations employed and the structure of the domain under investigation. For positivism, the causal relations are restricted to the domain of the empirically observable. For postmodernism and critical realism, the causal relations include not only the empirical but also the social and personal/mental that

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interact and mutually affect each other. Despite there being one phenomenon or problem under investigation such as in our case example, each philosophy of science provides a partial and provisional perspective. Each philosophy highlights different areas, parts, and domains as causally active or inactive. Hence, using divergent triangulation, management scholars can appreciate the perspectival and transient nature of the pluralistic outcomes of each philosophy. This equips scholars with a technique to address the questions and use the methods specific to each philosophy to understand complex phenomenon. It is only when a ‘‘privileged’’ philosophy is propounded that seeks to displace or eliminate others that conflict arises. More often than not, this conflict is due to the researcher’s philosophical orientation rather than the phenomenon or problem under investigation.

NOTES 1. We maintain that the major difference between a philosophy of science and a paradigm is in terms of their substantive orientations. While a philosophy of science specifies a set of ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions, it is not oriented toward a specific scientific field of inquiry but is assumed to apply broadly to all fields. Paradigms, however, tend to be oriented toward a specific scientific field of inquiry and provide a more concrete set of philosophical assumptions that are ontological, epistemological, and methodological. For example, positivism is philosophy of science that maintains a general set of philosophical assumptions that can apply to any scientific field of inquiry; however, functionalism is a paradigm that is typically associated with sociological inquiry. 2. These three philosophical schools are featured in this chapter because they reflect many current practices and debates among social scientists. Positivism and postmodernism set the outer limits of philosophical thought with their contrasting ontology and epistemology, and hence bracket the discussion of critical realism which lies in between the previous schools. 3. Popper claimed that scientific activity often emerged out of metaphysical speculation and creative intuition that might become testable and therefore scientific. He replaced logical positivism’s inductive and verificationist principles with deduction and falsification. He reversed verificationism, which proves a theory, into falsificationism that only disproves a theory. With his falsificationism, he attempted to avoid Hume’s skepticism by providing a systemic way of conducting science. Thus, any statement that cannot be falsified or refuted was metaphysical and therefore not scientific. This process of falsificationism leads to epistemological Darwinism where the fittest of theories will survive empirical refutation. This evolutionary process leads to better approximations of the truth or increases truthlikeness/verisimilitude. Yet, Popper still preserves some of the positivist assumptions such as the possibility of a theory-neutral observational language, a


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modified correspondence theory of truth, the methodological unity of the sciences, and the use of science to control the natural and social environment. 4. Hume defined causality as a product of habitual experience. The four conditions to insure causality are: constant conjunction (two events are constantly associated with each other), antecedence (events occur sequentially in time), contiguity (both events are spatially in the same location), and necessity (no alternative observation). The last condition, necessity, was problematic since it was impossible to observe all instances of the phenomenon under investigation, and thus any universal law from a finite number of observations can never be certain. 5. Since critical realism espouses a stratified ontology, that is, the mind-independent world consists of three strata – the real, the actual, and the empirical – it construes each stratum as interdependent and nonreducible to its constituent strata.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT We greatly appreciate the suggestions of Haridimos Tsoukas on an earlier draft of this chapter.

REFERENCES Alvesson, M., & Deetz, S. (1996). Critical theory and postmodernism approaches to organizational studies. In: S. Clegg, C. Hardy & W. Nord (Eds), Handbook of organizational studies (pp. 191–217). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Alvesson, M., & Skoldberg, K. (2000). Reflexive methodology: New vistas for qualitative research. London: Sage. Azevedo, J. (1997). Mapping reality: An evolutionary realist methodology for the natural and social sciences. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Bhaskar, R. (1979). The possibility of naturalism: A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences (1st ed.). Brighton: Harvester Press. Bhaskar, R. (1998a). General introduction. In: M. Archer, R. Bhaskar, A. Collier, T. Lawson & A. Norrie (Eds), Critical realism: Essential readings (pp. ix–xxiv). New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. Bhaskar, R. (1998b). Philosophy and scientific realism. In: M. Archer, R. Bhaskar, A. Collier, T. Lawson & A. Norrie (Eds), Critical realism: Essential readings (pp. 16–47). New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. Bhaskar, R. (1998c). The logic of scientific discovery. In: M. Archer, R. Bhaskar, A. Collier, T. Lawson & A. Norrie (Eds), Critical realism: Essential readings (pp. 48–104). New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. Blumberg, A. E., & Feigl, H. (1948). Logical positivism. The Journal of Philosophy, 28, 281–296. Boyd, R. (1991). Confirmation, semantics and the interpretation of scientific theories. In: R. Boyd, P. Gasper & J. D. Trout (Eds), The philosophy of science (pp. 12–34). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York: Monthly Review.

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Poole, M. S., & Van de Ven, A. H. (1989). Using paradox to build management and organization theories. Academy of Management Review, 15, 562–578. Schultz, M., & Hatch, M. J. (1996). Living with multiple paradigms: The case of paradigm interplay in organizational cultural studies. Academy of Management Review, 21, 529–557. Scott, W. A. (1965). Reactions to supervision in a heteronomous professional organization. Administrative Science Quarterly, 10(1), 65–81. Sim, S. (2001). Postmodernism and philosophy. In: S. Sim (Ed.), The Routledge companion to postmodernism (2nd ed., pp. 3–14). New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. Smigel, E. O. (1969). The Wall Street lawyer, professional organization man? London: Free Press of Glencoe. Suppe, F. (1977). The structure of scientific theories (2nd ed.). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Tolbert, P. S., & Stern, R. N. (1991). Organizations of professionals: Governance structures in large law firms. In: P. S. Tolbert & S. R. Barley (Eds), Research in the sociology of organizations (Vol. 8, pp. 97–117). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Tsoukas, H. (1994). Refining common sense: Types of knowledge in management studies. Journal of Management Studies, 31(6), 761–780. Van de Ven, A. H. (2007). Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research. New York: Oxford University Press. Van Maanen, J. (1995). Fear and loathing. Organization Science, 6(6), 687–692. Wallace, J. E. (1995). Organizational and professional commitment in professional and nonprofessional organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(2), 228–255. Weaver, G. R., & Gioia, D. A. (1994). Paradigms lost: Incommensurability vs structurationist inquiry. Organization Studies, 15, 565–589. Wilensky, H. L. (1964). The professionalization of everyone? American Journal of Sociology, 70, 137–159. Wilson, E. O. (1999). Consilience. New York: Prentice Hall.

John Bechara is a doctoral candidate in strategic management and organizations at the Carlson School of Management of the University of Minnesota. He received his MBA from the University of Minnesota and his BS in computer science from the American University of Beirut. His current research focuses on professions and occupations, organizational change, social networks, and the philosophy of science. His work has been published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior. Andrew H. Van de Ven is Vernon H. Heath Professor of Organizational Innovation and Change in the Carlson School of Management of the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1972, and taught at Kent State University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania before his present appointment. Prof. Van de Ven directed the Minnesota Innovation Research Program that tracked a wide variety of innovations from concept to implementation during the 1980s. Since 1994 he has been conducting a

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longitudinal real-time study of changes in health care organizations. He is coauthor of The Innovation Journey (1999), Organizational Change and Innovation Processes: Theory and Methods for Research (2000), Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation (2004), and Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organization and Social Research (forthcoming), all by Oxford University Press. Van de Ven was 2000–2001 President of the Academy of Management.

RICHARD RORTY, WOMEN, AND THE NEW PRAGMATISM Barbara Czarniawska ABSTRACT This chapter presents selected elements of Richard Rorty’s philosophy, with special emphasis on his role in re-introducing women to philosophy. It pleads for a greater attention to new pragmatist thinking in organization theory. Keywords: New pragmatism; gender; feminism; irony; solidarity; inspiring reading; recontextualization. ‘‘What is the use of philosophy?’’ The question has been asked many a time, and the answers vary – whether among philosophers or nonphilosophers. For many philosophers, the question already has an unpleasantly pragmatistic ring – unpleasant, that is, if one is not fond of pragmatist philosophy. In Sweden, the country where I live, philosophy – primarily under the analytic influence – has become an elitist hobby of no relevance for the wider public. At least so thought some young philosophers who started a ‘‘Philosophy bar’’ – first in Gothenburg, and then Stockholm – where invited guests, philosophers, and even management scholars, answered this question in front of a general audience. I was one of them, and my account – then and now – was quite personal. This is because I believe, like Marta Nussbaum (1994), that philosophy exists to help people cope with life and work. The philosophy Philosophy and Organization Theory Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 32, 365–383 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2011)0000032015

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that helped me is pragmatism, and especially the new pragmatism of Richard Rorty.

MY FIRST MEETING WITH NEW PRAGMATISM In 1991, Linda Smircich and Marta Cala´s came to Sweden for a visit, and as visitors tend to, they brought presents for their hosts. I received a book about Emily Dickinson, which gave me great pleasure, but also learned that they had a present for Mats Alvesson: Richard Rorty’s newest book, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989). I was curious, and they allowed me to take a look. The very first paragraph that I read, quite accidentally, made me cry: I shall define an ‘‘ironist’’ as someone who fulfills three conditions: (1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books that she has encountered; (2) she realizes that arguments phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. (1989, p. 47)

I cried because I understood that for 25 years (as of 1991), I had been reading English texts1 speaking of ‘‘man,’’ ‘‘he,’’ and ‘‘him’’ doing a constant if unconscious translation to a form that would include myself into the collection of expected readers of the text. My emotional reaction to Rorty’s text revealed to me that, equally unconsciously, I was constantly harboring a suspicion that the texts were not meant for me. Especially the combination ‘‘female ironist’’ was practically an oxymoron in the world of received ideas (Geertz, 1988). No wonder that I immediately bought the book for my own use. Ten years later, I had the opportunity to meet Rorty at Stanford University, where he taught in the Department of Comparative Literature, after having retired from his post at the University of Virginia. He told me then that many philosophers have started, consequently, to use the pronoun ‘‘she’’ in their texts, and are planning to do so for the next 2000 years, in order to achieve historical justice. My gender was not the only reason for my interest in Rorty’s text, but even those reasons were personal, in the sense that they had to do with my past. I was born and educated in Poland, which had long been under the strong influence of idealism and rationalism. Strangely enough, both Germany and France, the birthplaces of both idealist and rationalist philosophies, manage to combine them with strongly pragmatistic tendencies, not the least in business and administration.2 Pragmatism was the philosophy of action.

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In contrast, Poland and Italy, for various historical reasons, developed a preference for what I called a merciless idealism (Czarniawska, 2002). Action philosophy was based upon the firm conviction that human nature was faulty and weak, with a tendency toward evil. This conviction was not necessarily wrong (see, e.g., Kolakowski, 2005), but it led to a prescription for action that dictated the creation of a vision of a perfect future in which all these defects will be removed, followed by a detailed reform program. Opposition and rebellion had to be curbed through punishment and preventive measures of punitive character. Such an action program could be found both to the right and to the left within the ideological landscape. The merciless idealism rendered several appealing products, including the school of philosophy known as praxiology, grounded by Tadeusz Kotarbinski (1965). It was a fascinating philosophical oxymoron: an antipragmatist theory of pragmatic action, an idealist theory of action aimed at a universal model of successful action – of any kind, for anybody, in any place at any time. This school of thought was greatly appreciated by the so-called communist regime in Poland, which was looking desperately for prescriptions of effectiveness that could be claimed as untainted by ideologies. After all, Lenin had allegedly said that ‘‘we (the USSR) are going to learn from the devil himself,’’ meaning Frederick Taylor. My discipline, management and organization theory, was originally formed under the strong influence of engineering, its roots tracing back to the work of engineer Karol Adamiecki (1931; see also Czarniawska, 2009). Although Adamiecki was a convinced pragmatist, the leading tune in the 1970s was the newly coined discipline of cybernetics, and the key term was ‘‘system design.’’ It was not considered especially significant that things did not work; trying to correct the faults would be a waste of time. All efforts should be directed at designing ideal systems, which would automatically exclude all types of problems and errors. The economists who were busy designing an ideal planned economy shared this engineering idea. The result was a world full of planners of ideal systems and of nonfunctioning objects and institutions. A young university teacher in the 1970s, I had developed a keen interest in active teaching methods, and avidly read John Dewey, whose work became a useful guide for me. What attracted me most was exactly the idea that, instead of designing an ideal system, one could start from a concrete problem to be solved. Various OD gurus have, in time, vulgarized Dewey’s ideas, but his philosophy stayed with me. This vulgarization, or perhaps trivialization, has much to do with the presently widespread use of the word ‘‘pragmatism’’ in everyday parlance. Like Cynics, who, unprotected by their writings, have become

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translated – from the most courageous group of philosophers who ever tried to face life and the world as it is to immoral unbelievers (Nussbaum, 1994) – so ‘‘pragmatists’’ has become a label for unprincipled opportunists. It is revealing that in English ‘‘opportunity’’ is a positive word, but ‘‘opportunist’’ is not. But pragmatism, in its philosophical rendition, does not encourage opportunism. Its mission, if such a high-faluting word is applicable, is to support people’s attempts to be free from the tyranny of higher principles. It also assumes that (many) people do like things to work smoothly and well. Thus problem-oriented teaching, for example, does not mean that academia must do what the industry demands. It means that teaching should contribute to the production of local knowledge rather than universal knowledge, if any such thing can exist in the first place. Dewey led me to William James, the best-ever writing philosopher across centuries.3 It took me some time afterwards to get back to pragmatism. It was actually Contingency that I read in secret that made me go back and read, chronologically, all Rorty’s works. What follows is not a systematic presentation of Rorty’s thoughts, but a personal collage. I am going to present the excerpts that were most relevant for my life and work – either because they confirmed what I already believed, or because they made me change my beliefs. The latter kind of reading Rorty calls inspiring reading, in contrast to the systematic one.

WHERE IS TRUTH? Richard Rorty raised general interest when his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was published in 1979. This book begins with a provocative statement: y the notion of knowledge as accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation needs to be abandoned. (1979, p. 6, italics mine, BC)

What followed was a critique of the correspondence theory of truth – the idea that words can (and should) mirror things – a critique based on the claim that it is impossible to compare words with things they denote. y to think of language as a picture of the world – a set of representations which philosophy needs to exhibit as standing in some sort of nonintentional relation to what they represent – is not useful in explaining how language is learned or understood. (1979, p. 295)


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Words can be compared only to other words, so instead of wasting time on attempting the impossible – finding words that will mirror reality – philosophers should try to understand how language is acquired and how it is possible that people can communicate with one another. The idea that a language can exist that more or less ‘‘corresponds’’ to reality (an ancient obsession, see Eco, 1995) is, according to Rorty, not only superfluous but also harmful. As he put it, ironically: y nature has no preferred way of being represented, and thus no interest in a canonical notation. (1979, p. 300) y objectivity should be seen as conformity to the norms of justification we find about us (1979, p. 361) (y) the community as source of epistemic authority. (1979, p. 188, italics mine, BC)

The division between ‘‘objective representations’’ and ‘‘subjective opinions’’ that makes part of the correspondence theory of truth has always been problematic. An object, by definition, cannot have opinions; only a subject can. A subject can have opinions about herself or another subject, but in such cases they will be objects of her opinions. Here Rorty, like the STS scholars after him (see, e.g., Latour, 2005), recoursed to grammar: what is a subject and what is an object depends on their placement in the sentence and on the context of the utterance. No recourse to grammar can abolish a common usage, and ‘‘objective representations’’ belong to such common usage in most languages. So, asked Rorty, ‘‘What is usually meant by that?’’ In his opinion, an adjective ‘‘objective’’ is ascribed to opinions that raise few protests. This is because: y words take their meaning from other words rather than by virtue of their representative character, and (y) vocabularies acquire their privileges from the men who use them rather than from their transparency to the real. (1979, p. 368, gender not accidental, BC)

Words and expressions in common usage – a certain vocabulary – are taken for granted because in most cases they were coined by people with authority or power, and not because they have a direct relationship to reality. Ferdinand de Saussure and Michel Foucault were of the same opinion. Saussure’s theory of language (1933/1983) claims that words have significance only to the extent they can be related to other words: they refer to, not relate to. Foucault (1979) pointed out that people believe in one thing rather than another not because it corresponds to reality, but because it has been formulated by an authority voice.

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Other concepts that Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature criticizes are ‘‘mental processes’’ and the very concept of ‘‘mind,’’ as a mediator between ‘‘things’’ and ‘‘words.’’ Ironically as usual, Rorty said that ‘‘y if the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind’’ (1979, p. 239). Indeed, the functioning of the body and its organs, brain included, still remains, for the most part, a mystery. Thus the invention of the ‘‘mind,’’ with the result that instead of one thing to explain, there are now two: body and mind. Thus, there can be no principal opposition to the use of such terms as ‘‘mind’’ and ‘‘mental processes’’; they can be used by anybody who wishes to use them. The pragmatist’s question, however, is: Do they work? In this context, it means: Do they help us to understand anything, or do they complicate the complexity of the world even further? What are ‘‘mental processes’’? Rorty called them bits of ghostly stuff, something that is neither language nor matter, but something ‘‘in between.’’ Introducing concepts such as ‘‘mental processes’’ means creating yet another mediator between ‘‘neurons’’ and ‘‘words,’’ ‘‘neural states’’ and ‘‘utterances.’’ Rorty recommended a diligent application of Ockham’s razor: take away ‘‘mental processes’’ as research objects and you are left with neural states and utterances. How do they relate to each other in turn? They do not; they are expressions in two vocabularies used to describe the same phenomenon. It is just as well, therefore, not to use them in the same sentence. It makes no sense in our linguistic universe to say, ‘‘His two neurons met and because of that he felt agitated.’’ In contrast, the utterance ‘‘I felt pain – I cried – I apologized for it’’ can be convincingly presented as a cause–effect chain. The same chain can be described as a series of connected neural states. In principle, it should be possible to translate all utterances (and other actions) into series of neural states, but such a project seems relatively impractical. It would be possible to show the difference in neural states between the use of different words, between idiosyncratic and common expressions, but it is doubtful what use could one make of such knowledge. Rather, it would be yet another case of science replacing complexity with complication (Latour, 2005). It was Rorty’s belief that myriad tables and equations lose in competition with one sentence by a talented writer, who with this sentence makes the reader believe that she understood all of life and the whole world. Consequences of such reasoning would be revolutionary for psychology (which, however, seems to go in the direction of neuropsychology), but it is philosophy that was at the center of Rorty’s interest. One of his targets in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was an ahistorical, universalizing, and privileged stance ascribed to philosophy. For him, philosophy must be


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relevant – for individuals and for societies – and the road toward such a goal cannot lead through the construction of hermetic vocabularies that only trained philosophers can understand. If philosophy is an attempt to see how ‘‘things, in the largest sense of the term, hang together, in the largest sense of the term’’ then it will always involve the construction of images which will have characteristic problems and will beget characteristic genres of writing. (1979, p. 114)

For Rorty, philosophy is (or ought to be) a mixture of poetry and rhetoric, intent on creating images and circulating them. Upon inspection, such creation and circulation reveal certain regularities, which can be called a genre. The adherents to such genre will strive after y a pragmatic theory (view?) of truth and a therapeutic approach to ontology (in which philosophy can straighten out pointless quarrels between common sense and science, but not contribute any arguments of its own for the existence or inexistence of something). (1979, p. 175)

Philosophy should not be offering ontological claims. Whether or not the cat sits on the mat was an empirical question for Rorty, with the answer to be given by the observers. Philosophy can neither offer any absolutist ideas about what is the truth or what should be treated as truth; it can only comment upon the way different people create knowledge about the cat and why they often disagree. How do people acquire knowledge about the world in different lands, at different times, or even in different professions? Karin Knorr Cetina (1999) would have called this a study of epistemic cultures. Finally, a therapeutic approach to ontology fits well with the idea that philosophy should offer therapy, not theory. In this belief, Rorty agrees with Martha Nussbaum, the Hellenist philosopher, although she is an Aristotelian and he is anti-Aristotelian. Nussbaum opted for y [t]he idea of a practical and compassionate philosophy – a philosophy that exists for the sake of human beings, in order to address their deepest needs, confront their most urgent perplexities, and bring them from misery to some greater measure of flourishing y. (1994, p. 3)

And Rorty, in a more down-to-earth idiom, wrote: To see keeping a conversation going as a sufficient aim of philosophy, to see wisdom as consisting in the ability to sustain a conversation, is to see human beings as generators of new descriptions rather than beings one hopes to be able to describe accurately. (1979, p. 378)

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Sustaining a conversation is important, because it is the only way to try to avoid wars. In a sense, what we were talking about is not vital, as long as we are talking to one another. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was written mainly in order to differentiate pragmatism from the analytical philosophy. A more distinct formulation of the pragmatist manifesto can be found in later books.

PRAGMATIST MANIFESTO Consequences of Pragmatism begins with a provocative summary of the message of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: y a pragmatist theory about truth y says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about. (1982, p. xiii)

Such formulations regularly provoked accusations of antirealism or relativism or both. Rorty rejected those accusations as misguided. Pragmatism, in Rorty’s version, is antiessentialist but not antirealist. This means that there is no truth to be found in an object, which does not prevent anybody from creating realistic knowledge about it. The value of such knowledge can be tested in practice; a description is ‘‘right’’ (rather than ‘‘correct’’) when it works for the purpose at hand.4 Truth is therefore a question of the beliefs that are useful in practice, and therefore is constantly tested and changed. For Rorty, the main difference between nonpragmatist and pragmatist philosophers lies not in their definition of reality: The difference [between non-pragmatist and pragmatist philosophies] is not one between ‘‘correspondence’’ and ‘‘coherence’’ theories of truth – it is the difference between regarding truth, goodness and beauty as eternal objects that we are trying to locate and revel and regarding them as artifacts whose fundamental design we often have to alter. (1982, p. 92).

This can be treated as an admission of social constructivism, but in its original sense, given to it by the movement of Soviet artists and poets (Chicherin and Selvinsky, 1923): words are things, and need to be treated as such.5 Thus pragmatism can come up with a truth, but not with the truth or the theory of truth. It can attempt to build a theory about the way truths are created, destroyed, and recreated – the very thing we field researchers attempt to do.


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Even if language and speech are important, they do not deserve any privileged stance within pragmatism. Speaking is a human activity among many others: ‘‘y the activity of uttering sentences is one of the things people do in order to cope with their environment’’ (1982, p. xviii). Or, as we say in organization theory, talk is a kind of action and there is no reason to make a dramatic difference between talk and other kinds of actions (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1988). Another division that pragmatism proposes to abolish is the one between art and science. Science can be seen as a literary genre6 and, conversely, art and fiction can be seen as research activities. Such differences as exist concern products: there are theories, propositions, and concepts; there are pictures and words; there are poems, novels, films, and short stories. The activity, however, is the same, because ‘‘[w]e can see ourselves as never encountering reality except under a chosen description. This (y) has nothing to do with ‘idealism’ – with the suggestion that we can or should draw metaphysical comfort from the fact that reality is ‘spiritual in nature’’’ (1982, pp. xxxix–xl). In such a world, the philosophers would be ‘‘all-purpose intellectuals who were ready to offer a view on pretty much anything, in the hope of making it hang together with everything else’’ (1982, p. xxxix). The book ends with a reiteration of the statement concerning the role of philosophy in society from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: In the end, the pragmatists tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right. (1982, p. 166)

Philosophers freed from the obligation of seeking the truth can busy themselves with a topic of great important to themselves and others alike: solidarity.

SOLIDARITY IN THE CENTER OF THINGS Rorty’s conviction that solidarity is of utmost importance is visible in all his writings, beginning with Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Already in the Introduction, he specified his view on solidarity: In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen (y) as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves y. (1989, p. xiv)

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What is more, he argued that greater human solidarity is the basis of moral progress: ‘‘The view that I am offering says that there is indeed such a thing as moral progress, and that this progress is indeed in the direction of greater human solidarity’’ (1989, p. 192). Human solidarity means seeing others, despite their differences, as similar to ‘‘us,’’ though only in certain key aspects, such as the ability to feel ‘‘pain and humiliation’’ (1989, p. 192). In ‘‘certain aspects,’’ because Rorty never claimed that all human beings share a common essence. For him, solidarity is ‘‘a matter of imaginative identification with the details of others’ lives, rather than a recognition of something antecedently shared’’ (1989, p. 190). How can this striving for solidarity be combined with irony? In Rorty’s edition, irony is, in the first place, a self-irony. After all, an ironist has ‘‘ y radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books that she has encountered’’ (1989, p. 47). An ironist has a good memory; she remembers that she has not always used the present vocabulary, and therefore is fully aware that even this one can give place to another – in time. There is no final truth that will disperse all doubts once and for all. Thus the present vocabulary is the best she can – at present – find to talk about things that concern her. But she cannot defend that vocabulary by claiming that it is closer to reality than any other, or that an external authority exists that can legitimize it. Once again, the hydra of antirealism raises its many heads, and once again Rorty has defended his argument with a statement that is among his most quoted: To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes that do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations. (1989, pp. 4–5)

She who recognizes the difference between the reality out there and the truth that is born in here, in solidarity among people, can afford to be ironic. She is a historian and a cultural anthropologist who remembers the rise and fall of the old truths, and who humbly expects the same to happen to her truths. But there is an important difference between private and public ironic vocabularies. Rorty illustrated this difference by contrasting such ‘‘private’’ ironists as Nietzsche and Derrida, and ‘‘public’’ ironists such as Foucault and himself. The private ironists do not seem to place a high value on solidarity. In the end of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Rorty said, perhaps overoptimistically, that the present epoch is the first in the history in which


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many people were finally able to distinguish between the questions ‘‘Do you agree with us?’’ and ‘‘Do you suffer?.’’ This optimism seems to have vanished, or has at least been postponed by a century in the quasi-science-fiction story in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999). Nevertheless, he was always convinced that the purpose of life – for philosophers and nonphilosophers alike – is to diminish suffering, not to search for the truth.

ETHNOCENTRISM? Among many criticisms that new pragmatism in general and Rorty’s version in particular has encountered, the one that interested me most was the accusation of ethnocentrism, which gave rise to a debate between Clifford Geertz and Richard Rorty, reprinted in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (1991). I see this debate as significant not because of the requirement of political correctness, but because the plea for solidarity can be questioned on the grounds of ethnocentrism. Geertz was worried that there are no good prescriptions for a satisfactory way of solving problems created by the current development – societies that are increasingly pluricultural. In Geertz’s opinion, ‘‘[w]e are living more and more in the midst of an enormous collage (y) the world is coming at each of its local points to look more like a Kuwaiti bazaar than like an English gentlemen’s club’’ (1991, p. 209). Rorty replied: These [Geertz’s] descriptions seem right to me, but I do not see why Geertz thinks that we bourgeois liberals need to change our thinking about cultural diversity in order to deal with this situation. For this is just the sort of situation that the Western liberal ideal of procedural justice was designed to deal with (y) The relevant point is that one does not have to accept much else from Western culture to find the Western liberal ideal of procedural justice attractive y You cannot have an old-timey Gemeinschaft unless everybody pretty well agrees on who counts as a decent human being and who does not. But you can have a civil society of the bourgeois democratic sort. (p. 209)

It is necessary to point out that Rorty was using the term ‘‘liberal’’ in its US meaning; according to him, its closest equivalent in European politics is social democracy, although Rorty would not accept its tendency to preempt the desires of other social classes – thus the addition ‘‘bourgeois.’’ His understanding of the term was, he claimed, inspired by the writings of Judith Shklar, whose definition of liberalism was as follows: Every adult should be able to make as many effective decisions without fear and favor about as many aspects of her or his life as is compatible with the like freedom of every other adult. (1989/1998, p. 3)7

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Is not the admission of belonging to the bourgeois class and of sharing its ideals yet another proof of ethnocentrism – more specifically, class-centrism? Rorty foresaw this criticism, too: We would rather die than be ethnocentric, but ethnocentrism is precisely the conviction that one would rather die than share certain beliefs. We then find ourselves wondering whether our own bourgeois liberalism is not just one more example of cultural bias. (1991, p. 203)

Such wondering, or reflection, indeed reveals an ethnocentrism, but also its inevitability: (y.) It urges liberals to take with full seriousness the fact that the ideals of procedural justice and human equality are parochial, recent, eccentric cultural developments, and then to recognize that this does not mean they are any less worth fighting for. It urges that ideals may be local and culture-bound, and nevertheless be the best hope of the species. (1991, p. 208)

In other words, there is no need for (and perhaps no possibility of) an external (to humanity) authority to legitimize one’s beliefs. No evidence exists, and perhaps no evidence – natural or historical – can exist to demonstrate that it is better if women are treated at par with men. But this is no reason to stop fighting for such equality. This liberal stance is also in conflict with the metanarrative of emancipation (where Rorty expresses opinions similar to those of Latour, 1993). In another essay in the same volume, ‘‘Cosmopolitanism without emancipation. A response to Lyotard,’’ he wrote: For we want narratives of increasing cosmopolitanism, though not narratives of emancipation. For we think that there was nothing to emancipate (y) There is no human nature which was once, or still is, in chains. (1991, p. 213)

It is the ambition of emancipating others – not ethnocentrism – that is arrogant. Ethnocentrism is merely a reminder that all utterances come from some place, from some point in time. Thus, according to Rorty, the concept of ‘‘relativism’’ makes little sense. If all opinions are equally good, we will permit suffering and injustice. If fighting against injustice and alleviating suffering needs a superhuman legitimation, we may wait long to find it.

ON METHOD Already in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty had suggested that ‘‘imaginative identification,’’ the basis of solidarity, would be best developed


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with the help of art and literature, which have primary roles to play in fostering this imaginative ability. ‘‘This is not a task for theory, but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel’’ (1989, p. xvi). Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth contains an essay called ‘‘Inquiry as recontextualization: an anti-dualist account of interpretation,’’ which is especially relevant for social scientists. In this text, Rorty suggested that the time had come to part from traditional hermeneutics, acknowledging its enormous importance in the past. It is time to forget such dualisms as nature– culture, mind–body.8 Further, he expressed a doubt as to ‘‘methods that should fit the study objects,’’ and did not see as fruitful the division into ‘‘natural sciences’’ and ‘‘cultural sciences.’’ By getting rid of the idea of ‘‘different methods appropriate to the natures of different objects’’ one switches attention from the ‘‘demands of the object’’ to the demand of the purpose which a particular inquiry is supposed to serve (y) For now one is debating what purposes are worth bothering to fulfill, which are more worthwhile than others, rather than which purposes the nature of humanity or of reality obliges us to have. (1991, p. 110)

As to ‘‘mind versus body,’’ he reiterated and developed his previous ideas: Think of human minds as webs of beliefs and desires, of sentential attitudes – webs which continuously reweave themselves so as to accomodate new sentential attitudes (y) The web of belief should be regarded not just as a self-reweaving mechanism but as one which produces movements in the organism’s muscles movements which kick the organism itself into action. These actions, by shoving items in the environment around, produce new beliefs to be woven in, which in turn produce new actions, and so on for as long as the organism survives. (1991, p. 94)

This way of thinking has obvious consequences for understanding of the ‘‘self’’ and of an individual identity: y there is no self distinct from this self-reweaving web. All there is to the human self is just that web. To view beliefs as habits of action is to view the self from the outside. From that angle, there is no distinction between mind and bodyy .(1991, p. 94)

Thus it makes little sense to behold the distinction between the mind and the body, but it does make sense to maintain a difference between an actor and an observer, to use Luhmannian terms (see Seidl & Becker, 2005). If I tell somebody about my beliefs, that somebody can report only what I have said – not my beliefs, which only I can report. This is, of course, of crucial importance for social studies, where the mistake of taking utterances for ‘‘mental processes’’ is extremely common. Much as there are no ‘‘natural’’ dichotomies, some dichotomies or classifications may be useful and therefore worth preserving. Among them,

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Rorty counted the Deweyan distinction between a habit and an inquiry – between that which is taken for granted and that which is questioned or problematized (no inquiry can concern everything at once; some things must remain ‘‘as usual’’ for the time of a given inquiry). Of similar usefulness is the distinction between justification and causation – a legitimate explanation and a link between cause and effect. Nevertheless, such distinctions are merely useful devices; they are not deduced from ‘‘ontological differences’’: y the pragmatist (y) recognizes relations of justification holding between beliefs and desires, and relations of causation holding between these beliefs and desires and other items in the universe, but no relations of representation. (1991, p. 97) We can draw a line between objects which cause you to have beliefs about them by fairly direct causal means and other objects. In the case of the latter sort of objects, the relevant causal relations are either terribly indirect or simply non-existent. (1991, p. 106)

Weather belongs among the former, whereas neutrons belong to the latter (temporarily, of course; there may be times where neutrons will cause beliefs and desires more directly than the weather does, and even now this is probably the case with theoretical physicists). What is research, then, if not a search for truth and a quest to describe essences of objects? A sheer recontextualization, believed Rorty, oftentimes a recontextualization ‘‘for the hell of it’’ (1991, p. 110). This should be enough – for scientists as well as for artists.

DOES EVERYBODY LIKE RORTY? PRAGMATISM AND FEMINISM There have been great many protests against pragmatism (dating from the time of Dewey) and against Rorty’s views within philosophy. Because I am not a philosopher, I do not intend to enter those debates. More fascinating to me are the protests coming from social sciences, and not least from feminist authors. In general, critically minded social scientists are worried by the fact that if there are no a priori, external criteria permitting a differentiation between the good and the evil, even the Holocaust can be justified as ‘‘useful’’ for somebody’s ‘‘purpose at hand.’’ To which Rorty answered dryly in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), a collection of essays meant for the wider public, that: [i]t is unfortunate, I think, that many people hope for a tighter link between philosophy and politics than there is or can be. In particular, people on the left keep hoping for a philosophical view which cannot be used by the political right, one which will lend itself


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only to good causes. But there never will be such a view: any philosophical view is a tool which can be used by many different hands. (p. 23)

Can pragmatism be of any use to feminists, therefore, or is it a device lying on the road, for everybody to pick it up and use as an axe or as an ornament? In Truth and Progress (1998), Rorty quoted feminist critique against pragmatism, which came from two standpoints: the essentialist feminists saw antiessentialism as a stance preventing women from realizing their special needs; and the leftist feminists saw pragmatism as reactionary, opting for the status quo in place of progress and emancipation. Rorty’s line of defense is fortified by many references to Dewey, who, in Rorty’s opinion, said little about the situation of women. But that little he said is worth remembering. Thus in tandem, the two pragmatist philosophers presented the following offer of ‘‘a few pieces of special-purpose ammunition’’ (1998, p. 212) to feminism, engaging in conversation with several feminists, but mostly with Catharine MacKinnon. They claimed that ‘‘a pragmatist feminist will see herself as helping to create women rather than attempting to describe them more accurately’’ (1998, p. 212). The verb ‘‘create’’ does not suggest that women do not exist; it suggests creating Utopias (alternative realities) rather than attempting radical interventions (which, short of physical violence, end up either being incomprehensible, or joining the vocabulary of the adversary, thus strengthening it). If there is neither ‘‘true reality’’ nor ‘‘universal imperative’’ to count upon, one is at the mercy of one’s own imagination. ‘‘[T]ry to invent a reality of your own by selecting aspects of the world that lend themselves to the support of your judgment of the worthwhile life’’ (1998, p. 216). This provides moral support, however, rather than a solid fundament to rely upon; deciding what life is worthwhile will be ‘‘one of the things you will constantly change your mind about in the process of selecting a reality. (y) There is no method or procedure to be followed except courageous and imaginative experimentation’’ (1998, p. 217) because y assumptions become visible as assumptions only if we can make the contradictories of these assumptions sound plausible. So injustices may not be perceived as injustices, even by those who suffer them, until somebody invents a previously unplayed role. Only if somebody has a dream, and a voice to describe that dream, does what looked like nature begin to look like culture, what looked like fate begin to look like a moral abomination. For until then only the language of the oppressor is available, and most oppressors have had the wit to teach the oppressed a language in which the oppressed will sound crazy – even to themselves – if they describe themselves as oppressed. (p. 203)

Herein may lie the key to the surprising discoveries reported by researchers such as Joanne Martin (1986) and Barbara Ehrenreich (2001): that women

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perceived by the observers as severely oppressed did not see themselves in that light, or any way of changing this situation other than ‘‘emancipating’’ them. Nevertheless, even individuals of great imagination and courage will not be able achieve semantic authority alone; their statements must become a part of a shared practice. Thus we turn again to solidarity among feminists of both genders: a solidarity that does not require glossing over differences and a political unity. Experimental ways are many and tortuous. In this light, it is not surprising that in his last book, Philosophy and Cultural Politics, Rorty combined pragmatism and romanticism: At the heart of pragmatism is the refusal to accept the correspondence theory of truth and the idea that true beliefs are accurate representations of reality. At the heart of romanticism is the thesis of the priority of imagination over reason – the claim that reason can only follows paths that the imagination has broken. (2007, p. 105)

Reason is traveling the path of past imaginations; the reason of the future will follow the path of the new imagination that has become a shared practice. Art and literature, but also social sciences, are the fields in which versions of alternative realities and new vocabularies can be tested. Philosophy, and philosophers, can help in such endeavors. As Giovanna Borradori (1994, p. 21) rightly noted, the new pragmatism offers the dream of a new humanistic solidarity, to be shared by nations, by individuals, and by various disciplines of arts and sciences, based on nothing more than the fact of mortality and the acknowledgment of the contingency of their respective vocabularies. Is it enough? Is it too little? Will truth really take care of itself when you take care of freedom (Mendieta, 2006)? The answers to these questions will have to wait until the next vocabulary emerges. For the time being, the new pragmatist one can be used to exercise ‘‘imaginative identification’’ in the world that badly needs it.

NOTES 1. In Polish, as in Swedish, there is a generic term for human beings of both sexes, which in Swedish has the feminine gender. 2. Pragmatism, however, is a bourgeois virtue, not appreciated by higher classes (d’Iribarne, 2008). 3. Gordon Craig (1983) claimed that it was Hegel ‘‘who must bear responsibility for making stylistic obscurity respectable in academic and scientific writing. (y) Hegel himself was capable, at least in his youth, of writing a good plain style, as his 1788 essay ‘The Constitution of Germany’ demonstrates. But by the time he had begun work on The Phenomenology of the Spirit (y) he had abandoned his relative lucidity for a prose that has been the despair of legions of earnest students’’ (p. 314).


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4. Many of Alfred Schu¨tz’s ideas were born during his exile from a meeting between the German phenomenology and US pragmatism (see, e.g., his engagement with William James in ‘‘On multiple realities,’’ 1945/1973). 5. The presently popular idealist variation of constructivism seems to assume the opposite: that things are words (even John Searle, 2009 ascribes to this view, probably in order to better criticize it). 6. I tried to put this claim to work in my Writing Management. Organization Theory as a Literary Genre, 1999. 7. I do not believe that either John Stuart Mill or Judith Shklar intended to force people to make choices that they were unwilling to make, which seems to be the present interpretation of this definition by the European liberals. 8. Rorty repeatedly stressed his agreement with many of Latour’s claims (see, e.g., his review of Aramis, or the Love of Technology, 1996).

REFERENCES Adamiecki, K. (1931). Harmonograf. Przegla˛ d Organizacji (4). Polish Bibliography 1901–1939. Available at http://www.bn.org.pl/download/document/1234357030.pdf. Accessed on 26 November 2010. Borradori, G. (1994). The American philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Chicherin, A., & Selvinsky, E.-K. (1923). Znayem (We know. Declaration of constructivist poets). Moscow: K. P. Craig, G. A. (1983). The Germans. New York: Meridian. Czarniawska, B. (1999). Writing management. Organization theory as a literary genre. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Czarniawska, B. (2002). A tale of three cities, or the glocalization of city management. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Czarniawska, B. (2009). My forgotten predecessors. In: K. Sahlin, L. Wedlin & M. Grafstro¨m (Eds.), Exploring the worlds of Mercury and Minerwa. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis (51), 101–112. Czarniawska, B., & Joerges, B. (1988). How to control things with words. On organizational talk and organizational control. Management Communication Quarterly, 2(2), 170–193. de Saussure, F. (1983). Course in general linguistic. London: Duckworth. d’Iribarne, P. (2008). Penser la diversite´ du monde. Paris: Seuil. Eco, U. (1995). In search for the perfect language. Oxford: Blackwell. Ehrenreich, B. (2001). Nickel and dimed. Undercover in low-wage USA. London: Granta Books. Foucault, M. (1979). What is an author?. In: J. V. Harrari (Ed.), Textual strategies. Perspectives in post-structuralist criticism (pp. 141–160). Ithaca: Methuen. Geertz, C. (1988). Works and lives: The anthropologist as author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Knorr Cetina, K. (1999). Epistemic cultures: How sciences make knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kolakowski, L. (2005). The devil in history. In: My correct views on everything (pp. 121–138). South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press.

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Kotarbinski, T. (1965). Praxiology. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1996). Aramis, or the love of technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, J. (1986). The tolerance of injustice. In: J. M. Olson, C. P. Herman & M. P. Zanna (Eds), Relative deprivation and social comparison: The Ontario symposium (Vol. 4, p. 242). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Mendieta, E. (2006). Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself. Interviews with Richard Rorty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (1994). The therapy of desire. Theory and practice in hellenistic ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rorty, R. (1982). Consequences of pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1991). Objectivity, relativism, and truth: Philosophical papers, volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1996). Blinded with science. Voice Literary Supplement, September, 10–12. Rorty, R. (1998). Truth and progress: Philosophical papers, volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1999). Philosophy and social hope. London: Penguin. Rorty, R. (2007). Philosophy as cultural politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schu¨tz, A. (1945/1973). On multiple realities. In: Collected works (Vol. 1, pp. 340–347). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Searle, J. (2009). Fear of knowledge: Against relativism and constructivism by Paul A. Boghossian. New York Review of Books, LVI(14), 88–92. Seidl, D., & Becker, K. H. (Eds). (2005). Niklas Luhmann and organization studies. Malmo¨/ Copengahen: Liber/CBS Press. Shklar, J. (1998). Political thought and political thinkers. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Barbara Czarniawska holds a chair in management studies at GRI, School of Business, Economics and Law at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Doctor honoris causa at Stockholm School of Economics, Copenhagen Business School and Helsinki School of Economics, she is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Royal Engineering Academy, the Royal Society of Art and Sciences in Gothenburg, and Societas Scientiarum Finnica. Czarniawska takes a feminist and constructionist perspective on organizing, recently exploring the connections between popular culture and practice of management, and the organization of the news production. She is interested in methodology, especially in techniques of fieldwork and in the application of narratology to


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organization studies. Recent books in English: A Tale of Three Cities (2002), Narratives in Social Science Research (2004), Actor-Network Theory and Organizing (edited with Tor Hernes, 2005), Global Ideas (edited with Guje Sevoń, 2005), Management Education and Humanities (edited with Pasquale Gagliardi, 2006), Shadowing and Other Techniques of Doing Fieldwork in Modern Societies (2007), A Theory of Organizing (2008).

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