Postmodernism and Management, Volume 21: Pros, Cons and the Alternative

CONTENTS LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

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PREFACE

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INTERPRETIVE UNPACKING: MODERATELY DESTABILIZING IDENTITIES AND IMAGES IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES Mats Alvesson

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TO BE DONE WITH PROGRESS AND OTHER HERETICAL THOUGHTS FOR ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT STUDIES Marta B. Cal´as and Linda Smircich

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MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM, MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Stewart R. Clegg and Martin Kornberger

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BRINGING IDEAS BACK IN: ECLECTICISM AND DISCOVERY IN ORGANIZATIONAL STUDIES Martin Kilduff and Mihaela Kelemen

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PART II: CON POSTMODERNISM VERSUS TRUTH IN MANAGEMENT THEORY Bill McKelvey v

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A CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERNISM IN ORGANIZATIONAL STUDIES Lex Donaldson

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POSTMODERN EPISTEMOLOGY IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL William McKinley

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POSTMODERNISM’S KANTIAN ROOTS Onkar Ghate

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PART III: THE ALTERNATIVE OBJECTIVISM: THE PROPER ALTERNATIVE TO POSTMODERNISM Onkar Ghate and Edwin A. Locke

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Mats Alvesson

Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden

Marta B. Cal´as

Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA

Stewart R. Clegg

School of Management, Faculty of Business, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Lex Donaldson

Australian Graduate School of Management, Universities of New South Wales and Sydney, Australia

Onkar Ghate

Ayn Rand Institute, Marina del Rey, USA

Mihaela Kelemen

Department of Management, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK

Martin Kilduff

Department of Management and Organization, Pennsylvania State University, USA

Martin Kornberger

School of Management, Faculty of Business, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Edwin A. Locke

University of Maryland, USA

Bill McKelvey

Anderson School at UCLA, Los Angeles, USA

William McKinley

Department of Management, Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, USA

Linda Smircich

Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA

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PREFACE Postmodernism has had a widespread influence on intellectuals throughout the world. It all started, as the chapter on Ghate will show, with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who was the first philosopher to sever reason (consciousness) from reality. We have been paying the price ever since. Postmodernism has now spread from philosophy into many other fields, including literature, history, sociology, psychology and business. My dilemma as editor of this volume was the following: I disagreed with postmodernism but wanted to give all sides the opportunity to speak. My solution was to ask knowledgeable people in the field of management who the foremost proponents of postmodernism were and to invite them to make their best case, with virtually no censorship or editing on my part. Several of these chapters are co-authored. The leading scholars for the pro-postmodernism section of the book were: Matts Alvesson; Marta Calas and Linda Smricich; Stewart Clegg and Martin Kornberger; and Martin Kilduff and Mihaela Kelemen. I followed the same process of asking for the names of leading opponents of postmodernism. Bill McKelvey, Lex Donaldson and William McKinley agreed to write chapters for this section. I asked Onkar Ghate to write the fourth chapter, on Immanuel Kant, because, as the one who provided the philosophical foundation for postmodernism, Kant needed to be included. As to the last chapter, I take full responsibility for claiming that Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism is the proper antidote to postmodernism. I co-authored this chapter with Onkar Ghate. I have two expectations for this book. First, I hope that all sides will be satisfied that everyone, pro and con, had their say without interference or pressure of any kind from me, and that I picked among the best people in the field to write these chapters. Second, I hope that the book will inspire fruitful intellectual debate. The last chapter, on objectivism, makes radical claims; but they needed to be made. I believe the survival of our civilization depends on who wins out in the end on the issues debated here. It was been said (Peikoff, 1991) that the whole history of philosophy is a duel between Plato and Aristotle. The modern form of this debate is between Kant (a neo-Platonist) and his postmodern followers, and Ayn Rand, who follows in the Aristotelian tradition. The earth-shaking issue at stake ix

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is this: Is Man’s mind competent to know reality or not? The answers to this and related questions determine the course of history and thereby the fate of the world. Edwin A. Locke Editor

INTERPRETIVE UNPACKING: MODERATELY DESTABILIZING IDENTITIES AND IMAGES IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES Mats Alvesson ABSTRACT The paper reviews some basic themes in postmodernism and argues for a moderate incorporation of these themes in organization studies and methodology. This approach, named interpretive unpacking, takes issues of multiple and fluid meanings, ambiguities and fragmentation seriously without the a priori privileging of these qualities over assumptions of stable meanings and coherence in social phenomena. The suggested position is illustrated in the fields of identity and image in organization studies through a critical reading of a key text. Assumptions around identities, identification, beliefs, perceptions and images are here problematized and seen as themes for critical exploration and careful interpretive inquiry rather than as robust starting points for the formulation of hypothesis for testing.

INTRODUCTION “Postmodernism” is a label that is used in a variety of situations for a variety of purposes. It is not a clearly defined school or intellectual orientation but an Postmodernism and Management: Pros, Cons and the Alternative Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 21, 3–27 Copyright © 2003 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1016/S0733-558X(03)21001-6

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umbrella term, which is employed to address various issues and to market the position of the author labeling a particular project “postmodernism” in a specific way. My framing of and selective reading of postmodernism (pomo) is related to an interest in doing careful, sophisticated interpretive organizational research. This is rather uncommon. Postmodernism is typically expressed as a broad-brushed critique of a variety of ways of developing and understanding knowledge. It is often drawn upon in order to attack not only neo-positivist traditions, but also interpretivist ambitions. As Rosenau (1992) writes: The challenges postmodernism poses seem endless. It rejects epistemological assumptions, refutes methodological conventions, resists knowledge claims, obscures all versions of truths, and dismisses policy recommendations (p. 1).

A key focus for “post-positivistic” research, being skeptical of the possibilities to study “social facts” is meaning. Meaning can be defined as “what values, beliefs, and/or feelings an artefact represents beyond any ‘literal’, non-symbolic referent” (Yanow, 2000, p. 252) and refers to the point of view of the person(s) being studied. While interpretive research aims to identity and clarify meanings, postmodernists are more inclined to question, deconstruct, or even destruct meanings. It is not, however, inevitable to put up the pro-meaning focus of interpretive research and the anti-meaning interest of postmodernism in such a stark, antagonistic way. The tension between the interpretation of meaning and the “anti-interpretational” project of dissolving meaning may be formulated in less absolutist and perhaps more productive ways. This is the challenge of the present paper, trying to use ideas expressed under the label of postmodernism to inspire novel thinking in social and organizational research. This paper gives a very brief review of some key themes in postmodernism, but concentrates on the theoretical-methodological issue of how to conceptualize and study issues of meaning. Two versions of postmodernism – or postmodernistically inspired social research – are explored. The weaker version, bordering to interpretive studies, is favored and illustrated. The tension between clarity, unity and systematics of meanings versus fragmentation, variety and fluidity of meaning is highlighted and ways of dealing with it is discussed. This is mainly done through a critical exploration of a key text in the field of organizational image and identification. The theme is primarily used for purposes of illustrating how postmodern ideas may encourage the rethinking of conventional ideas of stable meanings and structures. A secondary purpose of the paper is to give some ideas toward a more processual and fluid view on identity and image in organization studies. The paper starts with a brief review of postmodernism, followed by a zooming in on the theme of destabilization and some critique of postmodernism. I then

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develop some ideas on “interpretive unpacking”, as a weak or moderate version of postmodernism, and illustrate this through a re-thinking of some conventional ideas on beliefs, identity and image.

ON POSTMODERNISM Very briefly, postmodernism in its strongest and most provocative form can be described as “an assault on unity” or “the death of reason”. For most postmodernists social science is, or should be viewed as, a humble and subjective enterprise, characterized by tentativeness, fragmentation and indeterminacy. Postmodernism is difficult to define, partly because the label is used in many different ways, partly because people using the term in a positive way reject the idea of language being able to represent or mirror phenomena, making not just “empirical objects,” but also theoretical orientations hard to capture. The usefulness of this term is questionable because it conflates very different themes – from trends and forms in art and architecture to particular forms of organizations and other social institutions to philosophical orientations and styles (Alvesson, 2002a; Thompson, 1993). The “fathers” of postmodernism in most cases did not use the label postmodernism; they did not see themselves as part of a specific stream and in some cases directly rejected the label. However, a number of commentators saw interesting similarities between some influential intellectuals (Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault & Lyotard). These commentators felt motivated to draw attention to the presence in their respective works of a shared critical concern with a number of issues, notably: (i) the crisis of representation and associated instability of meaning; (ii) the absence of secure foundations for knowledge; (iii) the analytic centrality of language, discourses, and texts; and (iv) the inappropriateness of the Enlightenment assumption of the rational autonomous subject and a contrasting concentration on the ways in which individuals are constituted as subjects (Smart, 2000, p. 450).

These critical concerns all refer to theoretical-philosophical ideas and have not much to do with possible changes in organizational or social forms. In this paper, I follow this and do not address the possibilities of the emergence or expansion of “postmodern organizations” (Clegg, 1990) or postmodern forms of management (Berg, 1989; Willmott, 1992), claimed to replacing bureaucracies and Fordist forms of organizations. However, the increased significance of changing and floating images of organizations sometimes related to postmodernist society will be briefly addressed (Gioia et al., 2000). The four mentioned concerns speak strongly against the pillars of Western thinking, including mainstream versions of social theory, methodology, and corporate and governmental policies. Postmodernism is a reaction to what is

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labeled “modernism”. Modernism is a part of the Enlightenment. The basic idea is that, through rational institutions and interventions based on objective knowledge, it is possible to get rid of rigidity, prejudice and superstition associated with taken-for-granted traditions, “false” authorities, poverty and other forms of misery, and social life is rationalized and a better world created. Positivism in its various forms is an expression of this attitude within society, social engineering another, employed in organizations and politics. Certainty, control, measurement, analysis, causality, logic, order, authority and progress are key elements of modernism. Modernism is thus a general cultural orientation, penetrating thought in general and putting its imprints on social institutions such as politics, government, business and education. The mentioned virtues also define modernism in science and philosophy. Postmodernism is a critical reaction, based on, and fueling, the growing feelings of skepticism towards this kind of thinking. Within organization studies postmodernism has been reasonably successful as a marginal, but high-profiled stream (e.g. Cal´as & Smircich, 1999; Chia, 1995; Cooper & Burrell, 1988; Hassard & Parker, 1993; Linstead & Grafton-Small, 1992). Postmodernism contributes with powerful critique, although the extreme implications and the absence of constructive suggestions for empirical inquiry and theorizing has contributed to its marginalization and a feeling of the need to go further – or not as far as the critique implies (Alvesson, 2002a; Cal´as & Smircich, 1999; Parker, 1992). The present paper departs from this feeling and aims to show how a moderate incorporation of postmodernist ideas may make organization studies more open minded, without being one-sidedly skeptical and paralyzed with postmodernist worries about saying something positive.

DESTABILIZATION AS A KEY THEME IN POSTMODERNISM In many forms of qualitative studies, e.g. in grounded theory, the assumption is that data, carefully processed, can guide the researcher to understand specific phenomena and develop theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1994).1 In interpretive work it is assumed that we can access and study social reality through getting indications on the meanings and symbolic interactions that are viewed as the crucial elements in social communities, including organizations. This great faith in data and empirical inquiry as a cornerstone in knowledge development has been challenged by a multitude of intellectual streams during recent years, including, but certainly not limited to, postmodernism. That human interests and cultural, gendered and political values, ideas and interests put their imprints on methodological principles, as well as on research practices and results,

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makes it very difficult to see science as a pure activity, neutral and objective in relationship to the reproduction or challenging of social ideologies, institutions and interests (Alvesson & Sk¨oldberg, 2000). Even more profound are the views from discursivists and constructivists denying science any privileged access to the objective truth about the social world outside language and language use (Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Steier, 1991). Language constructs rather than mirrors phenomena, making representation and thus empirical work a basically problematic enterprise it is argued (Gergen & Gergen, 1991). What (possibly) exists “out there” (e.g. behaviors) or “in there” (e.g. feelings or motives) is complex and ambiguous, and can never simply be captured, but, given the perspective, the vocabulary and the chosen interpretation, “reality” emerges in a particular way. Any claim of a truth thus says as much or more about the researcher’s convictions and language use than about the object of study. Foucault (1980), probably the most influential social theorist (broadly defined) at present, suggests that social scientific knowledge is closely associated with power (the regulation of social reality through arrangements and ordering devices) and less with exploring or distorting truth than creating it. It is increasingly common to claim: that there is no clear window into the inner life of an individual. Any gaze is always filtered through the lenses of language, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity. There are no objective observations, only observations socially situated in the worlds of the observer and the observed (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p. 12).

This means that the assumption about something existing out there that is knowledgeable through the researcher’s scientific operations becomes questionable. The core of postmodernism is the doubt that any method or theory, discourse or genre, tradition or novelty, has a universal and general claim as the right or the privileged form of authoritative knowledge (Richardson, 2000, p. 928).

Pomo as philosophy or – less pretentious – as an intellectual style rejects traditional ideals such as rationality, order, certainty. It is skeptical about categories and any idea of a stable meaning. Postmodernism claims that the instability of meaning is profound and that all approaches assuming fixed meaning produce a version of the world that reflect a want to freeze it. Instead, ambivalence, variation, fragmentation, intuition and emotion are celebrated as guidelines for how we should understand the social world. Fragmentation takes the place of totality and completeness. Ambiguity reigns where once there was clarity. The old certainties vanish, leaving us with the tentative, the provisional, the temporary, the contingent. Even our cherished antinomies are denied to us, those hierarchical oppositions between thought and language, nature and culture, reason and emotion, theory and practice, white and black, men and women. In the place of clear-cut distinctions and earnest logic, there is widespread irony, parody, pastiche, playfulness (Crotty, 1998, p. 194).

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Reason plays no important role in social life it is assumed – except as an ideological belief. Individuals are caught within and constituted by “discourses”. Sometimes postmodernists stress instincts and the drive for pleasure as central for how individuals function. Some psychoanalytic ideas are seen as delivering ammunition to the attack on “the tyranny of reason”, although psychoanalytic theory in its dominant versions is in itself far from postmodernism. It is a systematic theoretical frameworks with aspirations to capture the true nature of human beings. Many postmodernists, like some other authors, also reject a representational view of language. Language can not mirror the reality “out there”, nor people’s mental states (Gergen & Gergen, 1991; Shotter & Gergen, 1989). Given the belief in the centrality of language and its active, constructing role, many advocates of postmodernism also question or even deny the idea of a reality “out there” or “mental states”. Language is figural, metaphorical, undecidable, full of contradictions and inconsistencies (Brown, 1990; Cooper & Burrell, 1988). Instead of using language to illuminate “something”, language in itself should be illuminated and “deconstructed”. Rhetorical tricks should be exposed, not in order to reach a “truth”, but in order to understand that there is no truth – with the possible exception of the statement just made. As Brown (1990, p. 189) expresses it, “. . . postmodernism shifts the agenda of social theory and research from explanation and verification to guide and persuade themselves and each other”. Science is seen as rhetorical construction and the task of pomo is to explore this. But of course such enterprises are also carried out with language. That means that these also should be deconstructed/studied in terms of rhetoric, and so on. From this view on language partly follows that far-reaching theories – grand or master narratives as they are called – are problematic. Big Theory – efforts to produce truth claims with very general ambitions – should be avoided. We can’t talk about society, strategy, unemployment, leadership or values in any general sense. A more sociological version of this thesis stresses that these narratives are unpopular at present or, to take a more evaluative stance, that they – with postmodernism as an exception – are not sensitive to the Zeitgeist. Master narratives – e.g. Marxism, psychoanalysis – have lost credibility and cease to function as intended (Lyotard, 1984). But the philosophical version of postmodernism would emphasize the theoretical case against efforts to offer broad theoretical explanations. Master narratives are part of the tyranny of modernist ideology and they build upon a deeply problematic understanding of language. The multiplication of shaky language elements – upon which the master narratives are built – means that we arrive at a collossus on clay feet. Most management knowledge – from contingency theory and cross-cultural management to leadership research and motivation models – may appear as robust but relies on a myriad

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of language uses that are highly context-bound and cannot be accumulated into aggregated knowledge. I myself would not be as categorical as most postmodernist authors, but a careful look at a particular research field may show strong cracks in efforts to develop unified theory and grand-scale knowledge with universal aspirations. See for example the exploration of the field of leadership research in Alvesson and Deetz (2000) and Alvesson and Sveningsson (2003). Given the view of language use as functioning according to another logic than as mirroring the world, or being employed in order to transfer meaning in a transparant way, and recognizing the local, context-dependent view of language, it needs to be explored much more carefully. A postmodern turn is very much a linguistic turn in social science and philosophy, although the two cannot be equated. There are many other versions of this increased interest in language usage as illustrated by the variety of approaches on organizational discourse, of which many are not taking a (clear) postmodernist stance (Alvesson & K¨arreman, 2000; Grant & Oswick, 1996). Pomo represents an extreme form of the linguistic turn. The postmodernist position on the “person” follows partly from the conception of language proposed. Unstable language implies unstable meanings and an unstable, decentred human subject. Postmodernism rejects the notion of the autonomous, self-determining individual with a secure unitary identity as the center of the social universe. Even though many other traditions have done so also (for example, behaviorists, structuralists and to some extent psychoanalysts), postmodernists have pushed this point strongly and in a sophisticated manner and have emphasized the role of language and discourse in constituting an individual subject that does not exist outside language, as: . . . identity is in flux, in a permanent state of becoming as various social and linguistic constructs (or discourses) vie with another for supremacy (Thomas & Linstead, 2002, p. 75).

Discourses produce subject positions – not that different from roles (but determined by language rather than norms and expectations) – which individuals are located in (locate themselves in). These subject positions then drive individuals’ perceptions, intentions and acts. The point can easily be illustrated through indicating the likely responses of various credible ways of interpreting a particular human subject: you, as an academic . . ., as a European . . ., as a woman . . ., as a young person . . ., as a Muslim . . ., as a person living in a free, democratic country . . ., as being overweight . . .. Arguably, if one should shadow an individual during a day and observe all the encounters with different people and see how the individual is very different in all this situations and how contingencies seem to define the subject, then the fluidity and fragmentation of human life may become visible. The assumption that there is a core or essence behind all this surface behavior would by postmodernists

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be seen as an illustration of the kind of thinking that they want to question: the inclination to impose order and unity, to reproduce a Western, ethnocentric view on the human subject and to marginalize disruptions, process and fragmentation. Postmodernism is disinclined to say something about the self, but . . . If the postmodern genealogy counts at all as self-knowledge, then the self that is thereby known turns out to be not single, unified, complete, and whole, but complex, disseminated, fractious, and fragile (Hoy, 1985, pp. 36–37, cited in Smart, 2000).

All these themes make it difficult to use science in order to reveal the truth about social systems or human subjects. Language can’t really mirror or capture reality. The defensive, reactive side of postmodernism is important to emphasize. Its task is very much a matter of responding to dominant ideas in texts and opening these up. Postmodernism as a philosophy “would abandon its generalizing social science ambitions and instead parasitically play off the ironies, incoherencies, inconsistencies and inter-textuality of social science writings” (Featherstone, 1988, p. 205). It has little or nothing to say on its own, but relies on others to say something which the postmodernist then can get his or her teeth into. It tries to resist (rather than oppose) the view of others, who try to put forward a “dominant view” (Cal´as & Smircich, 1987). Statements establishing “truths” should be avoided. They have the virtue, however, of keeping the postmodernists preoccupied. The entire enterprise of many versions of postmodernism is dependent on there being something “dominant” to counteract. Also other critical theories suffer from critique of being parasitic – as does the present text – but it is more problematic for text-focusing deconstructionists, as they concentrate on text segments, rather than larger and perhaps more significant parts of culture.

CRITIQUE: THE DANGERS OF TOTALIZING POSTMODERNISM Many postmodernist authors are provocative and favor sharp statements, taking issue with a range of dominant positions. Debates have been intensive and there has been quite a lot of critique of postmodernism (e.g. Alvesson & Sk¨oldberg, 2000; Rosenau, 1992; Thompson, 1993). I will here only mention two issues of critique: (1) the limited and unconstructive – some would say destructive – agenda of pomo, and (2) the tendency for the advocate of a strong version of postmodernism to limit him- or herself severely and then easily become caught in self-contradictions. The language and text-focusing position is, as Parker (1992) remarks, philosophically waterproof. After all, it is impossible to prove that there is anything outside the text, but this emphasis would, if it became widespread, give social

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science a very restricted space. To only comment upon others’ texts appears a bit esoteric. If all people were converted then all would be involved in the deconstruction of others’ deconstructions . . . It starts and ends with “writers write about writers for other writers” (Castoriadis, 1992, p. 16). Another type of critique points at the totalizing elements of the anti-totalizing pretence of postmodernism. All systems of thought include their elements of totalization and closure. Postmodernism is no exception. It appears to insist on how we should understand and study the world once and for all. It comes close to postulating that the social world is discursively constituted, subjects are decentered, knowledge is dangerous, everything is undecidable, etc., as if we here are talking about attributes of the social world, people, knowledge and meaning. But why give such a privilege to ambiguity over patterns, fluidity over stability, diversity over unity, indeterminacy over interpretation, discourse over meaning, complexity over partial knowledge? Strong postmodernist preferences may well lead to a new kind of closure – and result in researchers one-dimensionally governed by postmodernist convictions missing vital aspects (Alvesson, 2002a). One may here ironically turning postmodernist on postmodernist: a postmodernism critique of postmodernism would suggest that it tends to emphasize patterns of fragmentation, be determined about the undeterminacy, allow no ambiguity about ambiguity and privilege diversity to unity (or allow variation about diversity), etc., etc. As postmodernism is a philosophical style, a way of relating to the world, one can’t say that these are purely empirical questions – it is not just a matter of going out there and finding out whether there are patterns and unities or fragmentations and diversities in, e.g. a particular organization, work group or decision process. But one may be or less hooked on a postmodernist style and let its favored terms command the world or be more open to alternative vocabularies and ways of relating to it. Postmodernist authors often reject the idea of hierarchies of vocabularies and the privileging of a form of understanding. One typically disputes the idea of critique bringing about the replacement of an idea or term with another one, thereby replacing one hierarchy with another. But postmodernism can be said to want to privilege fragmentation over totality and completeness, ambiguity over clarity, the tentative, the provisional, the temporary, the contingent over “old certainties”. The spirit of postmodernism calls for treating also postmodernist ideas with suspicion and avoiding ordering or predetermining the world and any text through ideas and vocabularies cherished by postmodernists. It is possible to be open about looking for – considering interpretations and readings – patterns and ambiguity, trends and variation, order and fragmentation, regularities and disorder. This may sound watered down, but may be necessary in order to promote understandings of specific groups, settings and events in ways

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that are fair and interesting – not more or less given from the start – in terms of the results produced. We don’t have to commit ourselves a priori so strongly to a particular conviction and a language (Alvesson, 2002a).

TWO KINDS OF POSTMODERNIST READINGS: DECONSTRUCTIONISM AND INTERPRETIVE UNPACKING Also within the philosophy/style field of postmodernism, there are many versions of it. It is difficult to further structure the field. Sometimes a distinction is made between skeptical and affirmative postmodernism (Rosenau, 1992). The skeptical version promotes a “negative” agenda, based on the idea of the impossibility of establishing any truth. Representation becomes a matter of imposing an arbitrary meaning on something. Research becomes a matter of deconstruction, the tearing apart of texts by showing the contradictions, repressed meanings and, thus, the fragility behind a superficial level of robustness and validity. This approach strongly discourages empirical work. Affirmative postmodernism also questions the idea of truth and validity but has a more positive view to social research. Playfulness, irony, humor, eclecticism and methodological pluralism are celebrated. So is local knowledge (including a preference for situated knowledge and a rejection of the search for abstract, universal truths). One example of this approach is given by Kilduff and Mehra (1997). Here, the problem of representation is briefly mentioned but generally taken lightly. Instead, a free attitude, “breaking down disciplinary boundaries, challenging conventional wisdom, and giving voice to viewpoints and perspectives hitherto silenced” (p. 476) is advocated. The distinction between skeptical and affirmative is far from unproblematic, but nevertheless indicates some of the differences of the field. Each of the two categories cover broad terrain, including opinions about the gloominess and joyfulness of contemporary (postmodern) society or cultural developments. My project in this paper is much more limited. Even though I also identify two positions, these focus exclusively on methodological issues. Deconstruction is a part of skeptical pomo, while interpretive unpacking is not dissimilar to affirmative postmodernism, but perhaps even more in a gray zone between (affirmative) postmodernism and interpretive research. Deconstruction, in Derrida’s and others’ works, functions primarily to critique the ideal of representation by recalling the suppressed terms (the deferred term) which provide the system and thus which allow the positive terms to appear to stand for an existing object. When the suppressed term is given value, both the dependency of the positive term on the negative is shown and a third term

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is recovered which shows a way of word-making that is not dependent on the opposition of the first two (see Cooper, 1989). Deconstruction involves demystifying a text, tearing it apart to reveal its internal, arbitrary hierarchies and its presuppositions. It lays out the flaws and the latent metaphysical structures of a text. A deconstructive reading of a text seeks to discover its ambivalence, blindness, logocentricity (Rosenau, 1992, p. 120).

Deconstruction stands for an analysis that shows how a discourse undermines the philosophy it asserts or the hierarchical oppositions on which it relies, by identifying the rhetorical operations behind the argument or key concept. The attempt is to undo, reverse, displace, and resituate the hierarchies of polar opposites, e.g. man/woman and management/leadership, manager/worker, etc. The term “deconstruction”, of course, is used in a variety of ways. Morrow (1994, p. 246) notes that it is increasingly employed rather loosely to refer to any kind of rhetorical analysis critically illuminating naive, realistic, and unreflexive conceptions of representation. However, irrespective of how one exactly defines deconstruction, it refers to hardline pomo approaches oriented towards critical questioning and anxiously avoiding any positive statement about how things are or can be productively understood. Deconstruction is thus “anti-interpretative”. It views efforts to establish meaning as arbitrary and aims to show how texts mask this arbitrariness. I am here restricting “deconstruction” to a fairly narrow meaning and suggest interpretive unpacking as a different approach, representing a milder form of postmodernism bordering on a “weak” interpretivist stance (Alvesson, 2002a). This weaker or more moderate stance assumes the possibilities in indicating and exploring meanings through going just under the surface. These meanings may, however, be loose, fluid, contradictory and hard to specify with any great certainty and authority. The project is thus different from hermeneutic interpretation which assumes and seek for a deeper meaning, a superior interpretation leading to a valid insight. Interpretive unpacking is somewhat skeptical of this assumption, but does not a priori reject this possibility. It does not assume that in-depth, unitary, stable meaning necessarily is false (arbitrary, masks researcher’s/author’s power to impose meaning). While it takes language and linguistic expressions seriously, it is open to variety and avoids a categorical attitude to the possibilities of an underlying, stable meaning versus the absence of or shakiness of any claim to meaning. Interpretive unpacking is thus skeptical, but allows space for cautious interpretations, also trying to offer a view on how a particular chunk of social reality can be understood. Multiple meanings, ambiguities and fragmentation can be studied, through careful interpretive work. We can compare interpretive unpacking with conventional or hardline pomo through a comparison with a typical statement expressing the latter view:

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An interpretive unpacking approach would partly agree, but give some space for meaning having some independence of the signifiers being in operation, giving different signifiers meanings based on assumptions and ideas with some inertia in relationship to the flickerings of the absences/presences of signifiers. Meaning is ambiguous but not impossible to grasp in its various shapes and expressions. Reading a text for meaning is neither like trace random flickering nor counting beans, but tries to making sense of an ambiguous, messy social reality. An interpretive unpacking approach represents a mild version of pomo, in opposition to a harsh, deconstructionist one. Perhaps one could say that it is postmodernistically influenced rather than a form of postmodernism. It allows space for working with the instability and precariousness of meaning also in a positive sense. Let me illustrate this approach and through doing so also sketch a possible postmodernism-inspired view of organizational identity, image and identification.

INTERPRETIVE UNPACKING APPLIED: ON ORGANIZATIONAL IMAGES AND IDENTIFICATION The article by Jane Dutton, Janet Dukerich and Celia Harquail “Organizational images and member identification”, ASQ 1994, is a widely cited piece of research published in a leading journal. For this reason it is a suitable illustration of how one can use postmodernist inspiration in order to question some taken-for-granted, established ways of thinking and possible push theoretical thinking and methodology into a more open, emergent approach, less locked into strong ideas about fixed subjects. I am thus not focusing on this article because it is particularly flawed or problematic, compared with what is common. On the contrary, I think it is in many ways a very good piece, but it can be productively used in illustrating some basic problems in “mainstream” thinking. This makes it a worthy target of a postmodernist’s reading, in my case a minor one. Dutton et al.’s (1994) work develops a model that aims to explain how people’s image of their work organization shape the strength of their identification with the organization. A core concept is organizational identification, defined as follows: When a person’s self-concept contains the same attributes as those in the perceived organizational identity, we define the cognitive connection as organizational identification. Organizational identification is the degree to which a member defines him- or herself by the same attributes that he or she believes define the organization (p. 239).

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Dutton et al. are aware of the variation of individuals’ perceptions of an organization’s collective identity. Acknowledging this variation, they argue that “the perceived organizational identity – a member’s beliefs about the distinctive, central, and enduring attributes of the organization – can serve as a powerful image influencing the degree to which the member identifies with the organization” (p. 244). Based on these terms and ideas, Dutton et al. suggest a number of propositions such as: The greater the distinctiveness of an organizational image (e.g. perceived organizational identity) relative to other organizations, the stronger a member’s organizational identification.

The authors also talk about “construed external image”, which refers to “what organizational insiders believe outsiders think is distinctive, central, and enduring about the organization” (p. 249). The text does not address “objective reality” or something outside the subjective beliefs of those subjects having self-concepts, perceiving the organization or developing the ideas of other people. A strongly subjectivist focus is not, however, immune to postmodernist skepticisms, but is on the contrary a suitable target for such skepticism. On a few occasions, Dutton et al. mention assumptions. A core assumption, they write, is that people’s sense of membership in the organization as a kind of social group shapes their self-concept. Very few of the ideas and assumptions they base their argumentation on are, however, labeled in these terms, i.e. worth considered as a debateable assumption. Instead, the impression created is that argument and logic are grounded in specific factors reflecting self-evident truths, e.g. that there is a perceived organizational identity in the sense of a member having beliefs about the distinctive, central and enduring attributes of the organization, that an organizational member sometimes defines him- or herself by the same attributes that he or she believes define the organization and that there is a construed external organizational image. Dutton et al. avoid crude thinking such as claiming that an organization has an identity or that outsiders think anything particular about an organization. The focus is on perceived identity, self-concept and organizational definition and on what insiders believe outsiders think. People’s perceptions, self-definitions and beliefs may appear to be a safe bastion against speculations about objective truth out there. However, the basic building blocs that Dutton et al. are using may be viewed as far less robust and unproblematic than they imply. Let us consider the statement: “a member’s beliefs about the distinctive, central, and enduring attributes of the organization”. It says that a member beliefs about attributes, and that these are distinctive, central and enduring. But we could

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perhaps assume that a “member”: (i) does not necessarily have fixed beliefs but takes temporary positions on a particular issue; (ii) expresses uncertainty and doubt; (iii) relates in terms of events and processes rather than in terms of static images about attributes; and (iv) has possible beliefs/images about attributes that are indistinct, of uncertain location in terms of periphery/centrality and temporary. These (counter-) assumptions, and any empirical study taking these aspects seriously, would lead to a different story than the one resulting in Dutton et al.’s propositions. An interpretive unpacking approach, taking the key themes of postmodernism outlined in the first part of the paper, would carefully study the indications on possible fixed or varied beliefs and the (in)distinctiveness and the coherence, fluidity and/or ambiguity of any possible talk about organizational attributes. Ambivalences would be noted. The possibility of talk reflecting discursive effects such as the re-circulation of corporate scripts would be considered parallel with interpretations emphasizing cognitive or emotional reactions anchored in the subjectivity of respondents. Returning to Dutton et al.’s idea of “organizational identification” – “the degree to which a member defines him- or herself by the same attributes that he or she believes define the organization” – this construction can be further unpacked and opened up for less predetermined or taken-for-granted structurings. The idea is that an individual defines him- or herself through attributes and that these can be compared with the attributes that he or she believes define the organization. Apart from the skepticism one may raise about the idea of fixed beliefs and stable definition of attributes, about not only the organization but the individual him- or herself as well, the idea of the “degree” to which they are the same attributes that are used to define oneself and the organization can be disputed. Do individuals and organizations have the same attributes? Or – and better – are they described/defined through the same kind of language? Even if the same language is used when referring to organization and self, perhaps the words mean different things? But also if in some cases the same words are used when referring to the two “entities”, there are presumably many other words that differ, thus making it difficult to establish a specific “degree”. This would make the very idea of organizational identification as defined in the paper difficult to investigate.2 An interpretive unpacking approach would be inclined to emphasize the variation of context and the potential incompatibility of talks on self-definitions and definitions of organizations. The potential pluralism of self-definitions as well as of organizational characterisations would make simple comparisons difficult, but the potential intersections, departures as well as incompatibilities of self-talk and organization-talk are all viewed as, in principle, possible to study. This would mean a multitude of possible connections and disconnections, rather than a

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simple, aggregated measure on the degree of overlap between definition of self and organization. A similar set of difficulties can be raised about the “construed external image, i.e. what insiders believe outsiders think is distinctive, central, and enduring about the organization”. Again, we find the assumption: (a) that insiders believe; (b) that “outsiders” think; (c) that there is anything distinctive, central and enduring. Reading the paper may lead the reader to realize that of course insiders believe that. But perhaps insiders do not believe anything specific, but may be uncertain or confused. If they believe, they may or may not believe that all or most outsiders think the same. Perhaps outsiders is not a very homogeneous group? And also if they believe that “outsiders think” more or less the same, they may be believed not to think in terms of distinctive, central and enduring attributes, but this thinking may be believed to be vague and/or fluid, contingent upon the latest mass media report. An interpretive unpacking approach would try to follow the coherent or varied constructions of outsiders and what they possibly may think. The option of outsiders being viewed as homogeneous and having firm ideas of the organization is one option, but the counter-idea of constructions of outsiders being pluralistic and varied, and their possible beliefs also being multiple, varied and strongly context-dependent is also taken seriously in interpretive work. Whether the study arrives at a stable image of distinct and central attributes or whether this idea withers away is then not determined a priori (as in the case of Dutton et al.). The text under scrutiny assumes and takes for granted that beliefs, definitions and perceptions are clear, distinct, coherent, measurable; they are possessed. People hold stable, unitary meanings and these can be established and compared. The text portrays an organizational world populated with people with a single, homogeneous self-concept that perceives the organization as having distinctive, central and enduring attributes, and that have firm beliefs that there is a uniform group of outsiders who think that there is something distinctive, central and enduring about the organization. A strong want to create an ordered, well-structured world, devoid of any uncertainty, ambivalence or incoherence, comes through in the article. This is highly common, not to say a standard feature, in very large parts of social studies and management research, even though more researchers emphasize the changing nature of images of companies and the instabilities of identities (e.g. Gioia et al., 2000). A deconstructionist reading would be fairly brutal with the text and go even further than I have done above in critically and ironically pointing at it’s cracks. As pointed out, my position is more affirmative and is more oriented toward unpacking what the authors try to box in and conceal in the seemingly robust

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components they are working with. As outlined above, unpacking is different from demolishing. Instead of accepting and proceeding from the massive set of assumptions of the unity and robustness of all these perceptions, definitions and beliefs about the self, the organization and the outsiders, an interpretive unpacking position would put question marks for many of the assumptions and the overall reasoning. From an interpretive unpacking perspective, authoritative definitions and propositions in the text would not be viewed as offering hypotheses to be tested, but interesting issues to rethink and try to investigate in more open, interpretive ways. Too much is taken for granted and hidden in propositions of texts like the one ideas scrutinized here. Here the postmodernist ideas could be mobilized, not in offering better truths, but producing tensions and openness encouraging sensitive thinking and empirical work with a destiny not determined from the start. Sensitivity to language use is important here. Postmodernism encourages paying careful attention to how language use constitutes certain versions of the world and the subject. In different local contexts and when different discourses are in operation, the self-concept, the organization and beliefs about image all may appear in different ways. Taking this possibility seriously may undermine any effort to investigate a specific self-concept, a specific view of organizational identity or a specific construed external image. Of course, this does not imply that a questionnaire study would be incapable of producing support for the hypotheses. Respondents may well, in this situation, put an X against questionnaire items that indicate a specific self-concept, perceptions of a distinct organization and a homogeneous group of outsiders with homogeneous thoughts, in particular if the questionnaire is strictly focused on measuring these aspects. One could of course, allow space also for exploring counter-ideas such as “outsiders’ perceptions are mainly temporal, strongly affected by the latest mass media report”, “outsiders vary strongly in their views of us” or “I find it difficult to identify any unique, central and enduring characteristics of this organization”. From a postmodernist point of view, also such questionnaire items would not suffice, but one may perhaps consider mainstream research modestly responding to postmodernist and interpretive critique through giving respondents a chance to deviate from the logic of testing propositions such as in the paper by Dutton et al. Instead of a predefined, single and unitary self-concept, a person’s situated, possibly varied talk about or actions possibly indicating one, several or a myriad self-conceptualizations of him- or herself can be considered and be studied in depth. If the pluralism and fluidity of self-presentations are not in line with a unitary self-concept, this pluralism and fluidity may be interpreted with ambitions to say something “positive” and empirically grounded. It may illuminate a processual self in social interaction and thus explore the dynamics of organizational

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life (Knights & Willmott, 1989). This is the idea with interpretive unpacking – in contrast to deconstructive projects – that typically undermine the claimed unity of subjects’ presented stories of themselves and thus express a more “negative” message. Whether there are indications of a specific (fixed) perception of the organization can also be considered in terms of what is expressed in language about “the organization”. But not only the issue of the possible fixed orientation/sentiment (perception, language use) but also the presumed object of this possible fixed orientation/sentiment can be opened up. It is perhaps not “the organization” as a formal, abstract entity that is the interesting object (or signifier) in many instances. Is it the factory, the corporate group, the subsidiary, the product group or anything else that, after careful consideration, emerges as of interest for the identification of individuals. A study of an industrial company indicated different perceptions of “we”/sources of social identity, depending on context – outside the company, it is the company, inside it is the factory and frequently “it is us the younger against ‘the walruses’ ” (the older workers), as one worker expressed it (Alvesson & Bj¨orkman, 1992). Also the angle on the company may produce different results in terms of “the outsiders’ ” image. A company like McDonald’s may be perceived rather differently if it is viewed as a provider of service (cheap, reliable), a workplace (assembly line work, dreadful) or in terms of ecological impact (a mass producer of waste). It is perhaps different and fluctuating “entities” (signifiers) that are the objects of attention/communication/perception. The multitude of images and also how they may change and reflect back on identity within an organization is worth taking seriously (Gioia et al., 2000). Leaving this issue of “entity” aside, and also the problematic idea of whether somebody perceives an organization and, if this is the case, how we can learn anything about it more than the talk of these perceptions, there are good reasons to try to follow the indications of people’s perceptions in a fairly open way. These indications are typically of a verbal nature. Talk about the view of the organization may be stable, coherent, repetitive or contingent, incoherent, varied and fragmented. It may be determinate and clear or it may come through as hesitant, searching, vague and confusing. What this talk actually means – irrespective of content or the way it is expressed – is always open for interpretation. Before making statements or assessments about perceived organizational identity – beliefs about the distinctive, central and enduring attributes – it makes sense to formulate research questions and then study whether there are perceptions or beliefs about such attributes. Do people in an organization have – or better express – a clear and strong set of coherent beliefs about attributes? Or do they express uncertainty and/or variation in this respect? Do they perhaps express – coherently or incoherently – beliefs about the organization being indistinct,

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having no central or enduring attributes? One may imagine talk indicating perceptions/beliefs about a multitude of faces of an organization held by specific subjects. And, again, rather than to assume that and investigate “what organizational insiders believe outsiders think is distinctive, central, and enduring about the organization” (Dutton et al., 1994, p. 249), one may ask whether: (a) “organizational insiders” coherently believe that “outsiders” think anything in particular; (b) insiders coherently view outsiders as homogeneous or a multitude of groups; (c) insiders’ possible beliefs about outsiders’ thoughts, to the extent that insiders have such beliefs, assume that outsiders think of the organization as distinctive, central and enduring or whether their ideas are incoherent, ambiguous and vague. My point is thus that an interpretive unpacking approach tries to take seriously at least the possibility of definitions, beliefs and perceptions being more fluid, varying, processual, contingent, constructed in language and open than assumed by the dominating approach assuming order, unity of meaning, robustness and the prevalence of perception and cognition (over language). Contra “harsh” (skeptical, deconstruction-oriented) pomo, interpretive unpacking does not give privilege to the former set of key words, but tries to spark more open-ended, careful interpretive work. This neither a priori prescribes unity of meaning nor fragmented, local meanings. The stability/fluidity of meaning can not be theoretically postulated and established once and for all. Whether a distinct, singular self-concept or a multitude of contingent self-conceptualizations prevails is not to be defined a priori. Similarly, whether people ascribe to organizations a set of attributes or produce varied, incoherent talk about how the organization is conceived is, at least to a degree, an empirical question. As said above, this of course does not imply that one just can do an empirical study and simply find out. The question of the singularity/plurality and stability/fluidity of meaning can not just be put up for hypothesis testing. But the theoretical framework and line of interpretation may be open for different ways of dealing with empirical impressions (Alvesson, 2002a; Alvesson & Sk¨oldberg, 2000). Likewise, whether organizational members hold ideas about an organizational image (believe that outsiders have certain thoughts of the organization) or whether sensitive inquiry may show the breakdown of any anticipation of outsiders holding a broadly shared view of the organization is again an interesting task for interpretive research. Perhaps ideas of outsiders images are multiple, varied, ambivalent, dependent on issue. Simple ideas of an image standing in a simple correlation to identification possible to formulate as generalizable hypotheses may then appear as an expression of academic convention structuring and commending the world in a particular way, saying more about predominant academic logic than of the organizational world “itself”. There is a strong risk that ideas about and reasoning of social reality derive less from an open mind and

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a willingness to seriously consider a range of interpretive possibilities and more with a want for paradigmatic closure and a compliance with a dominant set of rules for method and journal publication.

AN ILLUSTRATION Let me illustrate my major argument with an account from an interview with a consultant working for a medium-sized IT consultancy firm, with 500 employees, organized in subsidiaries with a maximum of 50 employees. The interviewee was asked about the distinctiveness of the organization, reflecting the assumption of the researcher that the interviewee may experience that the company in at least certain ways differed from other companies (Alvesson, 1995). The interviewee said that one important characteristic was the lack of hierarchy. At his previous workplace, he had a group manager as superior, while at the present company there was a flat structure. “My only boss is X (subsidiary manager)”, he said. Somewhat later in the interview we talked about participation and the possibilities of influencing the assignments that the interviewee worked on. It turned out that the last time he received a new assignment he had been given the job by Y, without being asked whether he wanted to work on it or not. I then asked whether Y had managerial responsibilities and received the answer that “Yes, he works directly under X”. Thus, it appeared that Y functioned as a middle manager, with semi-formal status as second-in-command in the subsidiary (Alvesson, 1995, p. 201). What does this piece of empirical material say about “the perceived organizational identity – a member’s beliefs about the distinctive, central and enduring attributes of the organization”? The expressed belief about lack of hierarchy seems rather vague and is undermined by the expressed opinion that there is a middle level between the interviewee and the subsidiary manager. The meaning of the organization in terms of hierarchy seems to be floating. There is no fixed, stable object to be perceived. In the company, there is much managerial talk about the organization being flat and non-hierarchical. This can be seen as an organizational discourse creating a certain version of corporate reality. In some situations, e.g. when thinking in the abstract about the character of the company, this discourse tends to be invoked and the organization appears in a particular way. In other situations, e.g. when talking about management of resources and allocation of tasks, this attribute is absent. The idea that the interviewed organizational member have any coherent, context-free beliefs about “distinctive, central, and enduring” attributes thus appears problematic. He may re-tell a corporate discourse in circulation rather than express beliefs held.

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It is, of course, possible that the interviewee by and large believes that the organization is non-hierarchical and that this belief corresponds to how he defines himself. But perhaps how he defines himself also is temporary and contingent. Many people in professional organizations are inclined to define themselves as non-hierarchical. This may be the case in Sweden (the native country of the interviewee) in particular; the Swedish do so more than any other group when responding to Hofstede’s questionnaire about values (1980). But no signs of unease or feeling of noteworthiness seemed to accompany the interviewee’s compliance with the order to work on a particular assignment given by a person with a somewhat ambiguous formal authority. I am here speculating, but it is likely that the self-concept in that relevant respect (attitude to hierarchy) is also flexible. The person approves of the lack of hierarchy and accepts, seemingly without frustration, being told what to do by a superior. If we then combine the ingredients in Dutton et al.’s (1994) approach, we get a fairly messy situation. To repeat, Dutton et al. say that “organizational identification is the degree to which a member defines himself by the same attributes as those in the perceived organizational identity”. Applying this idea here means that we get an odd kind of identification, where it makes little sense to establish “the degree” of overlap between fluid, varying self-definitions and local, context-dependent “perceptions” of the organization. The instabilities involved would suggest highly fluid processes of “identification”. It may be argued that this example only illustrates the messiness of the interview situation or the confusion of a single, atypical individual. Of course, qualitative interviewing is not as effective as questionnaires and other “rigorous” approaches in concealing ambiguity and avoiding being confronted with indications of respondents’ incoherence and fluidity. The brief illustration may, however, also be a rather typical case demonstrating that the assumption of perceived attributes is not unproblematic. Many of Dutton et al.’s illustrations are, arguably, rather atypical, e.g. Exxon, during the time after the great oil spill outside Alaska, where the company received enormous negative media coverage. That it makes sense to talk of an “external construed image” where outsiders are perceived to have certain beliefs about the company under these highly extraordinary circumstances of intense, negative media coverage may say little of the possible homogeneity/variety in image talk of organizational members in situations where they can read less about the organization in the newspapers and may encounter a more fragmented and multi-dimensional world of outsiders. And explicit, focused talk on the reputation of the company in the light of this macro situation may say little of how people relate to the company in everyday situations, e.g. when experiencing a need for gasoline. My own fairly extensive research from a variety of projects but generally aiming at in-depth interpretations of how people express themselves about their

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selves and their organizations typically indicate quite a lot of variation in their accounts, suggesting the fruitfulness of taking the possibility of the disintegration and variation of meaning seriously. In a study of leadership, for example, the interviewed managers’ expressed ideas on their leadership that were incoherent and contradictory. The idea of having a conception of, or doing, leadership in a distinct and coherent way was effectively punctuated in the study, which showed how that meanings of leadership initially expressed tended to wither way in the further accounts produced by the respondents in later parts of the interviews (Alvesson & Sveningsson, 2003). Caution before marginalizing instable conceptions as illustrated by this small case is therefore to be recommended. My point is not, however, to try to prove that we best understand subjects, meaning and social institutions through postmodernist ideas and vocabularies. There are certainly many middle forms between the extreme assumption of the stability and accessibility of meaning as assumed by “conventional” texts such as the examplar of Dutton et al. (1994) and the equally extreme anti-thesis of skeptical postmodernism and projects of deconstruction. Most dominant, neo-positivistic, research and theory tend to take an extreme position in this respect. It escapes critique and questioning partly because it is taken for granted and shared by broadly culturally and scientifically shared ideas of normal science. One does not have to celebrate the opposite promoted by postmodernist authors in order to see the productivity of turning research a few steps in a direction of taking the instabilities and vulnerabilities of meaning into account. In terms of theorizing on organizational identity, image and identification one can work with a framework taking the multiplicity and the flexible shifting of positions and constructions seriously. Organizations can typically be constructed along a range of various options, and organizational members may use various constructions of attributes for various purposes and/or be interpellated by various discourses constructing the world for them. Also various versions of “outsiders” and images may be constructed and reconstructed, occasionally coming into the foreground of talk and sometimes be lost outside conversation. (Using a scene metaphor, we can say that they sometimes are on stage, sometimes backstage.) This may bring about processes of various kinds of willingness to associate and dissociate self-presentations with organizational belonging. These associations are contextually dependent. A friend of order and structure may argue that organizational effectiveness and human well-being depend on stability and a certain degree of organizational identification. I agree that there are economic and social forces sanctioning extreme fragmentation of meaning. One can, however, also argue that strong variation characterizes contemporary organizational life and that the demands on

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flexibility are high. The idea of enduring identities – a standard feature of much organizational identity literature – is problematic (Gioia et al., 2000). If we imagine that our case-study individual would have held a fixed belief about organizational attributes and defined himself and the organization as strongly non-hierarchical, a lack of flexibility contingent thereupon would create a lot of friction: confusions, frustrations, disobedience, endless negotiations of meanings, etc.

CONCLUSION Pomo as an intellectual style can be seen as offering a set of sharp, even drastic counterpoints to dominant ways of thinking about and practicing social science, including: (a) putting emphasis on discourse, where the constitutive powers of language is emphasized and “natural” objects are viewed as discursively produced; (b) fragmented identities – emphasizing subjectivity as a process and the death of the individual, autonomous, meaning-creating subject; (c) the critique of the idea of representation where the undecidabilities of language takes precedence over language as a mirror of reality and a means for the transport of meaning; (d) the loss of foundations and efforts to produce broad, abstract generalizations; instead multiple voices and varieties of unstable meaning are emphasized. Taking this seriously means a radical change in social and organizational research and theory. Taking it very seriously means even the end of efforts to say something “positive”, e.g. offer research results, interpretations or theories on how to understand and explain phenomena and guide action on a more general level. Taking it somewhat less seriously would reduce the range of claims, avoiding highly abstract, generalizing claims, including making propositions with universal claims, in favor of local theory, i.e. studies with an ambition to say something insightful, including considering complexities and fragmentations, about limited social phenomena, bearing local context strongly in mind. Recognizing the virtues of skeptical postmodernism and deconstruction for challenging established truths have not prevented me from here sketching a less drastic version of postmodernism, actually bordering between postmodernism and interpretive studies. This takes the instabilities and fluidities of meaning seriously, without necessarily strongly privileging this idea. Meaning may be stabilized, there may be boundaries and patterns in the constitutions and reconstitutions of themes such as sentiments, beliefs, self-concepts, identifications, etc. It is

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possible, in a skeptical manner, to totalize the instabilities of meaning, but the relative (in)stabilities of meaning can also be given space. In the small case study above, one (skeptical) postmodernist version would be to use the case to demonstrate how meaning is highly temporary and vanishes when different versions of organizational hierarchy in the account are considered. The idea of the interviewed person holding a view of the organization as having a certain attribute could be demolished. One could also, however, note the possibility of the interviewed person understanding that the organization is fairly non-hierarchical, that in a great deal of situations the interviewee may experience low social distance between managers and others, a feeling of community across formal superior and subordinate, experiences of options of participation and initiative, etc., and that situations of a strict superior–subordinate relationship may be relatively infrequent. (The case study gave some indications on this; Alvesson, 1995.) My point is not to try to establish a preferred line of interpretation or propose that careful attention to data show us the truth. The point is that it is important to be open to different ways of reasoning, and be open to different ways of constructing/using empirical material and be reflexive about one’s framework, research language and inclinations to impose (dis)order on what we are studying. One could also, and this is more in line with an interpretive unpacking approach, be open to the empirical material, suggesting incoherence, variation and fluidity of meanings, making it difficult to establish a hierarchy or center-periphery, dominant and exceptional meanings, but trace the patterns and the frequencies as well as the locality, context-dependencies of the variety and processuality of meanings constituted and re-constituted in organizations. The organization would be approached neither as ordered and systemic, nor as essentially fluid and fragmented. We can study the expressions of self-concepts and the coherence/incoherence of these, we can study how multi-dimensional constructions of organizational realities are in process and point at their effects, we can study the processes of identifications and disidentifications rather than a fixed, abstract degree of identification through static comparisons between self and perceived organizational attributes. We can carry out such studies and develop theory that are less one-sidedly inclined to impose structure, comparability, order and fixed meanings – and less hostile to ambiguities, incoherences and unstabilities (Alvesson, 2002a, b). All this creates problems in the form of putting up hypothesis, propositions or the suggestion of grand theory. But these ambitions can, as I have shown above through unpacking the ideas of an example of the dominant approach in organization research (Dutton et al., 1994), often be seen as proceeding from and hiding problematic assumptions. The results produced may be overrated as forms of knowledge.

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NOTES 1. There are, however, some efforts to develop grounded theory, to move away from neo-positivism and incorporate some ideas of the constructed nature of social inquiry (Charmaz, 2000). 2. It is, of course, also possible that an individual’s identity constructions are mainly non-related to organizational membership. A qualitative study of identity construction processes of British managers emphasized, for example, quite different sources of identification than perceived organizational attributes as important for those being studied (Thomas & Linstead, 2002).

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TO BE DONE WITH PROGRESS AND OTHER HERETICAL THOUGHTS FOR ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT STUDIES Marta B. Cal´as and Linda Smircich INTRODUCTION In a paper written for a theory development forum (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999) we insisted that the postmodern moment, in its association with poststructuralist analyses, brought much of value to organization and management studies. At the time we observed that although such a moment may have already passed, its traces continued to be seen and expressed in several important intellectual developments. In particular, we identified poststructuralist feminist theories, postcolonial theory, actor-network theory, and narrative approaches to theory as productive heirs of the postmodern moment in organization and management studies. Now we wish to expand upon these earlier observations. Consistent with a narrative approach to knowledge we advocated then, we are continuing with a story (or several) we might have left untold at that time and adding further elements to it. In particular, we are articulating more fully ways in which these intellectual developments may further encounter each other. At the end of the chapter we reflect on what we see as a major productive outcome of these encounters. A key contribution of postmodernism to organization studies has been the reflective mode offered by poststructuralist analyses. Accordingly, we note with

Postmodernism and Management: Pros, Cons and the Alternative Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 21, 29–56 Copyright © 2003 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1016/S0733-558X(03)21002-8

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irony how we are framed within this book by a rhetorical device announcing and circumscribing various chapters as “Pro”/“Con”/“Alternative”. And here we are as the “pros” (pun intended). We can see that the book’s framing device already signals a familiar structure of knowledge: the debate or the tournament. Such a (modernist) knowledge form is precisely what we are seeking to escape with our comments about what poststructuralism offers. What else to do but acknowledge once again being “the written” as well as “the writer”! And thus, reflexivity over the constitution of knowledge has allowed us to consider taken-for-granted knowledge-making operations under very different premises; to try to think the unthinkable, to move as if we were outside the limits of our thoughts. It has promoted a temporary state of disbelief about the knowledge-making enterprise, emphasizing its institutional and political linkages and bringing us to “the end of innocence” (Flax, 1992, p. 445). Intellectuals from several different fields have arrived at similar conclusions. For instance, John Lukacs (2002) maintains that if the ubiquitous use of the word “postmodern” during the past twenty-five years was intended to convey a limited reaction to modernism then the term may have been quite inadequate. As long as the users of this term kept their faith in the Age of Reason and in the idea of “progress”, – the idea that postmodernism would allow improvement upon and beyond current ways of thinking but within the same system of thought – not much would change. However, as this historian emphasizes, the widespread use of the term, no matter how imprecise its usage, can also be considered symptomatic of an uneasy feeling that we may be living at the end of an era, the end of the Modern Age. “Postmodernism” in this case would simply have been the punctuation mark of that era and not the beginning of anything new. For something new to emerge, in Lukacs’ words “we must begin thinking about thinking itself . . . we must engage in a radical rethinking of ‘progress’ ” (2002, p. B11). Critiques of the idea of “progress,” an idea pervading Enlightenment thought and persisting to our days, have been a recurrent concern in writings about postmodernism. Yet, with few exceptions (e.g. Dugger, 1993), these critiques have stayed focused on matters of ontology and epistemology, forgetting the material consequences of the object of critique and digging a nihilistic (w)hole for themselves. Different from postmodern critiques, Lukacs’ remarks focus on the social consequences of Enlightenment ideas. There is much to praise about the 500 years historians have dated as Modern, but there is also much to decry. In particular, in the last 200 years, humans have created for the first time ways to destroy the world and humanity in the name of scientific, technological and economic progress. Lukacs calls attention to the fact that it is the still undoubting believers in the power of science and in technological and economic determinism who continue

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to bring us to the edge of this abyss. Yet there is also hope, for there are signs that “for the first time in 200 years, more and more people in more and more fields of life, have begun to question the still present and now outdated idea of progress” (2002, p. B11). Our interest is to join this latter group. It is why we think it worthwhile to write this chapter. Specifically, guided by the reflexivity of poststructuralist approaches and by contemporary heirs of these approaches which address the material consequences of modernity, we want to lay out other possible ways of thinking about thinking in organization and management studies and to foster other ways of articulating organizational knowledge. We do so with the explicit purpose of radically rethinking the modern idea of “progress” and its normative undertones, still pervading our field, and possibly resituating this idea in a less harmful space. It is through this theme that we weave our arguments to the end.

POSTSTRUCTURALISMS AS TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT THINKING IN ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT STUDIES As a general background for our proposal, we start with a reminder of what we consider significant theoretical contributions of postmodernism to organization and management studies. Our focus is not on the postmodern themes well known in the parlance of postmodernism and poststructuralism (and in the sometimes strange conflations between the two): the end of metanarratives, the undecidability of meaning, the crisis of representation, the problematization of the subject and the author, for others (e.g. Alvesson & Deetz, 1996), including others in this volume, as well as we (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999, 1997; Smircich & Cal´as, 1987) have done this several times already. Rather, our focus is on specific analytical approaches as well as on their institutional consequences. Poststructuralist analyses show how each of the postmodern themes mentioned above and their relationships to one another get concealed in operations that go into legitimating knowledge and theory. These knowledge-making operations, at their most basic, distract us from noticing how the “knowledge” so produced is constituted through an unstable system of signification. What we may take as our “common sense” of knowledge production is no common sense at all, but a lot of hard work for controlling signification, meaning and interpretation. Equally important, and perhaps less frequently admitted, these issues are also linked with the institutional politics of knowledge-making. The question of language in the constitution of knowledge is not only a question of aesthetics or

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epistemology, it is also a question of the relations between the institutions that define what knowledge is and the language through which knowledge gets made (Lyotard, 1984). The reflexivity over the constitution of knowledge that permeates “the postmodern condition” has helped to articulate these relationships. It is in these intersections of knowledge-making and institutions that we are hoping to make a contribution, as they may help us rethink the idea of progress and articulate it in a different form. The two modalities of poststructuralist analyses appearing most frequently in organization and management studies, deconstructive and genealogical, provide different but important ways of rethinking our field’s knowledge-making activities. Genealogical analyses, offering complex historical documentation of what otherwise may appear today as natural and ahistorical, reposition conventional wisdom and show how what passes as knowledge is an entanglement of power relations in which many discourses and practices are and have been implicated. Similarly, deconstructions, as close readings for understanding the constitution of textual knowledge, work on the blindspots that we all, readers and writers, are unable to control as we write knowledge. Together they have given us important tools to thoughtfully address the tricky nature of what we do, as well as ways to reflect on other possible consequences if we forget to mention our own sleight of hands.

Genealogies: Prying Open “The Progress of Knowledge” The works of Michel Foucault, in particular his genealogies or “histories of the present” (e.g. 1979) allow us to follow a network of discourses and practices that constitute what we take for granted as knowledge today. Genealogies follow different paths about “the same story,” addressing what may have been presented historically as the unavoidable outcome of a higher form of knowledge. Deterministic historical arguments become undermined by these other stories or parts of the story that were not told, or at least not connected before with what appeared as causal and self-evident. Evans (1998) says it well: “In the light of moderate postmodernism, it is no longer possible to maintain a simple view of economic or social causation in history . . . it has forced all historians to think again about what they are doing when they study the past” (1998, p. 29). Now, there is some immediate learning to be had from this last comment. Historians do not just think in a particular way because they are historians. To be a historian during the past 200 years has also required being able to perform in a particular way within particular institutions configured under the idea of knowledge of a particular era, namely “the modern university”. To be a historian, thus, was to

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be able to articulate a certain kind of narrative if truth were to be told. Upholding “the progress of knowledge” was its dominant feature and “causation” occupied center stage. Perhaps it is this prevalent faith in “the progress of knowledge” (and expectations about who is/how to be able/to speak “the truth”), fully sustained by the conventions of our institutional “order,” that is our worst enemy if we are trying to radically rethink this idea. Why this is an important issue for organization and management studies will soon become apparent, but first the following examples may clarify the more general outlines of this argument. In a still-unpublished paper, part of a larger project we will refer to later, Donna Haraway (2002) tells an anecdote about a National Public Radio (NPR) producer who developed a five-minute segment on human cloning. All the interviewees were biologists specializing in the biology of cloning. All argued that human cloning should be unacceptable for a long time because the conditions required for doing so without hurting people are not available. Yet, despite the clarity of these scientists regarding the ethical aspects of cloning given the lack of sufficient biotechnology capabilities and knowledge, the producer had trouble convincing the program editors to air this segment without also interviewing a bioethicist. Bioethics, it seems, with its stance on prohibition, should be the arbiter in a discussion on human cloning, as if the ethical issue could only be addressed as a “social issue” separate from and posterior to “the scientific and technical”. That “the scientific and technical” might lack certitude or knowledge, or that their practitioners might in fact doubt the capabilities of their knowledge to not do harm, seemed unreasonable to those whose faith in progress is preconditioned by the separation of “the scientific” and “the social,” and by the preeminence and omnipotence conceded to the former. That “doing science and technology” is in itself a particular social practice, and as such embedded in the context of everyday social relations is seldom addressed in the same breath with which “the miracles” of science and technology are nowadays enthroned in public and even private discourse. In instances when this has been done (i.e. looking at “doing science and technology” as a particular social practice), such as with the so-called “Challenger Disaster,” arguments are raised by focusing on the extraordinary circumstances of the event, and accentuating the social relations aspects of it, which makes the technological difficulties recede further into the background (e.g. Vaughan, 1996). The multiple narratives written about this tragic event have raised more questions about who was paying attention to whom and when as decisions were made – i.e. a managerial problem – than to the possibility that, as a matter of course, the science and technology in place might have been fully inadequate. In Vaughan’s recollection, “the focus after the disaster on managerial wrongdoing

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also removed from the public spotlight the difficulty of making engineering decisions about the shuttle technology. Although both official investigations repeatedly and publicly emphasized that the technology was developmental, not operational, the attention to managers marginalized the role of skilled working people, daily engineering routine and the technology . . .. Little publicity was given to the conclusion that no one at NASA nor Thiokol fully understood the operation of the joint prior to the accident” (Vaughan, 1996, p. 390). But further, and paradoxically, events such as this, which could potentially highlight in the most public of ways the intimate relations among science, the social, and the institutional, displace these facts from view precisely because what is deemed worthy of recollection is the extraordinariness of the situation. The manufacturing of “the extraordinary” in our public discourse excludes the everydayness about the fallibility of our knowledge and, in particular, the fallibility of science and technology insofar as these have become the surrogate models for “all that is to be known” in our society (Cal´as, 1999; Perrow, 1984; Turner, 1978; Weick, 1993). To be clear, the issue we are flagging here is not that science and technology should be suspected as flawed because they are “not yet good enough” – i.e. a way of thinking that continues to uphold the promises of science and technology within a particular view of progress. Rather, we are highlighting that such a way of thinking, which separates the social from the scientific, the technological, and the institutional as distinctive entities contributing in specific ways to some definite causal analysis, is part of historical events that should be examined. Beyond emphasizing that this separation was in itself historical, we are also addressing how the narratives we tell ourselves, before as much as now, have fashioned and continue to fashion the separation as if it were a natural fact (e.g. Czarniawska, 1995). We are also pointing to how there are real material outcomes, sometimes quite harmful, that can be associated with this naturalization. Further, remarking on instances in which some bridging is done, such as the Challenger example, we point at how, despite appearances to the contrary, these narratives maintain the distinctiveness and specificity of the social, the institutional, the scientific and technological, as well as their hierarchical positions in the knowledge landscape (from “ambiguous” to “exact”). Otherwise it would be impossible to sustain a narrative of causation toward the progress of knowledge in all its deterministic inevitability. Foucault provides some answers for how to go about prying open these narratives. His genealogical approaches, relying on what he refers to as eventalization, make visible “a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness which imposes itself uniformly on all. To show that things ‘weren’t as necessary as

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all that’ . . . eventalization means rediscovering the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, play of forces, strategies, and so on which at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal and necessary” (1991, p. 76). This analytical approach, moreover, contributes to thinking about, in Foucault’s words, “a plethora of intelligibilities, a deficit of necessities” (1991, p. 78) which makes it impossible to think about finding a clear line of causation, a progressive accumulation of all there is to know. “As a way of lightening the weight of causality, ‘eventalization’ thus works by constructing around the singular event analyzed as process . . . a polyhedron of intelligibility, the number of whose faces is not given in advance and can never properly be taken as finite” (1991, p. 77). Genealogical analyses, thus, allow us to rearticulate narratives about the progress of knowledge, so that they become denaturalized and, therefore, some space can be opened to radically rethink the way we may have been thinking. Yet, all these analyses allow us to do is to consider how we came to think how we think today. They are not intended to let us consider how else can we think into the future. Nonetheless, their importance for helping us to dislodge the taken-forgranted of our contemporary forms of thinking can hardly be exaggerated, since it is not until this is done that a different future can even be conceived.

Deconstruction: Revealing the Tenuous Grounds of Progress If the idea of progress has a history it also has a language. It is because of its focus on language in its intersection with knowledge that deconstruction makes a contribution to understanding the fallibility of the progress of knowledge and the impossibility of certainty. We experience language as immediate; it spills forth from our mouths as an apparently pure form of knowledge; yet the language through which we speak at the same time mediates what it is possible to know. The immediacy of language, as well as its mediation in constituting our system of thought, invites us to consider how it is possible to think as we do and to say as we do. It encourages suspicion about what we think and say, most especially when we think we might be “beyond” a reasonable doubt. At a minimum, we would say, deconstructive writings provide an approach for learning and teaching the inner workings, the mode of existence, of conventional theorizing, historically, rhetorically and politically, and for showing how we are all existing “inside” these. Unfortunately, the strong philosophical and institutional analysis that deconstruction can deliver often got lost in aesthetic pyrotechnics when practiced within the North American literary landscape. Specifically for our emphasis here, there are at least two aspects of Derrida’s work that often are

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forgotten when deconstruction is invoked. First, that Derrida’s engagements have been primarily with philosophical texts and that these engagements have not been intended to discount philosophical writings as simply metaphorical or literary language (e.g. Derrida, 1982a). Rather, in his words, “[w]hoever alleges that philosophical discourse belongs to the closure of a language must still proceed with this language and with the oppositions it furnishes. According to a law that can be formalized, philosophy always reappropriates for itself the discourse that de-limits it” (Derrida, 1982b, p. 177). This latter essay, a meditation focusing on the work of the linguist Benveniste, addresses from the start the difficulties of articulating the primacy of either thought or language as distinct categories without problematizing at the same time the notion of “category” and its historicity. Thus, at issue is reckoning with the traces of language and its difficulties in what may be taken as given in our approaches to thought, but not dismissing philosophical analyses tout court. In fact, contemporary philosophers reading Derrida’s texts have argued that deconstruction is neither irrational nonsense, nor does it deny the existence of any reality “outside the text”. In Norris’s view, for instance, “the issues [Derrida] raises belong to the tradition of Kantian enlightened critique even while pressing that tradition to the limits (and beyond) of its own self-legitimizing claims,” for Derrida’s project is the “ceaseless problematization of the principle of reason” (Norris, 1987, p. 169). A second aspect of Derrida’s work that often gets forgotten is related to the above, but in a somewhat different fashion: that deconstruction is always engaged with the institutional forms of modernity within which we all are expected to perform, and that there are very material consequences emerging from such performances. Early in his 1980s work, Derrida (1983) focused on the modern Western university and the intimate relationship between this institutional form and the idea of reason. He addressed the influence of Kant in defining the place of philosophy vis-`a-vis other disciplines in the university, such that philosophy acquired a space in the modern university insofar as it abstained from engaging outside its “proper area of competence.” That is, its place was to engage with “pure reason” and without concern for “utility.” In his analysis Derrida notes that such an agreement, which puts philosophy “outside and above” technical and practical faculties, was a compromise for philosophy to not overstep its bounds and, under premises of obtaining freedom of thought, to stay silent on matters of practical affairs. Further, this concrete example illustrates the historical location of organizing universities into “pure” and “applied” fields, as well as the institutionalization of the divide among different kinds of “knowledge,” and assumptions of expertise. It calls attention to the difficulties of maintaining the separation between the concerns of theoretical

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reason and the various fields of practice where reason is put to use, such as the legal, administrative and military systems. Moreover, it is equally important to note that to continue to debate the possibility, or not, of separating types of knowledge is also to forget that the doctrine establishing the modern Western university was the same doctrine that marked the emergence of modern technocratic reason, which is what authorized the debate in the first place. Much of Derrida’s work since this time has increasingly addressed “practical matters” by intervening in public discourses such as nuclear deterrence (1984), European identity (1992), global crisis in a post-Marxist world (1994), and promoting the importance of recognizing the impossibility of drawing many claims of “knowledge,” “expertise,” and “control” to their “logical conclusions” under the limitations of our modes of thought and language. The way deconstructive analyses have been deployed most often is for understanding linguistically the exclusions necessary for representing the “positive knowledge” on which ideas of “progress” depend. However, perhaps most significant for us academics in the business of “knowledge-making,” deconstructive analyses can work directly on the taken-for-granted of the institutions in which we labor – i.e. “the house of knowledge”. Both historically and rhetorically, the arguments we hear today about “the way it is” in the university (e.g. D’Aveni, 1996) require close analyses to show that the way it is, is not necessarily so (e.g. Bensimon, 1994; Readings, 1996). “It” can be interpreted otherwise (see Organization, 2001, special issue on Re-Organizing Knowledge, Transforming Institutions). More generally, we all, as organizational and management scholars, are in an excellent position to genealogize and deconstruct the “logics” of our institutions, for the construction of institutions is the primary object of our theories. In doing so, all of us would be learning how to teach others to do the same for their own organizations; an immediate integration of theory and practice, if ever there was one. To be clear, organization and management “faculties” are part and parcel of the discourses that maintain modern economic and technological determinism as if it were a natural fact. As more evidence of the material failures of such a mode of thinking appears, other positivities need to come into the picture if positive knowledge is to continue to be upheld at all (e.g. GibsonGraham, 1996). At stake would be trying to imagine other ways of articulating the economic, the social, the scientific, the technical and the institutional – to rethink all those categories with which modern ways of thinking about the progress of knowledge impose limitations on what/how to think and say, as well as reflect on the notion of category-making itself. On the other side of this, many other knowledges may come into the picture once we relinquish the role of the expert

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promoted and protected by our current forms of thinking, no matter at what cost (e.g. Haskell, 1984). An example of contemporary research may clarify these points. Donna Haraway is currently involved in a project that looks into the world of “companion species”. One interest of her project, which she playfully describes, after Foucault, as “the birth of the kennel”, is understanding how “purity” is constituted in order to claim a pedigreed breed of dogs. The form of thinking that promotes such constitution, and the concomitant claim of “pure-breed”, is no simple language game. Specific material practices of all kinds come together into the making of a pure-bred dog. Some are based on biotechnologies, including cloning, others are based on social activities such as dog shows, still others appear as classificatory schemes – i.e. category-making – devised to tell apart one breed from another. Then there is the historical and cultural location of all these activities, including the history of any particular breed, as well as the relationships between dogs and people in which dogs are as much actors as are people. Some of her ethnographic analyses focus on “lay breeders”, often very knowledgeable, through self-education, in science, technology, veterinary medicine, but who also have strong ethical concerns regarding conditions that would make people and dogs flourish together. Some of their recommendations include the use of an open registry such that the family health records of all dogs of a particular breed can be followed to identify possible genetic problems along the line. While in some countries open registry is common, in the U.S. it has been very unsuccessful. Preference for identifying “problems” has been primarily conceded to “more expert” approaches. Haraway comments: “the gold rush for commercially viable, parental verification DNA markers and DNA tests for individual genetic diseases goes on with gusto, with all the collaborations of biotech companies, academic institutions, and individual researchers that we know from two-legged genetics” (2002, p. 15). Haraway’s example illustrates how to tell relationally stories about science, technology, economics and our social space. These may include stories that are clear about not knowing, that call social experiments by their “proper names”, that do not trust the experts and that de-bunk their myths, that work in a world where the knowledge we have is always partial and always subject to re-signification by many . . . a meandering path where many other things are possible . . . In distinct contrast, organization and management studies’ mainstream storytelling seems to continue on an unreflective straight path as if the story that it tells could separate science, technology, economics and our social space. Within this path, there is little else it can say that contributes to other than holding on to its current positioning. And thus, if it wants to be able to say something else for the future there is still much work to be done.

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AFTER PROGRESS: SOME HERETICAL THOUGHTS What would happen if we tried to rethink our disciplines, organization and management studies, and the institution in which they perform, the university, as something else . . . the something else to be unspecified at the moment. Would it even be possible to imagine other ways of articulating the economic, the social, the scientific, the technical and the institutional? Would it be possible to rethink all those categories with which modern ways of thinking about the progress of knowledge impose limitations on what/how we think and say? With the aid of a few contemporary theoretical tendencies inspired by poststructuralist approaches, we will try to create some conditions of possibilities for having these thoughts. In 1999, we identified poststructuralist feminism, postcolonial theorization and actor-network theory as theoretical developments in the social sciences and the humanities, which inherited their contemporary articulations from poststructuralist analyses, yet went on to say something else. Similar to poststructuralism, they all emphasize the relationship between “power” and “knowledge” at the inception of “theory.” That is, each of these approaches address who/what does knowledge and the knowledge that gets made. Each takes seriously the politics of knowledgemaking and incorporates into their writings those reflective concerns. Each points at the subjectivities that get constituted through theory and to relational processes that account for such constitutions. They all share a preoccupation and ambivalence about the way “other’s knowledge/other knowledges” can be represented, while emphasizing the need to do so. Finally, the problems of representation and form, the poetics of knowledge-making, may become the focus of textual experiments. In general, these narratives call attention to conventional views about the Modern Age, about the progress of knowledge and the role of the expert, and turn them around to show the reductionist assumptions that were made in order to sustain these views. However, these approaches also share ambivalence about the anti-essentialist position of poststructuralism, and the implications and difficulties of this position for creating theories that promote active engagement with the world. Each considers it necessary to adopt an ethical posture as part of the knowledge-making enterprise; as part of writing theory. At a minimum, they all ask: Whose interests does theory serve? For whom is it good? While these theoretical tendencies bridge in some ways “the text” and “the world” in both conceptual and empirical writings (if we are still keen on maintaining those distinctions), their way of approaching the world is not necessarily self-evident, for there is no world independent of the analytical approach to which a commitment for analysis has been made. From these perspectives knowing and known are always already implicated in what is made self-evident. Thus questions

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becoming central are “Whose reasonable views do provide/would provide the explanation? To which logic will appeals be made? By whom? For whom? With what material consequences?” Therefore, they all use “evidence” to produce interpretations and critical commentaries that denaturalize more conventional modernist views of the world we inhabit. In what follows we re-present in turn some distinctive aspects of each of these theoretical tendencies, and in each case provide an example to illustrate a possible contribution to rethinking modern knowledge. Later, through other examples, we put them in conversation with each other. To make it possible to have these conversations is also to make it possible to have other conditions for telling a different story about organization and management studies.

Performing the Body Politics: Feminist Theorizing and Poststructuralism Feminist theories are always political theories regardless of the philosophies on which they stake their claims. Whether liberal, radical, marxist, socialist, psychoanalytic, and so on, feminist theories have been mostly about how and why the exclusion or oppression of women happens and how to provide remedies to this situation (Cal´as & Smircich, 1996). Modern feminist movements and the theories emanating from these movements (e.g. liberal, radical) engaged from the start with the modernist conception of progress, reason and knowledge. Specifically, the question of whether women were reasonable people (a question that was also posed about other “inferior categories”) appeared early in the philosophies of the Enlightenment. For instance, both Kant and Hegel present women’s reason as distinct from that of men. For Kant, women lacked the capacity for abstract thought and a grasp of universals, but they could make up for that lack through other mental traits such as taste, sensibility and practical sense. For Hegel the relationship between women and reason was more complicated. He posited feminine consciousness as less advanced than masculine consciousness, and therefore women’s status as fully rational and ethical beings depended upon their relationship to men (e.g. Lloyd, 1993). Continued debates on women’s rights since the 18th century had their inception through these ideas, for the position of women in Western societies were redefined by way of notions of reason and progress established at that time (e.g. Wollstonecraft, 1792). These notions have made their way to today through many, sometimes unspoken, assumptions about women’s rationality underlying the debates about gender equity and equality. Poststructuralism, however, provided a dramatic turn of events. Most other feminist analyses focused on women’s issues and conflated notions of sex and

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gender. That is, by maintaining the relationship between notions of gender (i.e. feminine, masculine) and particular sexed bodies (i.e. women, men) all questions of inequality and oppression were articulated through sex, even when there was an acceptance that gender, as a social structure, might be socially constructed. Poststructuralism opened the space for considering “gender” theoretically, independent from particular sexed bodies. The linguistic turn in poststructuralism moved the concerns of feminist theory from the body of women to the body of the text, by asking questions such as, How has “the feminine” or “the masculine” been constituted in “knowledge?” What kind of performances are required to maintain a structure of correspondence between particular sexed bodies and gendered knowledge? In what ways are these performances inscribed relationally in social institutions? Which forms of subjectivity thus become possible? (e.g. Butler & Scott, 1992; Flax, 1987). In short, the analytical emphasis was moved away from any essential human characteristic that may account for conditions of inequality, towards understanding relational processes. The emphasis here is not simply on the bodies that constitute these intersections but on the subjectivities that get formed and transformed within these social markers. “Gender” in these analyses is not “about women” anymore. One can now talk about “masculinities” or about “queer theory” as productive analytical approaches for understanding specific conditions of different people in the world. And this also applies to the conditions we help create in the world with our scholarship. Coming under specific scrutiny were processes of “knowledge-making,” which may have given, and still give, way to the institution and perpetuation of such conditions as if they were a natural fact. Yet, the relationship between feminist theories and poststructuralism has been, at best, uneasy. Poststructuralist feminists accept the merits of deconstruction and genealogies because they make explicit the devaluation of the feminine in “universal” theories and in discursive practices. In particular, they appreciate the ways in which “the margins,” “the other,” interrogate “the center” through these analytical approaches. The critics, however, point at the depoliticizing effects of these approaches when it comes to claiming agency for “women” and empowering their representation. That is, is it possible to attain positive political alliances through the claims of “deconstructed subjectivities” rather than through a unified notion of “oppressed women”? Who would be the subject in a debate where no truth-claims can be attached? Some have observed that the gendering of theories can result in an interesting and sophisticated academic exercise, but questioned how would this contribute to fighting the oppression of “real people”. Is this not another elitist posture more typical of “the patriarchs”? Since the late 1980s, several other processual approaches to feminist theorizing have emerged from the encounters among socialist feminist theories, black

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feminism and poststructuralism. These approaches share the critique of subjectivity in poststructuralism but they concede to a less-dispersed socially constituted “subject position”, enacted through historical and cultural locations, as well as power relations. Intersections of gender, ethnicity, race, class and sexuality now figure prominently in analyses of social and material concerns, which some label post-poststructuralist. For example, in a recently published round table on restoring feminist politics to post-poststructuralist critique, Hortense Spillers, echoing the other panelists, proposed that now is the time for the learnings from the productive encounters between feminism and poststructuralism to be put to use beyond the academic realm (Lurie, Cvetkovich, Gallop, Modleski & Spillers, 2001). Now is the time for scholars to become public intellectuals in very specific ways, as she says: discourse of political propaganda should be put back on the agenda of feminist theory. The feminist-as-citizen should cast an eye on the criminalization of people of color, the plight of the homeless, the impoverishment of children, the crisis in healthcare, the domination of the corporate order, which justifies greed as a new human right, and the disparagement of America’s inner cities and the collapse of the public school system. None of this stuff is glamorous . . . but every one of them bears enormous impact on our work as university teachers and researchers . . . What I am urging here is . . . intruding the rich instability of the subject of feminism on to the stage of intervention into the life of a democracy: I am suggesting that we do so not as strangers to ourselves but as students of rhetoric. If we can collectively discover strategies to penetrate the rapproachement between various media and the corporate conglomerates we should do so with all deliberate speed (Lurie et al., p. 684, our emphasis).

From this, contours start to emerge for certain conditions of possibilities for thinking about our thinking, and radically rethinking the idea of progress that is also part of organization and management studies and its institutional location. First, it does our field little good to ignore or deny the existence of dire conditions around us, and the contributions of our ignorance (multiple meanings about this) in creating such conditions. The concrete social ills identified by Spillers, and many others she did not mention, have their origin with, or have been exacerbated by, policies espoused as “good management” and “good organizations”. A relational analysis of intesectionalities of subject positions fostered in our teaching and our research vis-`a-vis those others ignored by our theories may uncover links with the production of harm which up to now remain invisible. Second, recognizing these intersections, as well as the “bad and the ugly” in our “good” is also a way to gain some pause about the way we think about “progress”. What kind of progress is that which admits to such social ills? What are the claims, whose are the claims, under which banner do they appear, which disallow conversations about what is patently evident – “no progress”? What are the claims,

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whose are the claims, under which banner do they appear, which only allow conversations of an economic-technological nexus as progress? In which ways are these dynamics of allowing/disallowing encased within masculinity/femininity positionalities? How have race and class played out in disabling the discourse of no progress? Third, in many universities, in the U.S. within business schools in particular, it may seem impossible to have such conversations. Insofar as separations between “the disciplines” remain in place, we continue to be disciplined to think as we think, to say as we say and to deny the existence of the others. Outside b-schools, however, women’s studies and eventually poststructuralism brought much interdisciplinarity to other social sciences in the university. The interdisciplinary critiques arriving through the sharing of “theory” among disciplines are also travelling outside the university and into “the real world” now. And thus, as more public intellectuals, feminist and others, engage with a broader audience to complicate the deterministic narratives of the economy–technology nexus, the more important it will be for “organization and management” discourse to participate in such engagements, not as antagonists but as protagonists, with the best “insider knowledge” of such discourse. In this regard, feminist encounters with poststructuralism furnish some good models to be followed.

Talking Back from Bombay: (Post)Colonial Analyses Poststructuralism is, in general, a critique of Western epistemology as a system of exclusions: an examination of the constitution of knowledge as the operations of a system of binary opposites in which the privileged term acquires authority by denying the presence of its “other”. But, poststructuralist analyses are also critiques of modernity in the West by the West and, of necessity, themselves exclusionary of other voices. Yet, is it still possible to tell the story of the West without understanding the relational but exclusionary (of the other) nature of its constitution? Postcolonial scholarship furnishes some answers to this question. Works such as Edward Said’s (e.g. 1979, 2000) pay attention to the ways in which, in order to represent themselves, the discourses of the West have taken recourse to representing Eastern people. These works analyze the forms in which such representations have appeared as well as the institutional practices that contributed to their creation and reproduction, that is, to their naturalization. Some of these analyses also criticize postmodern representations, which in their western-ness, including their sometimes emancipatory gestures, have nonetheless tended the rest with colonizing impetus, detracting from their agency and imagination (e.g. Radhakrishnan, 1994, 1996).

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Postcolonial (or, according to some, neocolonial) theorizing emerged from Third World scholarship that extended the insights of poststructuralism to its logical consequences: If Western modern knowledges (i.e. Enlightenment notion of knowledge and science) have been constituted on the backs of “the marginal,” the others, what would happen if those others were to speak back as “knowledgeable”? At their most immediate, these analyses share with feminist poststructuralist theorizing objections about the decentering of subjectivity and the problems of representation. But, in response, they pay attention first to the ways Western scholarship creates categories of analysis that, even at their most critical, are blind to their own ethnocentrism (e.g. Chambers & Curti, 1996). For instance, even critical categories such as gender, race and class may assume an unproblematic universalism which is often associated with the Enlightenment idea of “a core humanity”. While the analytical value of these categories in Western societies may appear to give them a certain irreproachable validity, it is precisely such naturalizing gesture of Western scholarship that makes them problematic in the first place if they were to be applied to others in the world. “Class” has no counterpart in many societies, “race” may be irrelevant as a social marker and “gender” often stands for a universalized “woman” who only exists, conceptually, as the notion of specific women from the West. Postcolonial critiques also extend to narratives of “origins of the nation” in Western historiography. They may retell the story of “the native other” who was already there but who might have been excluded or devalued in the Western version of the “national tale” through markers such as “traditional,” “primitive” or “less developed.” At the same time, these are not nostalgic narratives of a return to an untainted “primordial world” but about power/knowledge configurations inscribed in specific modernizing relationships between “the West” and “the Rest.” Of particular relevance for organization and management studies is the fact that these analyses are no longer of interest only to literary scholars and other humanist fields, as may have been the case at first. Postcolonial analyses have been appearing increasingly in the social sciences as a critique of these disciplines’ epistemological positioning (e.g. Burawoy et al., 2000; Feldman, 2001), for, as recognized much earlier by Sahlins regarding anthropology, there is an original contradiction in “a science of man (sic) sponsored by a society which, in a way no different from others, exclusively defined itself as humanity and its own order as culture” (1976, p. 54). Thus, insofar as the social sciences more generally were and still are formulated to establish categorizations of the West, which can and should speak for itself and for the Rest, they are unavoidably encountering the other in the field of Postcolonial Studies today. There are many aspects of postcolonial analyses we could discuss at this point, but for the sake of this chapter we want to focus again on the possibilities they

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offer for thinking about thinking and for radically rethinking the modern idea of “progress” in organization and management studies. The stories we have written in much organization theory, our concepts and representations, no matter how “global” (or precisely because of this), represent the ways of thinking of certain peoples and not others. While they may be more representative of our own wishful thinking than of the world we inhabit, our theoretical representations have been profoundly implicated in blinding us to historical and current global circumstances. These analyses are of immediate value for our disciplines in at least three areas: They furnish important theoretical lenses for critique of Western representations both textually and institutionally; they articulate distinct conceptualizations for addressing and problematizing the relational nature of Western knowledge in which the West/Rest are implicated; and they offer ways of rethinking engagements in the material world of a “global economy”. A few examples in these three areas may clarify our argument. For instance, in anthropology, Fabian’s (1983) work showed how the use of tropes concerning time in ethnographic accounts constructs a teleology of progress such that the West (i.e. the anthropologist’s world qua practice of anthropology as a discipline) seems always to move ahead of the Rest (i.e. the objects/subjects of anthropological knowledge who were, from the start, other than “western people”). These arguments consider, more generally, the naturalization of modern notions of time and space as belonging to specific changes in modes of thinking at a time when social and natural sciences were appearing. Distancing, be it through time, space or movement, became the rhetorical strategy of choice for the human sciences. It was through this strategy that “the man of reason” could claim “his” privilege on account of superior intellect, while accepting, as humanistic thought would have it, the possibility that others would attain the same privilege “at the appropriate time”. However, postcolonial studies analyze the intersections of Western theories and Western institutions as a “politics of knowledge” not just to point out at ways in which they silence the voices of the Rest. They also attempt to recover poststructuralist deconstructions with affirmative conceptualizations, which return agency and imagination to those who have been represented in subjection to others in the world, in particular those who have been subjected to Western colonialism both historically and at present. Perhaps one of the most creative attempts in this regard is the notion of “strategic essentialism” (Spivak, 1988, 1999), reclaiming the “essential identity” of a group as a temporary strategic gesture in the interest of agency for struggle, no matter how dispersed the identities of the members. Notions of “hybridity” and “hybridization” counter the “purity” of the West (and its recent “other,” homogenized into the trope of “multiculturalism”; e.g. Zizek, 1997) and show how West and Rest have always already interpenetrated each other racially, intellectually, materially, symbolically, territorially (Bhabha, 1990;

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Garc´ıa-Canclini, 1990; Pieterse, 1994). “The border,” “borderlands,” “border thinking”, both as geography and as metaphor, have become productive spaces rather than dividing lines for theorizing complicated subjectivities and social relations in contemporary encounters of many in the world (e.g. Anzald´ua, 1987; Mignolo, 2000; Saldivar, 1997). And “diaspora” and “displacement” articulate experiences that make visible the fissures in any seamless narrative of cultural and national identity (e.g. Gilroy, 1993). Regarding the materiality of social conditions, giving attention to popular culture, social movements and testimonial writings may help represent what the scholarly voice silences; for, some argue, it is there that particular configurations of identity, agency, and organization first appear and change under contemporary globalization processes (e.g. Alvarez, Dagnino & Escobar, 1998). Still others address different articulations and material reproductions of colonialism within globalization while recognizing dispersed resistances to such conditions that are appearing in new ways of thinking by many people in the world (Hard & Negri, 2000; San Juan, 2000). What is the relevance of these analyses, conceptualizations and critiques for organization and management studies? At first, there is the question of challenging our modernist ways of thinking and their still Hegelian faith in “progress”. Representations of “knowledge” as they appear in our theories reproduce widely the colonizer/colonized conditions in the context of today’s academic political economy. For example, cultural categorizations such as Hofstede’s (1980) are utilized to represent the relativity of cultural differences, including theories, which in appearance keeps charges of ethnocentrism at bay. Yet this same author argued more recently that, as they increase in affluence and modernize (read “westernize”), “collectivist” societies become more “individualistic” (Hofstede, 1999). Even “cultural relativism” cannot resist the explanatory seduction of “Western progress”. Further, organizational knowledge gets to be distributed from the West to the Rest through consulting firms, university consortia, distance education and many other institutional forms which attempt to remove the “local” from the “global” in the name of progress (Banerjee & Linstead, 2001). But up to what point is organization and management theory involved in the reproduction of worldwide ignorance? Up to what point is the assumption of worldwide convergence in management knowledge and values an assumption that pays attention only to a cosmopolitan elite who is not that different? What differences are not represented in these assumptions? How many people in the world are left out of our theories? And with what consequences? Concurrently certain languages, English in particular, continue to be privileged as the languages of theory and knowledge regardless of knowledge produced

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in other languages (e.g. Day, 2002). There is even irony, in that the best-known postcolonial writers are operating in the West and publishing in English, in fact reproducing that which they address in their critiques, for the publication and consumption of their intellectual products are seldom addressed to others than the bigger markets of Anglo and European academies (e.g. Afzal-Khan & Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). Some even see these as exhibiting a certain universalizing tendency, glossing over many different forms of colonialisms to which postcolonial critiques may need to attend (Chakrabarty, 2000; L´opez, 2001). In appearance, there is no escape from the West if its ideological contexts pervade the institutionalization of knowledge regardless of their location, but postcolonial analyses, in their multiplicity of arguments and counterarguments, represent a move toward these more complicated forms of understanding the current shape of the world and the interpenetration of its multiple agendas. An example from the streets of Bombay may provide some additional space for thinking about these questions. Srilatha Batliwala (2002), co-founder of SPARC during the 1980s, tells this story. SPARC, a Bombay-based NGO, organized and mobilized pavement and slum dwellers – particularly women – to struggle for sustainable, people-centered solutions to their housing and survival needs in the urban context. These dwellers, the poorest of the poor, dispossessed and uneducated by all our Western standards, were able to organize themselves for their own purposes in ways that defied the original approaches fostered by the NGO. From their perspective, the feminist politics sponsored by some women’s groups did not speak to their actual needs for housing which were more important for both women and men (e.g. violence against women was, in their views, a community not a personal problem). Thus, they were able to put together a plan that illustrated for the local government the higher cost of continued slum displacements versus the long-term cost benefits of permanent housing. Further, they negotiated financial arrangements from international donors despite concerns from the NGO that making a pact with these donors might get them into a difficult financial trap and more exploitation. From the perspective of the street dwellers, the international donors were no worse that their own local politicians, and thus it was a matter of who could address at their most immediate their own questions for survival. At issue here is the scope and directionality of thinking, that of the West and the many of the Rest. Illustrated through the slum dwellers in perhaps the most “local” of possible “global” examples, global processes are just that, processes. Their directions and dispersions are circuitous and ambiguous. Their intersections multiple, often unpredictable, mostly uncontrollable. On the other hand, Western theories of development, similar to much organization theory, are based on conceptions of cause and effect that go in a particular direction and address the thinking of a limited population. The understandings that support

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them are predicated on the possibility of prediction and control, no matter how much complexity is thrown into the equation. They view the world from afar in their quest for universal and final resolution of its problems. They are Western power/knowledge under the guise of scientific detachment. Postcolonial analyses grapple directly with these forms of thinking. Their sensibilities are attuned to ambiguity, the local, the partial, the ephemeral, no matter where these occur. They touch the pulse of everyday life and record it in the life of the people; people always already with agency and capabilities to engage and respond in relational ways to any “colonialism”. Their mode of existence exudes power relations. They navigate with the flow, in whichever direction it may go (e.g. Appadurai, 1990) and document the uncontrollable as they go along. While not without critique insofar as they stay in the grip of academic posturing, they are nonetheless of practical importance.

On Never Having Been Modern: Actor-Network “Theory” and After In our accounts of feminist theory after poststructuralism and postcolonial analyses, we highlighted several themes calling into question the ways the idea of “progress” has been put into circulation and maintained by our modern institutions. Both accounts address the exclusionary forms of thinking and knowing necessary in order to maintain this idea. Remarking on the relational nature between the included and the excluded, they encourage returning several of those exclusions to the frame of analysis. They encourage, as well, a rethinking of conventional institutional arrangements for “knowledge-production” insofar as these arrangements are fully implicated in maintaining partitions and categorizations making it impossible to think about a more extended relational form of knowing and acting in the world. In particular, they bring up discursive themes, such as “relationality” and “hybridization”, which question in principle the possible purity of any categorization on which modern ontological “certainties” must rely in order to “measure” their own “progress”. We illustrated some of these arguments with examples. Both Spillers and Batliwala speak of the misplaced efforts of conventional institutional forms, be they universities, NGOs or other producers of “expertise”, when it comes to engaging with concrete problems in the world which may look very different from the side of the actors. Spillers’ solutions would cross boundaries, disciplinary and institutional, but still concede to the expertise of scholars, who as public intellectuals would engage with the world through feminist rhetorical analyses. However, Batliwala’s tale casts a few doubts on the directionality of strategies such as these. Any “institutional expertise” is still a limited way for understanding

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and acting on the everydayness of others’ situations, and yet the discourses of expertise are still wagged by all in order to get a foothold in the world. That is, others in the world gain legitimacy for their actions by appealing to the discourse of “the experts,” but how so? Weren’t the slum dwellers in Bombay engaging in cost-benefit analyses? And yet, weren’t they also mobilizing precisely “the other” of our own discourses to show that our liberal distinctions between “good” and “bad” must rely on a tenuous boundary-making process in order to sustain them? At this point, then, we need to bring up still another tale regarding our ways of thinking about the shape of the world that may shed more light on the above issues. In other words, What is that modern way of thinking which keeps reproducing itself and that may be getting us into so much trouble? Can we think in any other way? To engage these questions, rather than relying on stories from philosophy, or from colonialism, we now turn to the social studies of science and technology and to Bruno Latour’s story telling. In a recent lecture in Germany, Latour (2001) asked his audience to consider how we do our societies these days as collective or sociotechnical experiments. Using the example of foot and mouth disease which was devastating Europe at that point, he reminds the audience that a decision had been previously made not to vaccinate the animals, “a collective experiment. . . where farmers, consumers, cows, sheep, veterinarians, virologists have been engaged together.” This decision was not controlled by anybody but rather it was a collective outcome of “hybrid forums”, the shape of our contemporary world in which multiple actors participate inside and outside laboratories, human and nonhumans “talking at once about imbroglios of people and things.” With this example, Latour asked his audience to think quite differently about our world and what we do in it. He asked his interlocutors to pay attention to the fact that there is more in the world than can be controlled by any of us, inside or outside the “laboratories”. And yet we act as if that were not the case, as if somebody knew and somebody was in control, because that is how we came to think as “moderns”. He asks us, thus, to interpret our present time not as modernity or postmodernity, but as nonmodernity, because in his view modernity, and its dream of being able to separate facts from values, ends and means, things and people, while always moving towards an ever better future, never really happened. If such is the case, he added, building on Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe, then we must replace the idea of experts (some of us) with that of “co-researchers” (all of us). One way or another “we are all engaged . . . into the collective experiments on matters as different as climate, food, landscape, health, urban design, technical communication and so on. As consumers, militants, citizens, we are all now co-researchers”, who should be taken into account as co-participants in the

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making of all these issues. Therefore, Latour suggests, we need a new slogan for us all: “No innovation without representation.” The framework undergirding this lecture was mapped several years earlier. In We Have Never Been Modern (1993), he sets out the argument by focusing on the separate sections of a regular newspaper, with headings such as Economy, Politics, Science, Books, Culture, Local Events and so on. He notices they address issues in the world as if they had nothing to do with each other, no matter how many possibilities of relationships and interactions exist among them. As he looks through these sections, he also notices how analysts of any discipline, be they journalists, scientists, politicians, economists and so on, seem to be saying “let us not mix up knowledge, interest, justice and power. Let us not mix up heaven and earth, the global stage and the local scene, the human and the nonhuman. ‘But these imbroglios do the mixing,’ you’ll say, ‘they weave our world together!’ ‘Act as if they didn’t exist,’ the analysts reply. They have cut the Gordian knot with a well-honed sword . . . on the left, they have put knowledge of things, on the right, power and human politics” (1993, p. 3). Latour proposes that there is a need to “retie the Gordian knot by crisscrossing as often as we have to the divide that separates exact knowledge and the exercise of power” (p. 3). His proposal, embedded in analytical approaches that go under the rubric, more generally, of “actor-network theory” or ANT, but also under others such as “sociology of translation”, (e.g. Callon, 1980, 1986, 1997; Callon & Law, 1995; Latour, 1987, 1996, 1997; Law, 1994; Law & Hassard, 1999) is to shuttle back and forth among this apparent divide through networks he describes as “[m]ore supple that the notion of system, more historical than the notion of structure, more empirical than the notion of complexity, the idea of network is the Ariadne’s thread of these interwoven stories” (p. 3). The frame for this proposal is a broader thesis, the need to see ourselves as “nonmodern” if we are ever going to be able to reconsider the ways in which we have been constituting our (Western) world for several centuries now. This is not an easy argument to represent, precisely because our modernist forms of understanding would put objections onto its path on and on, but, succinctly, here are some contours of what it implies. First, the argument goes, modernist forms of knowing, which includes most of our disciplines, institutions, and their constitutions, depend on two sets of quite different practices, which Latour address as “translation” and “purification”. Translation creates hybrids between several types of beings, which are networks or mixtures of nature and culture. Purification, on the other hand, creates two separate ontological zones, humans on the side of culture and nonhumans on the side of nature. Important in this account is that in order to make sense, thinking in terms of “purification” depends on thinking about the possibility of “translation”, for otherwise practices of separation wouldn’t be needed.

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Second, and more interesting, Latour remarks that as long as we think of translation and purification as separate practices, we continue to be modern, since we might be thinking of purifying what might otherwise be a messy world. Our thinking, however, would change if we consider both sets of practices simultaneously, such that our world is, and has always been, performed in the relationships among practices of translation and purification. That is, modernity and the practices of purification are part and parcel of each other. In this representation of the world, the effort has been put on maintaining the separation between nature and culture, and treating each as a separate ontological entity with its own rules and regulations. In the meantime, translation, the interpenetration of nature-culture, humans and nonhumans goes on at an accelerated pace, for the more purification occurs, a practice that in itself forbids conceiving of hybrids, “the more possible their interbreeding becomes” (1993, p. 12). This proliferation of hybrids thus denies the success of purification and, therefore, the possibility of ever having been modern. We could see this argument at work in one of our earlier examples from Haraway, who tells about the insistence of NPR producers to include a bioethicist in the discussion about human cloning. In this way of thinking, purification at work, it was dangerous to have this discussion without the input of an ethical expert, while allowing at the same time for the biologists, the technical experts, to have all the say. But there is more to this. There was also an unsayable concern on the part of the producers that if the social, scientific and technical would be mixed together, some hybrid creature, some monster for sure, would appear. Unthinkable to those whose faith in progress is preconditioned by the separation of “the scientific and technical” (the world of facts, nature and nonhumans) and “the social” (the world of values, culture and humans), is that scientists might in fact not know, might doubt the capabilities of their knowledge to not do harm and might be able to act on this doubt. The inability to think that this is possible is precisely what gets “the moderns” into so much trouble. From Latour’s perspective, this is not a postmodern argument but rather a rereading of our contemporary history, its discourses, practices and material realities which have been signified as premodern, postmodern or modern at some point. His views, signified now as nonmodern, partake of ideas articulated in all the others while turning them on their head. Specifically, Latour calls into question the idea of postmodernity for “Postmodernism is a symptom, not a fresh solution . . .. It senses that something has gone awry in the modern critique, but it is not able to do anything but prolong that critique, though without believing in its foundation. Instead of moving on to empirical studies of the networks that give meaning to the work of purification it denounces, postmodernism rejects all empirical work as illusory and deceptively scientistic” (1993, p. 47).

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Thus, Latour’s solution, against postmodernism, is to analyze the world of nature-culture, human/nonhuman hybrids on the side of “translation”, which implies following empirically these networks as “simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society” (1993, p. 6). Conceptually, Lukacs’ (2002) views with which we started this chapter would find much resonance with Latour’s arguments as a way to begin thinking about thinking itself and to engage in a radical rethinking of “progress.” Materially, Latour’s approach would help us, all of us, to understand quite differently for instance the Challenger disaster, the Human Genome Projects, but more importantly all the “marvels of science and technology” which propagate around us in our ordinary lives as ordinary citizens, and to call for our rights as co-researchers for “no innovation without representation”. Now, what exactly needs to happen for us in organization and management studies to follow the networks? What exactly needs to happen to displace more conventional “organizational” thinking which separates, categorizes, purifies, while ignoring the hybrids that it creates, and thus constantly proliferating what it cannot know? But Wait! There is More . . . On Taking the Meandering Path . . . As we have moved through our heretical thoughts trying to counter our constitution with/in “progress”, we hope that we have been able to convey that we are as well engaged in translations, hybridizing relationally rather than purifying through separation many of the ideas that we have written. Modern or postmodern, feminist or postcolonial, we have simply constructed networks and relationships among most of these realities, practices, discourses, narratives and collectives through which we inhabit our contemporary world as organization and management scholars. Presenting these considerations, we continue to point out to the limits of modern ways of thinking which still try to shape, very publicly, today’s world; a public world seemingly capable of reading contiguously and without apparent exasperation that “40 years of development assistance in Africa hasn’t been enormously successful” (Lederer, 2002) and that “A huge sea of ice lies just under the surface of Mars, ready to be tapped by future explorers as a source of fuel and maybe even drinking water, scientists report” (Fox, 2002). Who knows? What knowledge? And for what purposes? There are, of course, some very immediate implications for organization and management studies. First, there is the question of lay knowledge and the divides within and between our institutions. Under the premises that we are proposing here, “lay knowledge” is not ignorance, but rather a way of knowing that is less

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prone to purification and thus more willing to ask certain questions, to consider relationships, to think about that which “expert knowledge” would discard right away, assuming that it ever appears as that which they would want to know (e.g. the slum dwellers of Bombay; Haraway’s lay breeders). Second, to educate students under these premises is to educate them as co-researchers, participants and representatives for hybrid forums. It is to educate them to follow the networks, to think in the spaces between the divides, and to be able to connect the ways in which hybrids and monsters, and their consequences, get formed and transformed (remember the story about the FBI and those flight training schools? Whose fault was it that “the dots were not connected”?). Further, in the world of co-researchers there would be no distinctions between expert and lay, and more questions would be asked from the one and the other, for there would be “no innovation without representation” in the hybrid forums where humans and nonhumans interact. (When new “miracle” drugs appear in the market, who would ask the question about the seemingly benign “side-effect” that should no longer be put “aside”? Do miracle drugs justify greed as a new human right? Are they implicated in the crisis in healthcare, in the criminalization of people of color, in the plight of the homeless, in the impoverishment of children?) Finally, when all of us are willing to consider the part we play in upholding the current idea of progress, when we call into question the social and the science that should have known better, we will also be able to consider the part that we play in creating our own ignorance. “Organization and management studies”, just by saying it we are policing the way we think, fully modern, making sure that our discipline does not spill over the great divide, going straight to the point and knowing less and less as we corral ourselves on the side of “science” to control nature and ignore our hybrids.

REFERENCES Afzal-Khan, F., & Seshadri-Crooks, K. (Eds) (2000). The pre-occupation of postcolonial studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Alvarez, S. E., Dagnino, E., & Escobar, A. (Eds) (1998). Cultures of politics/Politics of culture. Boulder: Westview. Alvesson, M., & Deetz, S. (1996). Critical theory and postmodernism approaches to organization studies. In: S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy & W. Nord (Eds), Handbook of Organization Studies (pp. 191–217). London: Sage. Anzald´ua, G. (1987). Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Public Culture, 2, 1–24. Banerjee, S. B., & Linstead, S. (2001). Globalization, multiculturalism and other fictions: Colonialism for the new millennium? Organization, 8, 683–722.

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Batliwala, S. (2002). Claiming global space: Transnational grassroots movements. Presentation at the Center for International Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (April). Bensimon, E. M. (1994). Total quality management in the academy: A rebellious reading. Harvard Educational Review, 65, 593–611. Bhabha, H. K. (1990). Nation and narration. London: Routledge. Burawoy, M., Blum, J. A., George, S., Gille, Z., Gowan, T. L., Haney, M., Klawiter, S. H., Lopez, O., Riain, S., & Thayer, M. (2000). Global ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Butler, J., & Scott, J. W. (1992). Feminists theorize the political. London: Routledge. Cal´as, M. B. (1999). Barry Turner for the ages of living dangerously: Risk, ‘new capitalisms’, and life in the coming century. Organization Studies, 20, 683–694. Cal´as, M. B., & Smircich, L. (1996). From ‘the woman’s’ point of view: Feminist approaches to organization studies. In: S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy & W. Nord (Eds), Handbook of Organization Studies (pp. 218–257). London: Sage. Cal´as, M. B., & Smircich, L. (Eds) (1997). Postmodern management theory. Aldershot: Ashgate/ Dartmouth. Cal´as, M. B., & Smircich, L. (1999). Past postmodernism? Reflections and tentative directions. Academy of Management Review, 24, 649–671. Callon, M. (1980) Struggles and negotiations to define what is problematic and what is not: The sociology of translation. In: K. D. Knorr, R. Krohn & R. D. Whitley (Eds), The Social Process of Scientific Investigation (Vol. 4, pp. 197–219). Dordrecht: Reidel. Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation. In: J. Law (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (pp. 196–233). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Callon, M. (1997). Actor-network theory – the market test. Keynote speech: Center for Social Theory and Technology, Keele U. site: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/stscallon1.htm Callon, M., & Law, J. (1995). Agency and the hybrid collectif. South Atlantic Quarterly, 94, 481–507. Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chambers, I., & Curti, L. (Eds) (1996). The post-colonial question. London: Routledge. Czarniawska, B. (1995). Narration or science? Collapsing the division in organization studies. Organization, 2, 11–34. D’Aveni, R. (1996). A multiple-constituency, status-based approach to inter-organizational mobility of faculty and input-output competition among top business schools. Organization Science, 7, 167–189. Day, C. (2002). Globalizing the exchange of ideas. Chronicle of Higher Education (February 1), B7–B9. Derrida, J. (1982a). White mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy. In: J. Derrida (Ed.), Margins of Philosophy (pp. 207–271). A. Bass (Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1982b). The supplement of copula. In: J. Derrida (Ed.), Margins of Philosophy (pp. 175–205). A. Bass (Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1983). The principle of reason: The university in the eyes of its pupils. Diacritics, XIX, 3–20. Derrida, J. (1984). No apocalypse, not now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives). Diacritics, XX, 20–31. Derrida, J. (1992). The other heading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge. Dugger, W. M. (1993). Challenges facing social economists in the twenty-first century: An institutionalist perspective. Review of Social Economy, 51, 490–503. Evans, R. J. (1998). Postmodernism and the study of history. History Review (December), 28–31.

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Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press. Feldman, S. (2001). Exploring theories of patriarchy: A perspective from contemporary Bangladesh. Signs, 26, 1097–1127. Flax, J. (1987). Postmodern and gender relations in feminist theory. Signs, 16, 621–643. Flax, J. (1992). The end of innocence. In: J. Butler & J. W. Scott (Eds), Feminist Theorize the Political (pp. 445–463). New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish. New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1991). Questions of method. In: G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (pp. 73–86). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fox, M. (2002). NASA finds water, water everywhere on Mars. Reuters (May 28). Garc´ıa-Canclini, N. (1990). Culturas h´ıbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. M´exico: Grijalbo. Gilroy, P. (1993). The black atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Verso: London. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996). The end of capitalism (as we knew it). Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Hard, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Haraway, D. J. (2002). Cloning mutts, saving tigers: Ethical emergents in technocultural dog worlds. Paper presented at Mt. Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA (April). Haskell, T. L. (1984). The authority of experts: Studies in history & theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills: Sage. Hofstede, G. (1999). Problems remain, but theories will change: The universal and the specific in 21st century global management. Organizational Dynamics, 27, 34–43. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1996). Aramis or the love for technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1997). On recalling ANT. Keynote speech: Centre for Social Theory and Technology, Keele University, site: http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/stt/cstt2/ant/latour.htm Latour, B. (2001). What rules of method for the new socio-scientific experiments? Plenary Lecture for the Darmsdadt Colloquium, site: http://www.ensmp.fr/∼latour/ Law, J. (1994). Organizing modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Law, J., & Hassard, J. (Eds) (1999). Actor network theory and after. Oxford: Blackwell. Lederer, E. M. (2002). G-8 summit to focus on Africa. Associated Press (May 29). Lloyd, G. (1993). The man of reason: “Male” and “female” in western philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. L´opez, A. J. (2001). Post and pasts: A theory of postcolonialism. Albany: SUNY Press. Lukacs, J. (2002). It’s the end of the modern age. Chronicle of Higher Education (April 26), B7–B11. Excerpts from At the end of an age. New Haven:Yale University Press. Lurie, S., Cvetkovich, A., Gallop, J., Modleski, T., & Spillers, H. (2001). Restoring feminist politics to poststructuralist critique. Feminist Studies, 27, 679–709. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2000). Local histories/Global designs. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Norris, C. (1987). Derrida. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Organization (2001). Special issue on re-organizing knowledge, transforming institutions: Knowing, knowledge, and the university in the 21st century, 8(2).

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MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM, MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Stewart R. Clegg and Martin Kornberger ABSTRACT Modernism and postmodernism may be thought of as either moments or movements. We argue for thinking of them as moments, essentially related to each other, rather than movements that literally have historical specificity. From this perspective what is modern and what is postmodern is always shifting, such that their nature is problematic, essentially contested and shifting. Rather than use contemporary examples to make these points, we prefer to refer to quite historical examples, because the modalities become much sharper and can be seen in clearer focus. Hence, we discuss Machiavelli and Caravaggio as precursors of the postmodern and Hobbes and Boyle as precursors of the modern. Obviously, there is an irony in our intent: given the claims to currency of the debates with which we frame the paper then reference to some classical sources serves to hose down debate and fix it in a sharper, cleaner form. While it will become evident that our sympathies are not with “modernism”, it should become equally clear that we hold much of the representation of “postmodernism” to be as much at error as we do the fixing of the modern in the frame of the empiricist, the positivist, and the scientific. For us, all these terms are equally problematic, and have been so ever since we began to first think we might be modern – whether in art,

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social science or science. We conclude by addressing why, in the present, these classical debates should have migrated to the study of organizations.

INTRODUCTION Postmodernism cannot be described without referring to the modernist project; as Martin Parker has argued that it is important to focus discussion of postmodernism on that modernist project it eschews. Modernism, in his words, elevates the “faith in reason to a level at which it becomes equated with progress.” It does so through adherence to the canons of positivism (that what is important is only that which can be measured), empiricism (only that which can be seen to exist exists), and science (that knowledge should be expressed in a propositional form modelled on the knowledge of science – especially physics). By contrast, postmodernism stresses the role of discursively negotiated, shared and conflicting conceptions in arriving at a common sense of things, such that the role of language becomes central to the settlement of what is true and false, “and all our attempts to discover truth should be seen for what they are – forms of discourse” (Parker, 1992, p. 3). Some authors seem closer to Kant’s critique of modernism in their view of the postmodern. In Kant’s (1924) definition of the project of critique, postmodernism would be seen as an enterprise that is essentially critical about modernist assumptions – showing the limitations of human efforts and projects as such. Hassard (1996, p. 51), for instance, tells us “In a postmodern approach to knowledge, we must also possess the ability to be critical or suspicious of our own intellectual assumptions.” Parker (1992, p. 10), 200 years after Kant, similarly states that postmodernism “could be of no obvious practical use to organizers since it would be aimed at illustrating the limits of their projects” (italics added). Thus, postmodernism can never be thought of outside of modernism: it is not an alternative project or paradigm. Immanuel Kant (1924, p. xviii) argued in his “Critique of Pure Reason” that “At present, as all methods, according to the general persuasion, have been tried in vain, there reigns nought but weariness and complete indifferentism – the mother of chaos and night in the scientific world, but at the same time the source of, or at least the prelude to, the re-creation and reinstallation of a science, when it has fallen into confusion, obscurity, and disuse from ill-directed effort.” Ironically, Kant, one of the key authors of modernity, was already on to the moaning and groaning about nihilism, indifferentism and lack of direction. At the same time, he emphasises the potential power that lies in this apparently chaotic state – chaos and night are the source of scientific renewal and innovation. This ambiguity of chaos and disorder and the transgression of the boundaries lie at the heart of modernism; this driving force in

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the core of modernism is what we nowadays fashionably call, for want of a better term, postmodernism. The fallacy of many postmodern approaches to management and organization theory lies in their being understood as anti-modernist, as an alternative paradigm, as a new camp, from the beginning. In the next section we are going to point out the fatal logic behind this imagination, which, over the past 15 years has organized the discourse between modernist and postmodernist scholars. Rereading Burrell and Cooper’s (1988) and Burrell’s (1998) texts on postmodernism, and especially Foucault,1 we can highlight the problematic implications of their account, which has influenced and structured most of the avalanche of postmodernist texts that followed. Burrell and Cooper define the “battle positions which have been drawn up on both sides” (1988, p. 91), and they argue that “two radically different systems of thought and logic are at work in the modernist-postmodernist confrontation” (110, italics added).2 They conceptualise postmodern thinking as alternative or in opposition to modernity. This defining, limiting, boundary drawing, categorizing, ordering is a very modern undertaking in itself and leads to what Atkin and Hassard (1996) have described as “intellectual self-imprisonment”. As Burrell (1998, p. 27) stated in his Foucault article, he dreams of a “vision to be developed in fruitful and controversial ways by those interested in opening up our discipline and our organizations.” Burrell (1998, p. 22) wants to concentrate on the “positive aspects of Foucault’s work” instead of contributing to an orthodox and canonical Foucault-interpretation. This is a very Foucauldian idea in itself, suggesting that, as Foucault has done unto Nietzsche, so are we able to do unto Foucault, in the same terms as Foucault wrote when he said that “The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest. And if commentators say that I am being unfaithful to Nietzsche that it is of absolutely no interest” (Foucault, quoted in Burrell, 1998, p. 22).3 But, as Burrell uses Foucault, he slips more and more into an opposite position and ends up announcing Foucault to be the anti-hero for our times.4 Foucault becomes an “antimodernist”, the author of a “pessimistic” “antiscience” (Burrell, 1998, p. 27).5 Though Burrell started with the intention of elaborating the positive aspects of Foucault, he found himself, very quickly, in a “Foucauldian cage” (Ray & Reed, 1994, p. 189; see Kornberger & Weskopf, 2001) of his own making. Here is Burrell constructing his case: Reality, and our discourse about reality, are both ever more closely confining. Thus we are imprisoned by our knowledge and made freer by our ignorance. Only to the extent that we stop talking about types of organizations do we succeed in not reproducing the disciplinary society . . . According to Foucault, since all of us belong to organizations and all organizations are alike and take the prison as their model, we are all imprisoned (Burrell, 1998, pp. 22 and 27).

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As at least one critic commented, if Burrell thinks there is little difference between being incarcerated and tenured, he should get out more often and maybe do some prison visits. Burrell establishes a Foucauldianism, a Foucauldian paradigm, which is basically anti-modern. And it is exactly this categorization that has evoked critique of the postmodern approach. Parker (1992, pp. 28 and 37) posed a salient question when he asked: why the journey is worth beginning on . . . (Burrell’s) . . . terms. In other words, what can critical studies of organization achieve from a Foucauldian starting point – apart from the creation of new discursive ‘iron cages’? . . . It seems as if the very language of poststructuralism prevents someone from being able to see anything other than self-surveilling subjects who imprison themselves in various kinds of panopticons.

Postmodernism is perceived as a pure “celebration of rejection” (Feldman, 1998, p. 63), it is “celebrating the impossibility of the enlightenment emancipatory project” (Parker, 1995, p. 598), and postmodern organizational analyses “indeed appear to be successful in inhibiting theory-building” (Hassard, 1993, p. 19). Postmodernism leads to a position of “anything goes” (Parker, 1999, p. 39); it is “fundamentally capricious, individualistic and ultimately nihilistic” (Willmott, 1994, p. 115). Summing up the anti-positivism of this stream, we can allow Donaldson to speak for us: “This doctrine, that all intellectual matters are inherently ambiguous and all statements meaningless, is a high point, or better a low point, of 20th-century irrationalism, pessimism and fatalism” (1994, p. 197). Beyond this battle we see that as soon as postmodernist authors try to describe postmodernism in positive terms, it starts, suspiciously, to resemble modernism – “Postmodernism, therefore, decentres the human agent from its self-elevated position of narcissistic ‘rationality’ and shows it to be an essentially observer community which constructs interpretations of the world, these interpretations having no absolute or universal status” but only “representations in this sense, [they] are our realities and the only ones we can ever have,” suggests Chia (1996, p. 102, quoting Burrell & Cooper). What we perceive as the world “out there” is “essentially projections of the observer community representing their thinking about the world rather than the world itself.” (Chia, 1996, p. 103). As Parker (1995, p. 554) says ironically, “you do not need the postmodern label to be humble about your truth claims – versions of modernism will do fine.” It is this “intellectual self-imprisonment” which in postmodernism leads radical organization theorists to become ensnared by the very concepts they sought to reject. Being “captured,” as it were, within “the chain of supplementary inscriptions of the dominant discourse” they cannot “escape the grasp of conventional explanation” (Atkin & Hassard, 1996, p. 127). We can exemplify this problematic with the work of Chia who, while he regards the “process of organizational analysis as

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being essentially an intellectual journey without destination” (1996, p. 20, italics added), structures his book around the images of “Downstream” and “Upstream thinking” – could one imagine a clearer direction than downstream and upstream? In fact, upstream and downstream are far from delineating a journey without destination so much as being a way of finding the tidal current in the mainstream. Only by characterizing (or caricaturing) a “down” as modernism is he is capable of speaking of an “up” as postmodernism. He remains captive in the categories he tries to subvert – the normal fate of radical, young ragged-trousered philanthropists who try to enlighten the uninterested. It is easy to become boxed in by modernism and postmodernism. Imagine two orthogonal axes defining a theoretically possible surface. Label the outer poles of the first, “modernism” and “postmodernism”; label the outer poles of the other “modernist” and “postmodernist”. Ascribe qualities to each pole. The modernism/postmodernism pole specifies a realm of social practice, while the modernity/postmodernity pole specifies a realm of social theory. Within social theory specialized interpretations of social practices, including theorizing, are constructed. Modernist theory, the upper left-hand quadrant, has typically been characterized by the construction of unitary, grand theory, characterized by master terms for analysis, such as the “class struggle”, the triumph of “market forces”, or the necessity of “system differentiation”. These have been some of the predominant fictions of recent times. Postmodernist theory, by contrast, in the space of the lower right-hand quadrant, offers quite distinct, much more plural and contingent fictions, in which recurrent themes are grounded less in the story “intended” by the author and rather more in intertextual practices of ironic reflexivity and self-referentiality, as the author seeks to displace the possibilities of being overwritten by the narrative codes and conventions which are at work. Possibilities excluded by modernism, the sound of “other” voices, of marginalized or repressed phenomena are celebrated. Difference is the key concern: the familiar requires rapid de-construction and re-invention. All belief in the truth-value of those apparent realities sustained by conventional interpretation must be questioned. One should celebrate the ambiguities attendant upon the constant re-invention of what apparently is into what may be. The relationship between modernist theory and modern practice is straightforward and familiar within the field of management and organization theory. Relationships between phenomena such as the adoption of a particular “formal organization structure” and the achievement of “economic efficiency” are represented in terms of a palpable reality secured and objectively bounded by assumptions that are both unutterably unrealistic and unreflexive. Perhaps this objectivism is both the cost and the benefit of the achievement?

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The space of postmodern practice and the theory of postmodernity is different again. Some literary examples may help us find our way. One thinks of the kind of novel that constantly trips up the sense that the reader, using conventional, “natural” narrative devices, may be making of the text. An example might be Italo Calvino’s (1981) If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Here there is great doubt about representational practices: about the reality of things ever being captured in dominant categories of understanding, a suspicion of the essentialism of these categories. The critical task of postmodernity is one in which the interpretations generated by dominant conventions should be interrogated, deconstructed and other, excluded, possibilities of interpretation playfully explored for the sake of difference. It is possible, even in an area as seemingly pragmatic as management and organization theory, to adopt a playful exploration of the polymorphous possibilities afforded by the postmodern canvass. A postmodernist social theoretical understanding of putatively postmodern social phenomena would thus be one in which possibilities of interpretation were explored for the pure pleasures of their text, in terms of irony, repetition and variation. Burrell (1997) tries to achieve this sort of thing, although in a more mannered way, with his literary conceit of Pandemonium. Back to the boxes, if we were to enter the lower left-hand quadrant, we would find Burrell’s erstwhile stablemate, Gareth Morgan (1986). A resolutely modern phenomena, formal organizations, is treated in a postmodern theoretical gloss as capable of being seen as several things simultaneously, depending upon the metaphors in play. There is no discontinuity to the phenomena: it is just that different ways of seeing constitute it differently. Beyond the boxes beloved by analysts (see Clegg, 1996), postmodernism is not a camp or a paradigm so much as it is a critique of the taken for granted, in order to open up new possibilities of things being different (Townley, 1994, p. 28). With Cal´as and Smircich, we can acknowledge that genealogies will not result in better theories if judged under instrumental premises (1999, p. 657). Deconstruction, they say, “is an analytical strategy that permits us to question the limits that may have been imposed upon discourses of knowledge, and opens the possibility of enacting other, different discourses . . . different worlds in ambivalent spaces which are not yet inside or outside the organizational texts” (Cal´as & Smircich, 1991, p. 569). Consider the example of deconstruction: in order to be consistent with itself, it should not remain enclosed in purely speculative, theoretical, academic discourse. Rather, it should aspire to something more consequential, to change things and to intervene in an efficient, responsible, though always, of course, mediated way. It should do so not only in the profession but also in the world more generally, not to change things in the rather naive sense of calculated, deliberate and strategically

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controlled intervention but in the sense of maximum intensification of a transformation in progress (Derrida, 1992, p. 8). As Derrida suggests, deconstruction analyses and compares seemingly self-evident and natural conceptual pairs, to show their institutionalisation and history. Only by making the taken-for-granted problematic can thinking be freed by reflexion rather than retracing (Derrida, 1986b). As he put it, “Who would have counted on only the energies in disor de-? No work results from a simple displacement or dislocation. Therefore invention is needed . . .” (Derrida, 1986a, p. 65; italics added). As Jencks (1988, p. 18) states, deconstruction is subversive, it needs a norm that it breaks, a border that it transgresses, an ideology that it undermines; but in “the minute it loses this critical role, or becomes a dominant power itself (as in so many academies), it becomes a tyrannical bore.” This might be true as well for all the attempts in management and organization theory to establish a Foucauldianism and follow Foucault’s analysis in an orthodox manner.

RETHINKING POSTMODERNISM: REFLEXIVISATION Postmodernism is a moment in the unfolding of our history – it is neither a territory that could be defended (think again of Burrell’s battle positions) nor a paradigm that functions as a container. As Lyotard (1993) says, postmodernism is not the end of modernism, but its birth, its constant coming into being. Cooper, Fox and Martinez (1992, p. 8) get it right when they say that “Lyotard’s brand of postmodernism is not a rejection of modernism; it is an attempt to rethink the modernist project.” Postmodernism “complements” rather than opposes modernism. Even as it resists modernism in critiques of its performative qualities, it enjoys interaction with it. Postmodernism feeds parasitically on modernism. Postmodernism is a complexification, a hybridisation and sublation of the modern – not its antithesis (Jencks, 1992, p. 12). Hence “Postmodernism is thus not in any simply sense an ‘era’ which can be said to come ‘after’ modernism. Instead, postmodernism is parasitical upon the very conceptual categories promulgated by modernism which it seeks to criticize. It is not a substitute ‘paradigm’ through which organization theory should be articulated” (Chia, 1996, p. 7; italics added). Lyotard echoed a similar theme much later when he wrote that postmodernism means not the end of modernism but the opposite: Postmodernity is implicated in modernity, and modernity is constantly pregnant with its postmodernity (Lyotard, 1993). Hence, postmodernism is implicated in modernism; it is the very moment when modernism folds itself back upon its own presumption, whenever it questions

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itself and takes distance, in opposition to the currently dominating concepts and practices in order to invent them creatively anew. Postmodernism is the “obligatory point of passage” of modernity, the moment of its permanent birth and re-birth. One consequence of the role that reflexive postmodernism plays is to make modernism a congenitally failing operation, one that constantly undermines, subverts or deconstructs its own foundation. In fact, postmodernism existed long before the term postmodernism was invented – and maybe it existed more subversively and powerfully before it was labelled. We elaborate this concept of postmodernism through two very interesting, though marginalized, figures, in the critique of representation: Machiavelli and Caravaggio.

THE EDGE: STRUGGLES OVER MODERNITY We have defined postmodernism as a moment that occurs at that edge of creativity when, whatever practices are taken to be modern, are in the process of redefining themselves as something other, something in opposition, to those practices that are currently dominant. Hence, it is not so much a movement as a moment, not so much an era but a process in which something clearly known and understood is becoming something else not yet clearly known, not yet clearly understood. It is a moment of paradox defined by “the simultaneous presence of contradictory, even mutually exclusive elements” (Cameron & Quinn, 1988, p. 2). As such a paradoxical state of becoming rather than a predictable state of being, it can arise wherever whatever kind of modernity has been normalised. Which begs the question, of course – what is modernity? Well, without being too paradoxical, modernity is a state of being with little sense of paradox, small space for irony and precious little space for reflection. It is one where the struggle for hegemony is dominant in its confusions and contestations, as the old orders refuse to die and the new orders struggle to be born. It is a constantly shifting edge, struggles over the meaning of which define both modernism and postmodernism. It is for this reason that we prepare to address the debate about modernism and postmodernism through resolutely historical materials: these, in view of their lack of currency, make the edge much clearer. There have been many such occasions in modernity’s constant redefinition of itself. Many authorities settle on the 18th century as the critical moment of “revolution” in America, France and elsewhere, which ushered in the dawn of modernity; still others, inspired by the historian Wallerstein (1974), would look back to that long 16th century in which the modern world took shape. It was a period in which the east–west Mediterranean axis of the centre of modernity was tilted geographically and became inclined north–south on the European Atlantic

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seaboard, when Catholicism lost its edge to Protestantism, when even the bloody Inquisition could not secure truth. At the core, as ever, was a struggle to control meaning and profits, centred on Western Europe’s hitherto most impressive organizational innovation, the Holy Roman Catholic Church. The Church had incorporated many of the major organizational innovations that had been innovated by earlier religious figures and orders (Kieser, 1987): it had ranks, titles and uniforms; it had authority; it had control of vast wealth and estates and palaces and other real estate; but, perhaps most especially, it also had power through control of the means of production of knowledge and the expression of dissent. The Inquisition and the confessional were its twin instruments. With these the normalcy of Catholic modernity, in which the planets revolved around the earth, cherubs floated around representations of biblical figures while angels ascended, and the world was created in six days and nights of hard labour, all this was reproduced in its central representational form – religious art. It provided opportunities for spectacular representations: huge amounts of pain, burning, institutionalised torture, execution and individual torment. But it was also premised on a huge bureaucracy of repression and control that, by the turn of the 16th century, was enacted through a meticulous legality, one observed with care and great concern for the appropriateness of its own baroque procedures, as a kind of theatre of the absurd made normal (Robb, 1999, pp. 247–248, citing Mereu, 1979). And above all, these baroque procedures were organizational. This modernity was not something just there: it had been willed into being, disciplined into existence, and ceaselessly reproduced by a myriad of small dogmas, inconsequential acts and nicely observed ceremonies, representations and trade, as well as the odd occasional acts of spectacular violence and theatre. All of these comprised the first truly modern multinational organization – the Roman Church – albeit as it was under siege from other organizational forms that were to re-shape its modernity into one observers of a later modernity were to deem, appropriately, as more rational: the Reformation (Weber, 1976). From this edge in modernity’s history, two prototypically postmodern figures recommend themselves from the margins of its power–knowledge relations, because each rethought the possibilities of fundamental ways of seeing modernity. One, a writer and political advisor, straddles the beginning of that long 16th century, while the other, a painter, flourished briefly and brilliantly towards its end. Why a painter and a political philosopher? Because each ushered in a wholly new way of seeing, the implications of which were to reverberate through the subsequent centuries, re-imagining what had once seemed baroquely normal through a literal realism that shocked the moral codes and conventions of representational practice as it was then understood. Of course, they were not alone – they were indeed symptomatic of a general shift in the Zeitgeist that included

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other figures such as da Vinci and Gallileo, but they worked more committedly at the margins of representational possibility, of showing how it was possible to be a human being and a political being, than anyone else. And in doing so they defined radical possibilities for another kind of modernity – they were truly postmodern. Each introduced fundamentally new ways of seeing that changed what it meant to be modern for ever: at the moment they were being postmodern, in the themes that they worked, they prefigured the critical tensions of the new modernity – between the artful representational contrivance of the natural as an essential politics (Caravaggio) and the essential politics attaching to the practical problems of power involved in organization (Machiavelli). Both of these central issues – how to represent nature and how to organize power – were to be settled with another edge in 20th century modernity and its management, an edge that sought to negate and obscure the essential politics attached to the earliest modern proposal.

Machiavelli Nicco Machiavelli was born in Florence, at a time when the peninsula was in political upheaval. Italy was divided between four dominant city-states, and each of these was continually at the mercy of the stronger foreign governments of Europe, especially the French and the Spanish. The wealthy Medici family had ruled Florence since 1434, a rule that was temporarily broken by a reform movement, begun in 1494, when the young Machiavelli became an important diplomat. With the help of Spanish troops, the Medici family regained power in 1512 and Machiavelli was tortured and removed from public life. Machiavelli’s greatest work was The Prince, written in 1513 and published after his death in 1532. The work immediately provoked controversy and was soon condemned by Pope Clement VIII. Its main theme is that rulers should retain absolute control and should use any means to accomplish this end. The Prince can be read today as a work comprising advice of great realpolitik for successful organization (in the case he addresses, as a principality), rather than it being recommendation of moral precepts – which had characterised previous writings on the subject of power and rule. He describes those “virtues” a Prince – or an effective chief executive officer (CEO) – should possess. He concludes that some of these will lead to CEO destruction, whereas some “vices” will allow CEOs to survive. Indeed, the virtues that we commonly praise might lead to the downfall of a CEO and an organization. For instance, he argues that a CEO will be thought to be a more effective leader if they are severe when punishing people rather than merciful. Severity affects only a few, but it deters acts that many might otherwise aspire to. Thus, it is better for a CEO to be feared than to be loved although, above

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all, he should avoid being hated, and should know how to be deceitful in order to win admiration. Bailey (1977, p. 8) defines politics as “the art of bringing unacceptable myths into, and preserving one’s own myths from derision.” Such an explicitly political conception of myth (and a conception of politics as discursive) resonates with themes that abound in Machiavelli. Indeed, much of The Discourses (Machiavelli, 1970) can be read as a sustained attempt to undermine existing myths of honourable conduct and to create instead a model of precepts framed by the myth of strategy: to act expediently with respect to means in order to be honourable to the ends one should serve. In Machiavelli, the concern with strategy leads him to view reality as an arena in which strategically mindful princes may secure order (Machiavelli, 1958). The focus is on strategies, deals, negotiation, fraud and conflict in which myths concerning moral action become game-players resources rather than a topic framing what the game should be. Machiavelli’s cynical, rationalist and realist stress is on interpreting extant games, rather than on legislating their form, on following the moves actually made. For Machiavelli power is to be conceived as pure expediency and strategy rather than as pure instrumentality. Machiavelli describes an ethnographic research method for uncovering the rules of the games that consequently get played out. Machiavelli was cast adrift from state service by the changing nature of political adventurism and division in Medici Florence. Thus, he wrote his work not as a trusted legislator from a position of intellectual, scientific and political certainty, but as an uncertain explorer for a power that refused him employment. Against the backdrop of turmoil in Italian politics, Machiavelli forged a new interpretation of power in which one of its most significant aspects “was that it was unrelated to a systematic philosophy” (Wolin, 1960, p. 211). This interpretation holds, despite, one may note, the many attempts to provide such a philosophy on the part of subsequent observers. (See Crick, 1958, for a brief and elegant account of these.) The characteristics of Machiavelli’s new interpretation of power derived their sense from the political world in which he lived and studied: a world of flux, discontinuity, intrigue and illusion, a world in which “everyone is equipped to see, few can understand” (cited in Wolin, 1960, p. 212). Illusion is less to be legislated out of existence by a scientific declaration of “right method” but is rather more to be interpreted as to its effectivity in the political armoury of strategic actors such as the prince: “the new science was more in the nature of a body of knowledge adjusted to a world of movement, rather than one aimed at freezing it” (Wolin, 1960, p. 213). Such movement could not be totally controlled, because too much of it was contingent. Knowledge alone could not hope to grasp this contingency, but the combination of power and knowledge might enable some strategic understanding.

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Machiavelli’s “aim was political mastery not political sculpture” as Wolin (1960, p. 216) so nicely phrases it. Knowledge of the strategies and techniques of political mastery, of power, were achieved through what Callon and his colleagues have termed a “thoroughgoing determination to follow the actors wherever they go, to uncover what they might prefer to keep concealed, and to avoid being misled by myths” (Callon et al., 1986, p. 5). In this interpretation what is of importance is Machiavelli’s method and his insistence on studying strategies of power whatever and wherever they may be rather than being restricted by any a priori mechanical or causal conceptions. What Machiavelli offers in The Prince is a rich descriptive ethnography of power conceived in terms of its strategies. Towards these strategies he takes no moral stance: they are neither good nor bad, they are strategies whose only purpose is their effectivity. They flow from no principle of sovereignty; they serve no principle of sovereignty; they reproduce no principle of sovereignty. Machiavelli does not serve power: he merely describes its strategies as he sees it at work within the arena of the palace. Power does not belong to anyone nor to any place; it is not something that princes necessarily have. It is simply the effectivity of strategies for achieving for one a greater scope for action than for others implicated by one’s strategies. Power is not any thing nor is it necessarily inherent in any one; it is a tenuously produced and reproduced effectivity contingent upon the strategic competencies and skills of actors who would be powerful. From the shadows of the palace, Machiavelli observes and describes power at play. It is this stress on description, on interpretation, on the translation of power that signals Machiavelli’s distinctiveness. His focus is on power in situ, in the specific arena of the palace with its many locales, rather than as a generalizing concept for awing the world or for making it seem awesome, in marked contrast to Hobbes (1962). It is in the very prosaic refusal of any grand theory or meta-narrative, above all, that Machiavelli’s distinctiveness resides. Power is embedded in many diverse forms of practice within the arena constituted by the palace; such practices may be methodically interpreted as to their strategicality but cannot be assumed to be effective simply by virtue of their author. The sub-title of Wolin’s (1960) chapter on Machiavelli is “politics and the economy of violence”. At the core of Machiavelli’s concern with power is “the primordial fact that the hard core of power is violence and to exercise power is often to bring violence to bear on someone else’s person or possessions” (Wolin, 1960, p. 220). Strategy, to be effective, must know when to be cruel and when to withdraw: in other words it must practice an economy of violence, sparingly, appropriately and creatively. An effective economy of violence required careful consideration of its military forms, knowledge of the means required to translate armed bodies into disciplined organized power. Most especially, it should exercise

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such power sparingly: wreaking violence as a political strategy which is followed too often or too easily serves to demonstrate the real structural weakness of a power which has to intervene so ferociously. Securing consent may be a more effective form of translating power into strategic action than always having to coerce recalcitrant bodies. Or it may not. On some occasions, at least, violence may be judged more effective. Where consent may be secured, Machiavelli does not believe that it will be generalized, the application of some universal or essential fiat across all spheres of action. Part of the flux of life inheres in its radical discontinuities: different forms of life display their own rationalities rather than the invisible hand of any architectonic reason. (Smith and Marx both admitted of such an essential principle. Of course they differed on what they believed its effects and prime movers to be). Strategy, effective as knowledge of power in one sphere, may have no effectivity at all in another form of life. Machiavelli reproduces a moral treatise on the use of organizational power as a political economy of violence, vastly at odds with the moral texts admired by the Church of the day. In this respect Machiavelli, like Caravaggio, was an outlaw in terms of the contemporary morality and moral codes. Caravaggio Michelangelo Caravaggio6 (1573–1610) was the most revolutionary artist of his time, because he abandoned the rules that had guided a century of artists before him. They had idealized human and religious experience, according to strict precepts embedded in religious dogma concerning the appropriate nature of representation. This dogma represented one side of what Robb (1999, p. 2) refers to as “ideological cold war that’d split the late sixteenth century Europe as deeply as any political divide has riven the old continent in the twentieth.” It was the side of bureaucracy, official faith, the Holy Roman Church of Catholic spiritual and temporal power. The cold war was against the protestant reformation sparked further north by Martin Luther, against which Italy was on a war footing that: Asserted the catholic church’s claim to total control of Italians’ minds and bodies . . . Coercion and persuasion were its twin prongs. The inquisition was the stick, a vast repressive machinery that worked through informants and secret courts to meet ideological deviance with humiliation, prison, torture and burning alive. Art was the carrot, and was enlisted to serve the purposes of the church militant by channelling the imagination’s energies into the runnels of catholic doctrine (Robb, 1999, p. 3).

Between 1588 and 1592, Caravaggio went to Rome and worked as an assistant to painters of lesser skill. About 1595 he began to sell his paintings through a dealer.

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The dealer brought Caravaggio to the attention of Cardinal Francesco del Monte. Through the cardinal, Caravaggio was commissioned, at age 24, to paint for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. In its Contarelli Chapel Caravaggio’s realistic naturalism first fully appeared in three scenes he created of the life of St. Matthew. The works caused public outcry, however, because of their realistic and dramatic nature. They broke, dramatically, with the representational codes of their time, by using what we would now call naturalism and, instead of stylised religious conventions, ordinary, “shameful” people as models from life. Earlier, at the beginning of the 16th century, one of the centuries greatest minds posed the crucial question of whether painting was an art or a science – the question with which Leonardo had opened his Book of painting, a work that remained unpublished until 1651, long after Caravaggio had died. For Leonardo, the answer was evident: painting was a science. The art of seeing – and representing truly what you saw was the heart of understanding the material world. And art and science were joined in that perception. The eyes had once been the windows of the soul. With Leonardo they became man’s window on the universe (Robb, 1999, p. 72).

It was a robust assertion of splendid empiricism, one with which, Robb (1999) suggests, Caravaggio may well have been familiar, both from viewing Leonardo’s art and reading an unpublished version of the text in the house of one his patrons. It certainly informed his art. With Caravaggio, art was firmly oriented to a realist, naturalist and scientific mode of representation as opposed to the stylised canon on offer as the standard for iconography in the Catholic chamber of horrors – “Nailed hands, rolling eyes, exposed breasts, floating veils, bleeding wounds and cherubs’ heads on wings” – for the next four centuries, as Robb (1999, p. 326) put it. But what was crucial is the technique it took to achieve this new realist effect, a technique “peculiarly true” to his “subjective way of seeing” (Robb, 1999, p. 5). Caravaggio created art that was more like science, which went straight to shocking and delightful life itself, unmediated by any shaping intelligence. The appearance, of course, misleads. In a time when art was prisoner first of ideas and then of ideology, M undertook a singlehanded and singleminded exploration of what it was to see the reality of things and people. He did it with a rigour that, like the work of Leonardo a hundred years before him, meant as much to the origin of modern science as it did to modern art – more so in a way, since what Leonardo wrote about in art only became real in M’s hands. M rendered the optics of the way we see so truly that four hundred years later his newly cleaned paintings startle like brilliant photos of another age. These images came out of an attention to the real that ignored the careful geometries of renaissance art as scrupulously as it excluded the dogmas of religion. No other painter ever caught a living bodily presence as M did (Robb, 1999, p. 5).

How Caravaggio attained this way of seeing is, in itself, a fascinating story, as Robb’s (1999) account makes clear, but it cannot concern us here. There is

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insufficient space to chronicle the shifts in his technique, working ever faster, more minimalistically, as the circumstances of his life and times pressed in on his work. What is significant is the triumph of realism against the baroque modernity then installed as normalcy. And it was the same with Machiavelli: his utterly realistic accounts of the strategies and tactics of power, the military analogies, the ethnographies from the palace margins; these are what are so striking in Machiavelli.

WE HAVE NEVER BEEN MODERN Thus wrote Bruno Latour (1993) in a book that sits unacknowledged by most at the centre of his oeuvre. And if we have never been modern we cannot even think about being postmodern in the sense in which it is often represented – as a going beyond. The point that he makes is that the conventions framing representation that we have taken into the era that we call modern display their roots all too clearly. If Machiavelli and Caravaggio’s achievement was to practice modernity, their problem was that the context in which they did so could not accept this practice: it had no way of settling disagreements other than through tradition or force. Elsewhere, in England, Hobbes and Boyle were to promulgate an arena in which contest over modernity and meaning could occur in practice and not be subject to resolution by either force or tradition. For Boyle, the creation of a technology that would allow observation of phenomenal events of his sovereign design, by others than merely himself, was to be the theme for the new dawn of modernity. Hobbes, by contrast, sought to legislate a situation in which sovereignty in the Body Politic puts an end to disputation over anything much other than the proof of an argument conducted as if on the lines of a discourse among geometers or mathematicians. While Hobbes sought to render the political meaning of modernity timeless, for Boyle it became contingent upon matters of fact as decided by artfully contrived experimentation that allows “nature” to be a messenger. Hobbes sought to exclude experimental science from the discourse of political science, and Boyle sought to exclude politics from the discourse of experimental science. It was a double denial that has become the basis for some of the great fictions of modernity: subjected/subjective citizen, the sovereign state and order, on the one hand; the evident fact, the laboratory design and the objective witness-as-subject, on the other. Science and Politics, the representation of objects and the representation of subjects, thereafter diverge in a modern fiction. Boyle argued that only experimentally produced matters of fact could constitute the foundations of proper natural philosophical knowledge. Shapin and Schaffer (1985, p. 22) demonstrate that the experimental production of matters of fact that Boyle valorised rested upon the acceptance of social and discursive conventions

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and depended upon the production and protection of a special form of social organization. The experimental programme was, in Wittgenstein’s (1968) phrases, a “language-game” and a “form of life.” Accepting or rejecting that programme amounted to the acceptance or rejection of the form of life that Boyle and his colleagues proposed. Hence, neither the acceptance of the experimental programme nor the epistemological status of the matter of fact is as self-evident as they might appear: In the conventions of the intellectual world we now inhabit there is no item of knowledge so solid as a matter of fact. We may revise our ways of making sense of matters of fact and we may adjust their place in our overall maps of knowledge. Our theories, hypotheses, and our metaphysical systems may be jettisoned, but matters of fact stand undeniable and permanent. We do, to be sure, reject particular matters of fact, but the manner of our doing so adds solidity to the category of the fact. A discarded theory remains a theory; there are “good” theories and “bad” theories—theories currently regarded as true by everyone and theories that no one any longer believes to be true. However, when we reject a matter of fact, we take away its entitlement to the designation: it never was a matter of fact at all (Shapin & Schaffer, 1985, p. 22).

Matters of fact are presumed, in positivism, to “mirror of nature” such that no man or woman could dispute that they are just so, just as they are represented to be. It is the triumph of the experiment to show that this is the case. Subsequently, as Boyle’s heirs defined matters, “probability” entered the representation to break down the radical distinction between “knowledge” and “opinion”. Probability offered conditional and contingent certainty in knowledge claims. The mechanisms of nature would give up their secrets only slowly and variously to the overall enterprise of science, rather than yield their truths to the lone scientist. As Shapin and Schaffer (1985, pp. 22–23) demonstrate, matters of fact depended on a unique empirical experience, its unique meaning, and the communication to others that the grounds for the belief one had in its unique meaning were adequate. Multiple repetitions and witnesses of the unique event were required. “If that experience could be extended to many, and in principle to all men, then the result could be constituted as a matter of fact. In this way, the matter of fact is to be seen as both an epistemological and a social category.” Boyle’s experimental programme utilized a material technology embedded in the construction and operation of the air pump, which rendered the unique event possible. The power of the air pump as a new scientific instrument resided in its capacity to enhance perception and to constitute new perceptual objects. (It was not very reliable in doing this, however; additionally, it was enormously expensive – the “cyclotron” of its day, as Shapin & Schaffer, 1985, suggest.) Inventing a machine that could create unique events hitherto unexperienced was in itself insufficient; it was also necessary to let others know what had been uniquely produced so that they might come to the same understanding. For this a literary technology was required by means of which the

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phenomena produced by the pump could be published for those not able directly to witness the event. Finally, there had to be a social technology invented that incorporated the conventions experimental philosophers should use to consider knowledge claims. Hobbes disagreed with the program that Boyle promulgated. As he pointed out, the laboratory was a very restricted public space. Instead, he promulgated a rationalist program for knowledge based upon the principles of geometry: a type of science fiction similar to more modern neo-classical economics, in that it worked from prime assumptions through to conclusions consistent with the assumptions made. Hobbes’ (1962) importance, however, lies not in his scientific claims or his practical administrative, organizational or managerial effects, but in his articulation of key conceptual tenets of modernity as power. Henceforward, power was to be constituted primarily as an essentially modern, mechanical concept. Hobbes sought to found a science in which power was a key concept. In this respect he was, in Bauman’s (1988) terms, a legislator of the very role of legislator: whereas sense and memory are but knowledge of fact, which is a thing past and irrevocable; science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another: by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like another time; because when we see how any thing comes about, upon what causes, and by what manner; when the like causes come into our power, we see how to make it produce the like effects (Hobbes, 1962, p. 45).

Hobbes was the baroque master of the clockwork: the scholar who rendered an implacably causal view of the world as the centrepiece of its analysis and power. Power was, above all causal, for Hobbes, and if you couldn’t see a causal connection at work then you couldn’t see power. Indeed, Hobbes was the modernist master par excellence, for in his wake a whole intellectual industry grew up, imposing causal parameters on the modern world, reaching from Hobbes, through Locke and Hume, to contemporary political and organization science. As the foundations of these were laid down by masters such as March and Simon (1952) and their successors, the track within which they worked were already set by Hobbes’ fateful encounter with clockwork and mechanics. They rendered a mechanical, causal universe, an imperfect machine, a difficult causality, but nonetheless, still recognisably a machine. And, as we know from Morgan (1986), the “machine” metaphor is the dominant metaphor of modern organization theory and practice, and causality, in all its contemporary fascination with log linear regression and other stylistic conventions, is the metaphysical essence that animates prime movement. In organization theory there is now a huge and disciplined industry of normal science that, in its stylistic conventions, as imposed by the “best” journals, is a new form of baroque representation, striving to secure

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modern knowledge on scientific footings, either the experimental ones secured so laboriously by Boyle or the rationalist ones secured by Hobbes. The division between experiment and reason, as these two figures conceived it, articulated all that was at stake in being modern when the conceits of modernity first appeared. But, as Latour says, we have never been modern: the modern fictions of Hobbes and Boyle have never been wholly established, because the separation of the pure social force of reason and the pure natural mechanism that collective assent allowed has never been achieved in its purity: paradoxical dangers irrupt to profane the pure spaces. The fiction of the Leviathan – the all-ordering sovereign state (which later becomes transmogrified into the order of organization in general) – and the fiction of Nature – that field of pure being whose truth can be outed by the well-designed experiment and the well-tempered experimentalist – cannot be contained. They leak and leach into each other. Nature’s laws are unknowable without human organization: from primitive pumps to sophisticated electrospectographs, that which belongs putatively to Nature can only utter its message where human agency contrives that it is able to do so. Simultaneously, ingenious scientists absolve themselves of responsibility for the message received, except through residual categories of “error”. A set of philosophical language games became constructed around the great divide. Nature’s laws must be divined; no Nature’s law is socially constructed; Society is not a construct but a law-like set of unfreedoms constraining free agency and awaiting discovery; Nature and Society are ontologically distinct; Nature is Society; Society is Nature – and so on, in an endless parlour game for undergraduates. These games constitute what modernity became. But not everyone played the game. Not everyone was confined within either the institutions of Society or the institutions of Nature, nor did everyone seek to impose their institutions on those of the other. For instance, anthropologists, at least when researching pre-modern societies, did not. In America, ethnomethodologists such as Garfinkel (1967) did not. In France, Boltanski and Th´evenot (1991) did not any more than did Latour (1987), or, in Denmark, the master-ethnographer, Flyvbjerg (1998). Instead, rather like the ethnomethodologists or the anthropologists (and Caravaggio & Machiavelli), they made the game the object of study: they sought to observe, to describe, to follow the actors in their everyday life rather than that imagined for them in the protocols of High Church, High Science or High Society. They sought to understand the game, not by appeal to its transcendent laws or immanent possibilities, but through observation and analysis of the ways in which the actors themselves construct immanence, construct transcendence, the way that they do the work of making stable those networks that lace together, leach into, and profane the pristine spaces that the epistemologically pure scions of social construction and natural law would keep unsullied. Hence, the pure world

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of Modernity – in the spheres of the Social and the Natural – has never existed. We have never been Modern. Instead, we have inhabited a series of dualisms: on the one hand, “hard” nature determined “soft” society and on the other, “hard” society determined “soft” nature: naturalism versus constructionism. However, in one field (anticipated by both the realism of Machiavelli and Caravaggio), these dualisms were rethought – by anthropology. Each provides a kind of anthropology of their experience: Caravaggio’s representations of real people and their dirty foibles, even within the baroque conventions that funding required; Machiavelli’s real politics and its moral disdain for the prattle, chicanery and duplicity of the Church. Once anthropology broke free from its Victorian essentialist assumptions, whereby “savages” existed merely to elevate “civilization”, and, instead, sought to describe and represent things as they appeared to be in terms of their own forms of life, then it became postmodern – because it no longer spoke from the position of privilege accorded the knowledge, norms and mores of here and now – wherever, whatever, that here and now appeared to be. Latour recommends such an anthropology, one that treats all its objects of analysis equally, whether conventionally pre-modern or modern; whether conventionally of nature or society, or something impure and in-between, something hybrid, such as organization. Critical to this exercise is the abandonment of a priori error – the baggage of epistemological breaks, paradigm shifts and incommensurabilities. Error must be explained in the same terms as non-error or whatever passes for truth. (In organizational terms, we should not explain failure as a limited category different from success.) Analysis must be symmetrical: the same procedures and protocols are to be reserved for the human and the non-human (in Caravaggio’s case the human and the divine, or, in Machiavelli’s case, the good and the bad). The privileging of either the human or the natural is to reproduce, a priori, all the dualisms to be deconstructed. Far better to sketch out the methods that communities use to make their constructs: the organization theorists, the strategists, the behaviourists and so on. Sketch what they actually do.

KNOWLEDGE AND POWER Science is politics pursued by other means – so it matters not if that which is studied belongs to Society or to Nature. Indeed, it will probably belong to both simultaneously – matters of organization design, for instance, are as naturalistic and as sociable as matters of software design, bridge design or any other form of design. Or as aesthetic, plausible and replicable: their realization depends neither on natural law or social construction but on the stabilization of those circuits of power that

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produce them, how they are configured, how effortlessly they circulate, and what resistance they meet (Clegg, 1989). The nature of things or their social construction is nothing other than whatever it is that their circuitry embeds them as being: stable bureaucracies, networks, family enterprises or virtual connections – the outcome depends on what the actors – people, things and hybrids – do and achieve. That they do this despite our categorical inability to see them doing it most of the time is what Latour means when he says we have never been modern. We have never achieved the realization in practice of those categorical distinctions that modernity was to be built on. If we have never been modern then what could be the postmodern in management? If we think of postmodernity at all today as something real, something tangible, then we think of the drift from modernity, a set of ideas, values and institutions firmly anchored by an organizing reason, to postmodernity, as implying a dissolution of these scientific and cultural forms. The reflexivity demanded by this transformation comes more easily to sciences less determinate and more ambiguous about their knowledge than those that remain deeply attached to the possibility of objective, that is context-free, truths, or which can think only of that which is socially fabricated. For reflexive sciences, rationality is always situational rather than transcendent. And because it is always contextually situational it is always implicated with power. No context stands outside power. If it were the case, then it would exist nowhere, outside of understanding, outside of possibility, outside of sense. As Foucault (1977, pp. 27–28) says, “power produces knowledge . . . power and knowledge directly imply one another . . . there is no power relation without the creative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” In such a view, rationalities and powers are fused. Different power actors will operate in and through different rationalities. The different rationalities will have their different rules for producing sense – at the more formal outer limits – for producing truth. In fact, sense and truth cannot be separated from the ensemble of rules that constitute them – and their obverse – as such. To adopt a discursive analysis of rationality is to see what people say as the means whereby rationality and power become interwoven. People may be in a position to say anything, given the infinity of discourse, but they rarely surprise the well-grounded analyst with their discursive moves. Which is not to say that language games are predictable – although sometimes they are – but to suggest that they are explicable. We can understand and constitute the senses that are being made as well as the conditions of existence and underlying tacit assumptions that make such sense possible. And in this way we can begin to understand the different forms of agency that find expression in organizational contexts, where

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the players make sense of rules that they actively construct and deconstruct in the context of their action. Rather than being law-like phenomena, rules are always constituted locally, in context, by the actors themselves, rather than being the objective instantiation of a general principle or law. Contextualism implies that whatever regularities occur empirically will always be situational. Researchers need to understand that these are not likely to be the result of either remote laws operating behind the backs of the actors concerned, nor are they likely to be the result of an idiosyncratic researchers interpretation of the scene in question. To the extent that the researcher has researched the situational ethics of the context at hand, then they will have a sound grasp of the socially and historically conditioned context within which sense is made. With these understandings researchers can avoid the relativism that they are sometimes charged with: their understandings will be framed within deeply embedded foundations that the actors find normal and acceptable to use. In matters of interpretation, there is always room for disagreement and it is no different for the organization researcher. One interpretation is rarely as good as another. Some will always be more plausible in terms of the contexts within which they are produced and received. For phenomena in an object realm, the matter at hand can have no understanding of itself. But actors always populate organizations and they always have an understanding both of each other and those artefacts that they constitute (and which sometimes constitute them – for instance, a machine operator) and with which they interact. Thus, organizations are always more subject-realms than merely object realms, albeit that, as objects of reflection, they can be subjected to object-like treatment and routines. But this does not inescapably secure their nature as something ontologically just so. Of course, there is no shortage of theories in organization studies that presume to offer abstract context-independent concepts: contingency theories, institutional theories, population ecologies, transaction cost analysis, and so on. But on close examination, these theories always betray the origins of their context-dependent assumptions. It could not be otherwise. These assumptions may be more or less tacit or more or less reflexive, but their context cannot be excluded, because such context always defines the relevancy of the phenomena that any theory addresses. None of these considerations, constituting a plain realism that neither a Caravaggio nor a Machiavelli would find amiss – the real actors always spoke in their work – count for much in the contemporary power games of organization theory. (For instance, Pfeffer, 1993 has highlighted the value of normal science and paradigm consensus, as defining conditions for better, more modern organization theory, suggesting that it will produce greater scholarly reputations and better resource allocations.)

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While the nature of reality is unequivocally real – it is “out there” – our ways of knowing it as such are somewhat more contestable. While we have highly elaborated codes for making sense of phenomena – such as the methods of empirical science – we should recognise these for the codes they are. They are sophisticated ways of narrating the stories that matter to us as scientists and people, of giving them credence, of passing them on in the world. Reality cannot be represented in some propositionally pure form that is untouched by the context of meaning in which it is embedded. That Hobbes saw and described the phenomena of power in causal terms, using metaphors of springs, flywheels, and force, and was subsequently well received for having done so, was not surprising in a world newly impressed by the writings of Newton. Everywhere scholars sought out signs that would enable them to unravel the mechanical nature of the universe and of being in it. In speaking in the scholarly language of his day Hobbes bequeathed a view that could not encapsulate action at a distance, that could not conceptualise how the standing conditions for any action might constitute the mechanics of its outcome, and could not cope with the power of abstracted representations – its own included. But he laid down a framework for causal analysis as an analysis of the mechanical relations between things that has framed positivist analysis since.

FROM POSITIVISM TO LANGUAGE GAMES Perhaps the best way of understanding the rules for scientific analysis that constitute approaches such as positivism is to see them as discursive strategies rooted in a particular view of the world as a sphere of mechanical and causal relations between objects that are amenable to inspection of signs of their existence through the reception of sense data. Not just any sense data will do, but that which is privileged, discursively and representationally, by the science in question. Experience ordered though our sense data may cause us to hold certain views of the matter in question, but it cannot tell us which views we should be considering in the first place. The insight is old. Weber (1948, p. 143) quoted Tolstoy in a speech to students at Munich University in 1918 to this effect: Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: What shall we do and how shall we live? That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable. The only question that remains is the sense in which science gives ‘no’ answer, and whether or not science might yet be of some use to the one who puts the question correctly.7

One consequence of positivism in organization studies has been to obscure this most basic question. It has created an epistemic context in which such a question cannot even be considered. Instead, ethics are something else outside

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the questions one asks of reality as a scholar: that certain causal regularities may be empirically observed of a phenomena does not enable one to ask why these regularities and not some others? How, for instance, is authority achieved as a set of patterned preferences whose prevalence demonstrates its facticity? At the outset, organization studies never asked such questions concerning power in organizations – it simply took it for granted. Hence, having no conception of power other than as A getting B to do something that B would not otherwise do, it was able to ignore all the important ethical questions. Such as, why should ownership and control of a phenomenon such as capital have dominance over other things? How does such domination become authority? Increasingly, in fields of endeavour such as management and organization theory, the world construed in modern terms has been seen as an arena capable of analysis in terms of underlying mechanisms, the phenomenal signs of which can be registered in sense data. What is important is to construct the machinery of sense-data collection and analysis in such a way as to enable these mechanisms to be visible. In effect, what this amounts to is the installation of a very particular language game as the dominant orthodoxy for doing research. That this is the case is most evident on those rare occasions of moral exhortation, when the politics of the dominant orthodoxy are revealed for all to see. Jeffrey Pfeffer (1993) provides us with one such occasion. Pfeffer calls for moral rearmament in organization theory that will suppress internal conflict concerning methods and epistemologies. Such conflicts he regards as dangerous, corrosive of moral authority, and destructive of professional reputation and discipline. Order is what is required. On the contrary, we would argue – intellectual communities, just as political communities – that suppress conflict do so at considerable risk to their vitality. As Flyvbjerg (2001, p. 108) suggests, “suppressing conflict is suppressing freedom, because the privilege to engage in conflict and power struggle is part of freedom. He goes on to suggest that ‘perhaps social and political theories that ignore or marginalize conflicts are potentially oppressive, too.’ ” Organization theory, in as much as it would only allow for debate on its own terms – the Pfeffer option – would be repressive, oppressive and antithetical to the spirit of an intellectually open society, a baroque institution of institutionalised terror and the confessional (the tenure review decision – “No, that is not a toptier journal and it is not on the prescribed list of journals in which one should publish.” The Departmental Index has replaced the Papal Index.). It is conflict that sustains openness and without such conflict the genuine democracy that is essential to the articulation of reason is lacking. Reason resides not so much in what is said, as Habermas (1972) argues, as in the formal conditions that constitute the conditions within which what is said can be expressed. The more democratic a

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discourse, the more legitimate will be the inevitable conflicts of interest that arise and the less there will be barriers to their expression. And there is every reason for democratic discourse as the basis of science: if there are barriers to expression, if certain styles of work are demonised or disdained, then there is no open society. Sterility, banality, orthodoxy, this is what ensues when debate is stifled in the name of order. In political science it is called totalitarianism. It is what happens when power overwhelms imagination – especially the imagination of those outwith of power, whose imagination could rewrite history. One of the advantages of Foucault’s approach to power is that it “integrates rationality and power, knowledge and power, reason and power, truth and power” (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 124). Power is the axis. Power frees imagination and power writes history (Foucault, 1977). Only power – the capacity to make a difference to existing conditions of existence in ways that are significant for the actors concerned – can free imagination. Power writes history. That the histories we inherit have overwhelmingly been those of the dominant actors strutting their stuff in the various stages of the human comedy – the men, the whites, the colonialists, the rich, the powerful, the educated – is hardly surprising. Life on the margins, in service, bondage or slavery of one kind or another, rarely affords room, time or tools for intense reflection. As Foucault (1977, p. 27) suggests, “we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests.” On the contrary, as he goes on to suggest, power produces knowledge, they are directly implicated in each other. Reflexivity is essential to understanding this relation, suggests Foucault. We need to be able to see how power actually functions in context. Elsewhere, in the context of a discussion of the significance of reflexivity, a general and guiding theoretical point has been elaborated: Those theoretical positions able to account, reflexively, for their own theorizing, as well as whatever it is that they are theorizing about, will be clearest about their own identity, and the extent to which it is partial or formed in dialogue with other positions. The recognition of the ‘other’ is crucial: self-regarding behaviour in the absence of the recognition of the and by others is of no value in itself. On these criteria it is not the alleged ‘disinterestedness’ of a position that makes it worthwhile, but the degree of reflexivity that it exhibits in relation to the conditions of its own existence. Severing the conversational elements that nurtured the theory in the first place and which link it to practice makes it harder to attain this reflexivity. Thus we argue for the grounding of theoretical claims in local and specific circumstances rather than their radical and rapid translation out of them. In an organizational world that is part of the social, which is inscribed with the materiality of words, and the indeterminacy of meaning, such conversational stretch is essential. Otherwise the paradigm closes, conversational practice becomes monologue, and reflexivity declines accordingly (Clegg & Hardy, 1996, p. 701).

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Reflexive analysis is never innocent of context – that is its beauty and strength. It situates itself on the boundaries between the seemingly possible and the impossible with the desire to shift these boundaries. Such a position is the ideal place from which to think differently in order to act differently, as Flyvbjerg (2001, p. 127) puts it.

TOWARDS A CONCLUSION We have concentrated on the difference between modern and postmodern – whatever these terms may mean, they only get (in)formed and shaped by their opposite. Whatever nowadays is fashionably called postmodernism was always at the very heart of modernism. Thus, with Lyotard we can understand postmodernism as “modernism in a nascent state” (Lyotard, 1992), a constant movement back to the very underlying preconditions of modern thought, as in Derrida’s (1976) analyses of Rousseau or Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical projects (Foucault, 1971, p. 1977), or indeed, our own reference to Caravaggio and Machiavelli. Modernism could thus be described as a business that constantly transgresses its boundaries – that is what Marx found fascinating with capitalism – its ability to make everything solid melt into air. The urge for growth, for transgression, for incessant questioning of established order(s), for violating existing rules and deferring the boundaries: this is the interplay between modernism and postmodernism – a shifting movement between apparently stable categories. Another word for this interplay is reflexivity: the questioning of the taken-for-granted, of the established in order to see, think and finally act differently. We know where the taken-for-grantedness of management came from – it was a triumph of American engineering, especially but not singularly in Taylor. Taylor’s (1911) relentless cataloguing and reforming of the minutiae of everyday work started management and organization theory on its path of analysing and ordering organization. From this beginning, management theorists attempted to produce knowledge about organization as a phenomenon. With the so-called postmodern turn in organization theory, these questions have been folded back upon themselves. Postmodernism is driven by the insight that our understanding and our knowledge are organized in a certain way, and that a change in the organization of our theories changes our ways of world-making, and thus the reality we care to see (Jeffcutt, 1993).8 Hugh Willmott called this process “reflexivization” (1998, p. 217), which circumscribes the “turning back of organization theory upon itself” (Chia, 1996, p. 7). Strategically, what is created is as often as not, a textual reflexivity, addressing “the logical and rhetorical strategies deployed in the production of organizational texts and their consequent effects on our understanding of organization . . . which

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enable certain theories of organization to gain credibility within particular research communities” (Chia, 1996, p. vii). Cooper also shares a similar point of view: It is in this sense that the statements of that discourse which we call ‘organization theory’ are supplementary, for they present the ‘organization of organization’, that is to say, that as texts on organization they are themselves ‘organized’ according to certain normalized criteria (often called scientific and/or academic) so that it becomes impossible to disentangle the content of organization studies from the theory or methodology that frames it (Cooper, 1990, p. 196).

Postmodern organization theory, rather than generating “analyses of organization that assume its objects to exist ‘out there,’ waiting to be captured by the tools of the social scientist” (Willmott, 1998, p. 214), seeks reflexive understanding of the ways in which the analysis of organization depends on the organization of analysis. This reflexivisation marks the point at which our thinking constantly oscillates between two poles: on the one hand the modern attempt to understand, think, theorize and manage organizations, and on the other hand the postmodern effort to question the organization, its preconditions, the hidden assumptions of our understandings, thoughts, theories and management practices. In other terms, we observe a huge feedback process, which Nietzsche described as nihilism. In previous centuries it made sense for this resistance to the will to truth, the demanding urge for truth, to be against organised Catholicism – viz. the Reformation – because it was the Catholic Church which most terribly and markedly constituted our souls so that it could impose itself on that which it had created, most dramatically by inquisition, more mundanely through confession. That is why Caravaggio and Machiavelli – as prototypical modernists – were already postmodern before they were even modern, before there even was modernity. But it is not Spiritual Power that we need to resist today so much as its other, refracted darkly through the lenses of Luther and Calvin. Modern rationality, the tyranny of the means rather than the tyranny of ends, is what holds us in its thrall today. That reflexivity whose origins we chose to find in Caravaggio and Machiavelli, over hundreds of years, has started to be directed towards itself as it questions the will to truth: what is the truth of our will to truth? What is the driving force behind our obsession to speak the truth? The will to truth becomes self-reflexive, it self-critically questions its own origin with the means through which it was developed. The result is well known: behind the will to truth, there is, and has always been, the will to power (Foucault, 1977; Nietzsche, 1968). And that is why postmodernism is turned now not just to spiritual power but also to the material and temporal power of modern organizations and what passes for their rationality. And that is why resistance must start with the texts, because this is where that “reason” is reproduced.

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To be “post” modern in management and organization theory today is to oppose and work outside of the prevailing baroque orthodoxy, at the margins, and to try and see things not through the dominant codes of representation which, like all such codes, can only become stylistics devices – but to see things freshly, with a new eye, just like Caravaggio and Machiavelli, and thus to see a new “reality” by reflexively questioning everything that makes that dominant way of seeing possible (Blum, 1974). As Alvesson (this collection) suggests, acute ethnographies, the tool of the anthropologist, are one way to achieve this; Foucault suggests that perhaps one cannot avoid philosophy in undertaking such an enterprise. The movement by which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams and illusions, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks other rules – that is philosophy. The displacement and transformation of frameworks of thinking, the changing of received values and all the work that has been done to think otherwise, to do something else, to become other than what one is – that, too, is philosophy (Foucault, 1990, p. 328).

The subversive, deconstructive movement is immanent and inherent to the modernist project. It took over 400 years for Hobbes’ clockwork to be dismantled by Foucault (while drawing inspiration from Machiavelli’s earlier work). Postmodernist questioning needs neither to critique from the outside nor find any other transcendent causes or reasons for its practice. Rather, the modernist project evokes its own critique, it inescapably gives rise to the very forces that both built the modernist project and, at certain points of its development (not to say “progress”), may undermine and reconstruct it. Kafka (1970) once said that our business today, instead of building the tower of Babel, is to “dig the shaft of Babel” – to critically examine where we are standing, from where we would build. In fact, Foucault defined his project as “digging underneath our feet – that characterizes contemporary thinking.” Or, as Nietzsche said in his “Daybreak”, we are all moles. Such constant and critical questioning delineates not so much a search for answers but rather the generation of more questions, uncertainties, narratives that generate questions. With Law (1994, p. 249), we agree “there is no organization outside the uncertain process by which it chronically produces itself. And, furthermore, that there is no possibility of a final account of the organization, a grand narrative that would order or tell of the character of the organization.” Outside of these stories, knowledge rarely develops evenly and smoothly but thrives on “the edge of intellectual anarchism” (Knights & Morgan, 1994, p. 133, italics added). This is the edge we touched on earlier – the edge where Machiavelli and Caravaggio were standing, transgressing the taken-for-granted in order to act and think differently. No matter whether we call his process postmodern or not – it is the constant companion of our Western history, and, like a shadow, it follows us, even as the apparently stable melts into air.

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Foucault wrote about the function of diagnosis and critique of nature, saying: [I]t does not consist in a simple characterization of what we are but, instead – by following lines of fragility in the present – in managing to grasp why and how that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is. In this sense, any description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i.e. of possible transformation. . . . it is fruitful in a certain way to describe that-which-is by making it appear as something that might not be, or that might not be as it is. . . . What reason perceives as its necessity, or rather, what different forms of rationality offer as their necessary being, can perfectly well be shown to have history, and the network of contingencies from which it emerges can be traced back. Which is not to say, however, that these forms of rationality were irrational. It means that they reside on a base of human practice and human history; and that since these things have been made, they can be unmade, as long as we know it was that they were made (Foucault, 1990, pp. 36 and 37).

Why should organization theory be an appropriate sphere from which to conduct some interrogation today? Why should postmodernism migrate from art and architecture to this far shore of technical rationality? The answer is simple. If we want to challenge the nature of everyday rationality today then we have to challenge organisations that appeal to nature to justify their practices: their centralisation, their hierarchy, their disciplinary practices. Installed as the ontological necessity of a science of nature which takes as its object the functionalised necessity of modern organisations, and then reproduces these, endlessly, in its writings, analysis, recipes and the recriminations of those of a less naturalist bent, organisation theorists of this ilk serve a modern inquisition, a modern confessional, where the human will to achieve creativity is disciplined, contained and occasionally excommunicated, and the “people who go into the workforce . . . are stifled by hierarchical institutions that prevent people from reaching their potential” as Couuts (2002, p. 37) put it. Today, while the churches are virtually empty, despite those many millions imprisoned in their beliefs since birth by the choices of their fathers and mothers, everyday mundane organisations, in which we are obliged to make a living, have taken on their role. In a secular age, spiritual power passes to the new churches of commerce. These continue to exist and be reproduced as those modern organisations whose infinite metaphorical variety, as iron cages, as psychic prisons, as penitentiaries of discipline and domination, as soft machines of consenting control, is easily rendered into the stuff of normal organization theory and its contingencies (Donaldson, 1999). Against these normalising tendencies, we seek vitality in ethnographies that sabotage the normalised and panglossian view that the organisations we get are the best we could have, because they are the only way to be and that anything else would be an offence against nature (Clegg, 1997). Thus, postmodernism is, finally, at this moment, an offence against

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[this (mis)conception of] nature. Equally, it stands opposed to the outer limits of constructivism. Some see this as nihilism – a tearing down for no reason. The alleged nihilism of postmodern organization theory directly descends from Nietzsche’s diagnosis. It is experienced as a weakening of the field: the postmodern “stream of work takes at its subject the activities of organizational scholars, rather than organizations” (McKinlay & Mone, 1998, p. 185). As they go on to say, “the phenomenon being studied dominates the horizon more completely, so why waste time focusing on anything else?” The plea is made in the context of a text that expresses its admiration for the real that it summons into being much as Hobbes regarded clockwork – less an artful invention and more an overwhelming facticity for thinking the world – or as Boyle regarded his air pump – a real, if occasionally fallible, machinery, for authorizing nature’s message. Finally, it is such “facticity” that we believe the postmodern can illuminate.

NOTES 1. Ironically, Foucault himself never used the label postmodernism – in an interview he was asked about the meaning of the term, and he replied: “What are we calling postmodernity? I am not up to date. . . . I do not understand what kind of problem is common to the people we call postmodern . . .” (Foucault, 1990, pp. 33–34). 2. Of course, this language inspired by war metaphors is very modern in itself – see Burrell (1994, p. 2) where he speaks of “the possibility of a defence for organization theory in the face of the gathering attack now being assembled by those in the sway of postmodernism.” It entered into modernist discourse on power when Machiavelli turned his back on the moral posturing of Catholic theologians to become an anthropologist of power in the Medici palace. 3. See Foucault’s idea of a criticism that “would not try to judge, but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea-foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply, not judgements, but signs of existence . . . Perhaps it would invent them sometimes – all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep, I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. I would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightening of possible storms” (1990, p. 326). 4. The same can be observed in Chia’s book, when he states at the very beginning of the book that a deconstructive approach offers “inexhaustible opportunities for gaining fresh insights into the ontological character of social organizing processes” (1996, p. 10); by page 18 he sounds a little more careful: “Deconstructive analyses, therefore can claim to have potentially radical institutional and organizational implication even though these implications are often difficult to pinpoint and incalculable in terms of their long term effects”, and on page 192, at the end, he confesses that “The value of deconstruction lies in what is denied.” 5. See also Burrell’s “anti-organization theory” (1997) or Marsden and Townley’s “contra-organization science” (1996, p. 666).

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6. Whom Robb (1999), his most recent (and most provocative) biographer, names M – the initial of his given name – as there is some confusion about his proper name, although it is conventionally accorded to have been Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Caravaggio being the name of the place that he came from. 7. This reflects the insight of Wittgenstein’s (1922) early philosophy: “[T]he truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work . . . consists in the fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.” 8. “It becomes a question of analysing, let us say, the production of organization rather than the organization of production” (Burrell & Cooper, 1988, p. 106).

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BRINGING IDEAS BACK IN: ECLECTICISM AND DISCOVERY IN ORGANIZATIONAL STUDIES Martin Kilduff and Mihaela Kelemen ABSTRACT This chapter presents an affirmative and emancipatory postmodernism characterized by epistemological and methodological pluralism. Many narratives are to be preferred to just one, many styles of research are available and useful, and local, limited and fragmented research initiatives have contributions to make to our common enterprise. The chapter outlines postmodern ideas such as fluidity, deconstruction and pluralism; debunks misconceptions concerning postmodernism’s relationship to science, modernity and theorizing; and offers a four-step guide to those interested in postmodernizing a research area. The chapter ends with a call for transparency in theory and method, pursuit of nonobvious research ideas and pragmatic engagement with the world of practice.

INTRODUCTION We write this chapter for those who wonder about the import for management research of various theories and approaches often summarized in rubrics such as postmodernism, deconstruction and poststructuralism. Social scientists should be trained to keep minds open for new ideas and useful approaches. But the

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gatekeepers to our field have often neglected or misinterpreted intellectual debates that have energized other fields. In particular, research from the humanities, deriving from traditions of scholarship different from those in the social sciences, has proved difficult for many social scientists to comprehend or use. Work inspired by postmodernism has often been relegated to an incommensurable paradigm immune from or resistant to critique. But this practice of academic apartheid is antithetical to the cross-border initiatives that characterize postmodern enquiry. We offer in this essay a fresh look at the contemporary possibilities available to organizational research from a postmodern perspective. We are concerned here not with reviewing past work but with offering our own distinctive approach (see Kilduff & Mehra, 1997, for a review of postmodernism). There is no doubt that ideas associated with postmodernism have taken root throughout the social sciences. A quick search in the JSTOR database using the term “postmodernism” produced citations to 156 articles, many in mainstream outlets. These articles included comprehensive review pieces (e.g. Agger, 1991), critiques of postmodernism (e.g. Smith, 1995) and debates concerning specific postmodern approaches (e.g. Fuchs & Ward, 1994). In anthropology, interest in postmodern approaches has burgeoned as signaled by major review pieces (e.g. Franklin, 1995; Nugent, 1998) and critiques (e.g. D’Andrade, 1995). In psychology, postmodern ideas have been articulated for at least twenty years (e.g. Sampson, 1983), with a consistent stream of publications (e.g. Gergen, 1990, 1995). In business studies, articles from postmodern perspectives are familiar to readers of major journals in consumer research (e.g. Firat & Venkatesh, 1995; Holt, 1998), operations research (Taket & White, 1993) and, of course, management research (e.g. Kilduff, 1993). Indeed, in the management and organizational studies area, new journals (such as Organization and Journal of Management Inquiry) devoted to alternative conceptualizations (including postmodern conceptualizations) have proliferated, whereas the established journals routinely call for work from “nontraditional perspectives, such as the liberal arts and the humanities” (quoted in: “Information for contributors”, Academy of Management Review). The evidence is persuasive, therefore, that ideas from postmodern perspectives have permeated the social sciences, including management and organizational studies. The paradox is that the increasing publishing success of those working from postmodern approaches seems to have done little to enlighten the field concerning the possibilities of postmodern research. In fact, terms such as “postmodernism” and “deconstruction” have themselves become battle flags in wars between opposing camps. Some writers find themselves rhetorically frothing at the mouth at the very mention of postmodernism, Derrida or deconstruction (e.g. Postman, 1999),

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rather than engaging in any constructive attempt to understand new intellectual movements. We try in this paper to open a dialog concerning ideas and approaches. There are some stimulating insights and fresh thinking that we find worth exploring. We, in common with many researchers (e.g. Parker, 1992), refer to postmodernism as a movement of ideas, whereas others refer to the condition of postmodernity as a state of the world in the aftermath of the collapse of such political ideologies as state communism (e.g. Jameson, 1984). We are skeptical about the claims of those promoting the postmodernity thesis, although we readily agree that many aspects of contemporary organizations and management can be reevaluated from a postmodern perspective to draw attention to phenomena that may appear new but in fact have always been with us. In this chapter we focus relentlessly on ideas about research rather than on patterns of consumption, new technologies, simulacra or other supposed characteristics of the postmodern condition. We also resolutely refuse to defend the absurdities present in some so-called postmodernism, absurdities that have been exaggerated by such critics as Sokal (1996). In the same spirit, we avoid piling further opprobrium on the wastelands of positivism documented by critics of the Aston research program such as Starbuck (1981). Our goal is to find interesting approaches to social science irrespective of the armies fighting battles over the sacred territories of journal space and academic promotion. Is there anything useful to be gleaned from postmodern perspectives? Read further and judge for yourself.

WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM? In considering the array of work that proceeds from a postmodern perspective, we choose to present an affirmative, emancipatory version that asserts the possibility of meaning, the importance of theory and the necessity of practical action. We neglect writing from a pessimistic perspective that denies the possibility of objective reality, that obscures possibilities of personal emancipation, and that excludes any approach to studying data about organizational processes. Our aim is not to present an exhaustive panorama of postmodernism, but to build from one corner of the postmodern field, a corner that incorporates the legacy of pragmatism, in order to improve research and thinking about organizational processes. Postmodernism is nothing if not eclectic, and, therefore, it is necessary at the outset to indicate clearly which aspects of this eclecticism are worth considering as contributions to a science of organizing.

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Fluidity The affirmative, pragmatic postmodernism that we find interesting focuses on processes rather than outcomes, on organizing rather than organization. It draws from the radical reinventing of the field characteristic of Weick’s (1969) The social psychology of organizing and neglects the programmatic, normal-science approaches characteristic of such standard icons as Katz and Kahn’s (1966) The social psychology of organizations (see Van Maanen, 1995, for more on the comparison between these two texts). We view organizational reality as constantly in the process of being constituted rather than something static. Organizations are no longer seen as collections of stable entities (people, material resources, ideologies and so on) but as Weickian networks of relations in permanent states of flux and transformation. The conventional model of organizations emphasizes the reassuring predictability of organizational activity. Events occur each day with an inevitability that recalls the repetition of lines “uttered by a Hamlet on the stage” (March & Simon, 1958, p. 143). Postmodern writing alerts us to the furious activity behind this reassuring fac¸ade, to the disruptions waiting in the wings and to the possibility of new narratives of production, invention, aspiration and technology that actors in organizations may invent in the face of suppression, discouragement and disinformation (cf. Kelemen, 2000). The stagings, meanings and implications of repeated acts are elements to be analyzed rather than surfaces to be ignored. Postmodern ideas have disseminated widely in the field of organizational studies, despite resistance from those fixated on the vision of a universal science proceeding along Aston research lines, with well-defined entities measured by stable indicators. In pointing to the features of contemporary research that echo and affirm postmodern notions, we make no claims to identifying certain authors as postmodernists. The ideas themselves are in the air, and many of our leading researchers have incorporated them in research and thinking. We have already signaled that much of the pioneering work of Karl Weick is compatible with postmodern emphases on the fluid and paradoxical nature of organizing processes. His book The social psychology of organizing (Weick, 1969) is an early marker of the changes that have transformed the field of organizational studies, and made it the most interesting place to do research in the social sciences. Predictably, as the influence of Weick’s book increased, the old guard fought relentlessly against the so-called “Weick stuff” in Academy meetings, in journal articles, and elsewhere. The same people who now mount attacks on postmodernism were the ones attacking the “Weick stuff” in the 1980s. So the rather futile battle goes on between researchers who want to do Aston-style contingency theory and others who favor an eclectic approach to the complex issues of organizational research.

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Postmodernism posits the end of strong, stable, coherent and unified subjects. Individuals have multiple, fluid, contradictory identities, with particular identities taking precedence over others as individuals go in and out of various social situations. For example, one study showed that individuals’ identities reflected the salience of underrepresented characteristics in any particular social grouping. Gender became more salient for women than for men in an organization composed mainly of men, whereas ethnicity became more salient for those in the minority compared with those belonging to the ethnic majority. People’s identifications, therefore, tended to be influenced by the individual’s distinctive characteristics in the social space (Mehra, Kilduff & Brass, 1998). Thus, one of the most interesting approaches to individual identity springs from the work of Goffman (1959) and other writers, who have documented the shifting selves that people present in social situations to manage impressions. Theory and research on self-monitoring in organizational settings have shown that the high self-monitoring chameleons (i.e. people who can change their attitudes and behaviors to suit prevailing norms) tend to gain faster promotions (Kilduff & Day, 1994) and higher performance ratings (Mehra, Kilduff & Brass, 2001) than the true-tothemselves, low self-monitors (see Snyder, 1987, for a review of self-monitoring research). This work is postmodern in its insistence on drawing attention to paradoxical aspects of the self neglected in the modernist emphasis on consistency. High self-monitors are consistently inconsistent, and it is the constancy of their inconsistency that enables them to flexibly adapt to the world of organizations. Research on organizations from a postmodern perspective must, therefore, acknowledge the fluid, dynamic nature of organizational behavior. For too long organizational research has been in thrall to statistical techniques that emphasize stable characteristics, cross-sectional analyses and inertial processes. Postmodernism calls attention to the instability of such characteristics as size, net income and strategy, and demands more focus on the trajectories, narratives and unfoldings characteristic of organizational settings. At a time when vast organizations such as Enron abruptly vanish as functioning entities, taking with them the aspirations of employees and investors, we need more research that recognizes the ways in which repetition and formulaic speech mask processes of instability and transformation.

Deconstructing Metanarrative Most postmodern writers take exception to the grand theorizing that has characterized research in the social sciences from a modernist perspective. The critique of metanarratives (such as Marxism and structuralism) is part of an overall skepticism

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toward dogmatic agendas (cf. Lyotard, 1984). In the social sciences, we often hear calls by those wedded to positivist research for a radical simplification of theory (e.g. Pfeffer, 1993) and for an embrace of scientific canons of parsimony and falsifiability (e.g. Berkowitz, 1982). Postmodernists distrust those who seek to sweep away alternative research paradigms, who derogate whole areas of research (such as social psychology) as consisting of, in the words of one structuralist writer, “non-answers to . . . non-questions” (Mayhew, 1980, p. 365). Postmodernists seek to understand the nuances of indeterminate systems and accept that phenomena can resist easy classification. Recent work on complexity theory captures some of the emphases evident in postmodern thinking, particularly the tendency for systems to defy prediction and to exhibit radical changes based on apparently minor disturbances (Eisenhardt & Bhatia, 2002). Much of postmodern thinking is compatible with the startling world of modern physics, in which notions of parallel universes and time travel are seriously debated, and where there is serious doubt concerning the immutability of laws (such as the speed of light) hitherto regarded as absolute. A recent New York Times science article reported: “An international team of astrophysicists has discovered that the basic laws of nature as understood today may be changing slightly as the universe ages” (Glanz & Overbye, 2001, p. A1). In rejecting systems of overarching propositions, postmodernists emphasize the multivocal and equivocal nature of the world in which we live. Research is needed that registers the differences and heterogeneity of this world as well as the surprising commonalities that link people across traditional boundaries. Rather than capturing exclusively the routinized patterns of bureaucratic organizations, postmodernists aim to capture also the ephemeral, fleeting nuances of behavior, the hidden world of sociality, and the emergence of organizing. This is one reason why much postmodern work tends to consist of in-depth ethnographic studies of identity management in ambivalent work situations (e.g. Cassell, 1996; Kunda, 1992). Two key concepts in postmodernist research are diff´erance and deconstruction derived from the work of Jacques Derrida (1976, 1978, 1988). Diff´erance refers to the play of meaning between textual levels. To the extent that organizations are constituted through texts of all kinds (reports, e-mail, performance evaluations, presentations and so on), the extent to which meaning is both deferred and different across boundaries can be a key to understanding the exercise of power and the replication of marginality. Deconstruction assumes that all writing, whether it consists of performance reports, annual reports or technical manuals, is inherently literary. There is no such thing as a neutral style, a mere stating of the facts. If there is “nothing outside of the text”, as Derrida (1976, p. 158) famously articulated, this directs attention, in management research, to the extent to which organizational work is governed

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by texts, whether these be the written instructions of scientific management or the classics in our field. Deconstruction is particularly skeptical vis-`a-vis textual claims concerning special access to truth, to matters too evident to even be worth discussing, to conclusions that are missing their premises or to inferences that should have been made, given a set of assumptions, but that are missing. Deconstruction asks questions that are rarely formulated from modernist perspectives, such as: What is absent from the text and why? And: Why is one member of a pair of binary terms (such as male/female) subordinated to the other in this text? A standard deconstructive procedure is to examine carefully the examples used to illustrate the major concepts or processes present in the text. One recent example is a deconstruction of Chester Barnard’s (1938) The functions of the executive in which the contrast was drawn between the stark examples of solitary individuals engaged in basic labor (such as moving stones), on the one hand, and the inferences concerning executive functions, on the other (Kilduff & Kelemen, in press). Why did Barnard write a book on cooperation in large modern corporations, drawing exclusively from examples of solitary and almost prehistoric workers? One of the most powerful deconstructive gestures is to reveal to the reader a hidden text, present for all to see once its absence is made present by an analysis that brings it to the attention of the reader. One example was a deconstruction of March and Simon’s foundational book Organizations, showing that the text replicated the moves of predecessors it condemned, and asserted an ideology of programming that justified the inevitable fractionation of work (Kilduff, 1993). Deconstruction can be a creative process that enriches our understanding of texts rather than impoverishing them. Deconstruction is now so familiar that it has even lent its name to one of the Strategic Management Society’s annual meetings! The hope is that by questioning the taken-for-granted meanings of a text, by showing the operation of hidden and even subversive texts, researchers can deconstruct the ostensibly determinate nature of events in organizations and reveal the fragility of apparently robust institutions. This is difficult work, however. The popularity of the term “deconstruction” has not been matched by the arduous process of deconstructive criticism in management studies.

Pluralism Postmodernism celebrates ontological, epistemological and methodological pluralism. The social world is complex and multi-faceted and, therefore, is best understood by an array of research approaches, including the full panoply of modernist

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research technologies, but also emergent approaches focused on textual criticism such as deconstruction and semiotics. All styles of research are available to the postmodernist, with the proviso that method itself holds no special status. In other words, research cannot be justified on the sole basis that the method is rigorous. The single criterion for the evaluation of research is excellence rather than methodological purity or adherence to paradigmatic unity. Excellence itself is assessed not through compatibility with preconceived notions of parsimony and predictive validity, but by the consensus of the community of research practice. Interpretive communities form around research topics, and these communities enforce standards appropriate to the area (Fish, 1980). As Derrida (1988, p. 146) has written, concerning the kind of research that he engages in: “It should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion, and consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.” We might add that excellence, from our postmodernist perspective, includes the possibility of surprise. Work that states the obvious (however rigorous its methods, however objective its prose) not only fails to contribute to social science, it runs the risk of bringing the whole enterprise of social science into disrepute. Postmodernism calls for management research to be brought down from the ivory tower to speak to the concerns of those present in the city square, the factory, the boardroom and the village street. Postmodernism tends to be antithetical to the mass production of research articles in the social sciences. Postmodernists prefer small-scale local research to the Fordist production line of chains of articles, each slightly different from the other. We agree with Weick (1983) in his skepticism toward the value of large-scale research teams. From a postmodernist perspective, fragmentation of voices is likely to lead to a pleasing and useful heterogeneity, a heterogeneity that matches the complexity of organizational behavior with a similar complexity of theory and research. The postmodernism that we champion is incompatible with the idea of paradigm incommensurability. Certainly, the community of experts in each area will appraise the work in terms of deciding what is published, what is cited and so on. But across fields of research there are indeed shared standards of excellence. These shared standards encourage collaboration across research traditions. Calls for devotion to paradigmatic unity are perilous, because they reduce the ability to combine diverse approaches and remove social science from the concerns of a wide variety of stakeholders. Postmodernist researchers are free to apply whatever combinations of research methods they deem useful and are urged to regard the research process as a bold adventure (Kilduff & Mehra, 1997). The use of multiple approaches to phenomena fosters greater understanding of organizational plurality and paradox (cf. Lewis & Kelemen, 2002).

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The Answer is the Question One of the major differences between any version of postmodernism and any version of modernist research concerns the approach to truth. Whereas modernists tend to seek for universal laws of social behavior, postmodernists accept that the aim of social science is not generalizability as the be-all and end-all of social theory (cf. Giddens, 1984, p. xix), but discovery. The crisis in social science is due not to postmodernism but to the wide-spread realization that, as far as social behavior is concerned (including behavior in organizations), multiple contingencies affect outcomes, local cultural and historical conditions influence the production and interpretation of actions, and so-called laws of behavior can be flouted by people who have been taught about these laws in high school and university. Attempting to impose unchangeable laws on the thoughts and social behaviors of changeable humans is tantamount to bidding the ocean to stop invading the beach. The pragmatic postmodernism that we subscribe to sees research as both an end in itself and also as contributing to the public good. As an end in itself, social science research seeks not to uncover eternal truths, but to open new questions, new territories for discovery. The fun of discovery, the excitement of enquiries into previously unexplored domains of organizational behavior – this is very much compatible with the postmodernist project. Postmodernism refuses to accede to the myth that social science is an affair of cold rationality untroubled by enthusiasm, ambition and hunches (cf. Latour, 1987). On the contrary, social scientists are seen as auteurs, producing highly personal texts that permit both self-fulfillment and the creation of interpretive communities. The value of social science texts is established in the marketplace of ideas, but the enthusiasms that produce this research tend to be communal and local. To provide public benefit from research on management and organizations is an important aspect of the postmodernist agenda. Just as teachers can strive to be transformative intellectuals who take pedagogy off the shelf and enact it in classrooms (cf. Giroux, 1992), so management theorists can strive to improve the world of organizations by doing research relevant to practice, and by reminding people, including the research community, of the practical implications of their research (cf. Kilduff & Kelemen, 2001).

Local Themes for a Global Audience Perhaps nothing is more confounding to the modernist sensibility than the affection postmodernists show for many local variations in architecture, language, food, culture and method. From a postmodernist perspective, the world is characterized

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by equifinality, with several (but not all) paths likely to lead toward the aesthetically pleasing and the scientifically exciting. How does this celebration of the local affect management research? It signals a move away from a complete reliance on survey research and other methods that tend to homogenize the variations in organizational culture, context and history. The posmodernist researcher is likely to examine the ways in which organizations enact the niches they inhabit, invent the identities they offer to their employees, and fictionalize the bureaucratic structures that provide a fac¸ade to the world. Far from trying to simplify the production and reproduction of identity, network and performance, the postmodern researcher is likely to attempt to capture the complexity of interacting humans in organizational settings. The inspiration is likely to derive more from ethnographic studies in anthropology (e.g. Cassell, 1996; Kondo, 1990) and from the textual turn in the social sciences (e.g. Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1983) than from the long tradition of regression analyses. For postmodernists, the purpose of research has nothing to do with the celebration of statistical significance and everything to do with the discovery of meaning. How is it that people in organizations create meanings and invent environments? How is it that small wins can take on such self-fulfilling power? What is it that restricts people in organizational settings from accomplishing apparently attainable goals? What are the stories that individuals tell about themselves and others and how do these unfold as narratives of their own lives? These are the kinds of issues that postmodernist research is interested in: local themes that may have a surprising resonance just because they are anchored in specific times and places.

WHAT POSTMODERNISM IS NOT: CONFRONTING THE MYTHS Myth 1: “Postmodernism is Antiscience” A glance at the many postmodern buildings in the world that use ultramodern techniques and materials to create friendly homes, humorous skyscrapers, and churches that span across architectural traditions should help answer the question concerning the attitude of pragmatic postmodernists to scientific developments. (See Kilduff & Mehra, 1997, for a more wide-ranging discussion.) The postmodern critic Charles Jencks (1989, p. 14) defined the postmodern style in architecture as follows: “the combination of modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the public and a concerned minority (usually other architects).” Jencks’ definition is important

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in drawing attention to the freedom with which pragmatic postmodernists avail themselves of important aspects of the modernist legacy such as scientific advances. Postmodernism is eclectic in the most ecumenical sense: It draws on ideas and techniques from across the intellectual landscape, including the sciences and the arts. Jencks’ definition also reminds us that, in the use of scientific techniques and results, pragmatic postmodernists (in architecture as in the social sciences) are concerned with at least two audiences: the general public that is likely to be affected by research, and the scientific experts who appraise the research. It is not enough, from a postmodernist perspective, to address only issues of interest to a small cadre of experts. Postmodernism differs from modernism in its commitment to research that has broad appeal across boundaries. The work of Derrida is testimony to the tremendous appeal of rigorous postmodern work across intellectual fields and the ability of postmodern writers to attract both general and specialist audiences. (See Lamont, 1987, for one examination of the remarkable popular and intellectual appeal of Derrida’s complex analyses.) Pragmatic postmodernism seizes on the useful techniques and results of science. Far from rejecting the legacy of rationality and the enlightenment, postmodernism seeks to hold this legacy to the highest standards. According to postmodernists, homes should blend into the surrounding environment and be comfortable to live in. Contrary to the modernist ethos of Le Corbusier and Mies Van der Rohe, postmodernist buildings are designed to avoid the “machine-for-living” ethos that has given us the ugly tower blocks disfiguring the cities of the world. In the same way, postmodernist management research seeks to avoid the accumulation of trivial, obvious and irrelevant results that, according to some noted experts (Hambrick, 1994; Starkey & Madan, 2001), characterize the contribution of management research. Thus, the postmodernist social science that we advocate selectively draws from the enlightenment project. Researchers from the postmodern perspective feel free to draw upon any method that seems appropriate, including the whole panoply of hypotheses and statistical tests beloved by positivists. The postmodern revolution that is in the process of transforming the field of management studies has succeeded in part because of its careful use of scientific method. On the one hand, the postmodern revolution has gradually shifted the field of management research toward more in-depth analyses of single organizations, emphasizing dynamic and fluid environments, and active agents creating their own environments of opportunity and constraint. On the other hand, postmodern epistemology has discarded the pursuit of what Kuhn (1962) has called “normal science” – puzzle-solving within well-established scientific paradigms. Postmodernists are much more likely to follow Popper’s (1970, p. 55) call for scientists to

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engage in “bold conjectures, controlled by criticism”. Pragmatic postmodernism rejects the Kuhnian notion of a metanarrative that dominates all work to the exclusion of other narratives. Instead, postmodernists accept the idea of competing and multiple paradigms, with social scientists engaged in cross-paradigm enquiry. The postmodernist stance is not antiscientific, but it could certainly be construed as post-Kuhnian.

Myth 2: “Postmodernism Rejects Modernism” It follows from what we have said so far that postmodernism, in all its guises, is not to be confused with traditionalism or tribalism or any of the other anti-modern movements that have sprung up around the world in reaction to the spread of science, rationality and Western culture. Postmodernism does not represent a return to the Middle Ages (despite the atavistic yearning of one organizational theorist; see Burrell, 1996). On the contrary, postmodernism adopts a critical pragmatic approach to the modernist legacy. Postmodernists seek to selectively appropriate aspects of modernism without having to buy into dogmatic adherence to such paradigmatic straightjackets as positivism. A typical postmodernist approach to the modernist legacy in organizational studies is to subject this legacy to sustained critique. The question might arise, for example, as to what the classics in our field have to say about such postmodern themes as change and development in a pluralistic world. Rather than dismissing the works of predecessors as archaic (a typically modernist reaction!), the postmodernist critic is likely to examine these works for potentially useful, if neglected, text that might illuminate the discussion of pluralism and change. Instead of following the modernist tendency to revere “illustrious ancestors” as progenitors in a linear sequence of cumulative scholarship (a tendency denounced by Robert Merton, 1967, p. 30), postmodernists tend to engage in active critique of foundational modernist texts in order to challenge conventional interpretations and open up research to more diverse approaches. Thus, a postmodernist examination of the contribution of the classics toward understanding change and development (Kilduff & Dougherty, 2000) finds unusual parallels between such divergent thinkers as Alfred Chandler and Frederick Taylor, both of them united in their disdain for executive inertia. As Taylor (1960, p. 93) bluntly stated: “Those in management are infinitely more stubborn, infinitely harder to make change their ways than the workers.” Joan Woodward (1965, p. 22) was critical not so much of executive inertia as of executive initiative in the structuring of organizations, denouncing the tendency for top management to add whole departments to organizations in order to accommodate “misfits who

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had been unable to hold down their jobs but who, for one reason or another, could be neither discharged nor demoted.” And Thompson’s (1967) classic emerges as full of irony and paradox, the one classic from the modernist stable that is perhaps most compatible with the postmodern emphasis on processes of change rather than stable hierarchies of people. One of the ironies that Thompson (1967, p. 118) explores is the likelihood that the “centralized, bureaucratic, and inflexible” bureaucracies that we have been taught to believe embody the rational spirit of modernity are most likely to be found not in the increasingly flexible economies of the West, but in those transitional economies that have yet to embrace free markets.

Myth 3: “Postmodernism is Itself a Metanarrative” It could be argued that the postmodern denial of metanaratives is itself a narrative. To postulate the “death of the author” and the “crisis of representation” may be tantamount to establishing a new, overarching orthodoxy within which researchers are obliged to work. Departure from an agreed-on lexicon might receive the same disapprobation that occurs in some of the rigidly confined paradigms associated with normal science. Fortunately, there is no single orthodoxy within the parameters of postmodernism, and there are continual efforts to mock any attempt to erect paradigmatically correct jargons (see, for example, the satire of Crews, 2001). Indeed, we may look forward with some confidence to the apparent disappearance of postmodernism altogether. Unlike modernist research approaches with their codified methods, carefully defined terminologies and characteristic research questions, postmodernism is so eclectic and popular that it seems likely to be incorporated wholesale into research practice. For those of us who value eclecticism, critical thinking, historical and cultural scholarship, and the simultaneous availability of a wide range of classic and contemporary writings, the label of postmodernism has been useful in differentiating ourselves from narrower conceptions of social science. But it appears more and more as if the term postmodernism were mainly useful as a pejorative for those opposed to paradigmatic openness, to eclecticism and to much of what makes our field dynamic and influential. Postmodernism, therefore, is unlikely to set itself up as a rival to other metanarratives. On the contrary, it has already established the principle that many narratives are to be preferred to just one, that many styles of research are available and useful, and that local, limited and fragmented research initiatives have their own contributions to make to our common enterprise.

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Myth 4: “Postmodernism is Nothing but Armchair Theorizing” One of the little-appreciated aspects of postmodernism is its commitment to the amelioration of the world, including the world of work. Postmodernists are interested in substantive initiatives that take the products of social science and use them for purposes of social change. There is, therefore, an emancipatory agenda included in the pragmatic postmodernism that we articulate in this chapter. From the postmodernist perspective, the taken-for-granted assumptions that abound in the social sciences concerning the limitations of workers and the corresponding necessity for all-wise managers to fractionate work (e.g. March & Simon, 1958) must be critiqued (e.g. Kilduff, 1993), and also challenged with data about real people making choices (e.g. Kilduff & Regan, 1988). The modernist tendency is to make assumptions that quite explicitly condemn individuals to an anonymous and pejorative status. For example, a recent study makes the assumption (without evidence) that, for humans, “interacting with many people at once overloads a person’s capacity to process information” (Mark, 1998, p. 309). The study advertises itself as particularly important because it avoids attributing to individuals any differences in natural endowments (of intelligence, and so on): “An important characteristic of this theory is that it does not require an assumption of initial differences in the natural endowments or structural positions of individuals to explain social differentiation” (Mark, 1998, p. 309). True to its modernist legacy, the study also does not require any contact with actual human subjects: the theory is tested on simulated humans exclusively. We mention this study because it illustrates a more general point: The ivory tower is inhabited not by postmodernists but by dyed-in-the-wool modernists who seek parsimonious models of simulated interaction over the messy world of idiosyncratic human behavior. Postmodernist research tends to be located in actual organizations, not simulated ones (e.g. Kunda, 1992); it incorporates a focus on those trapped inside failing institutions such as school children in inner cities (e.g. Giroux, 1992); and it tends to draw attention to those on the margins (e.g. Mehra, Kilduff & Brass, 1998).

HOW TO POSTMODERNIZE – A GUIDE FOR ACTION Okay, you say – we’re convinced. We want to transform research in the area of management and organization toward the eclecticism and discovery characteristic of postmodernism. How do we go about doing this? Can you offer an example of how a field of study succeeded in postmodernizing its research endeavors?

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Interestingly, the one social science area that has gone far toward transforming itself is psychology, a field that has been remarkably free of the contentious paradigm disputes characteristic of the rest of the social sciences (Greenfield, 2000). A recent handbook of clinical psychology (Snyder & Lopez, 2002) demonstrates how any field can move away from narrow and doctrinaire reliance on methodological purity toward emancipatory relevance and eclectic discovery. The first step toward postmodernization is to deconstruct the truth claims in the texts that provide the conventional wisdom underpinning thinking and research. The aim is to show the extent to which ostensibly objective categories are in fact socially constructed and to reveal the overarching ideology (if any) that provides the taken-for-granted assumptions that guide research theory and practice. This process has begun in management research (e.g. Kilduff, 1993) and has led to a renewed emphasis on the critique of foundational texts. In clinical psychology, the field’s “sacred text” (Maddux, 2002, p. 15) is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders also known as the DSM. This book “provides the organizational structure for virtually every textbook and course on abnormal psychology and psychopathology . . . students are required to memorize parts of it line by line” (Maddux, 2002, p. 15). The DSM purports to offer a set of objective categories into which psychological illnesses can be sorted. These categories purportedly facilitate effective clinical decision making and treatment based on clear distinctions between those who are ill and those who are healthy. A deconstruction reveals that the DSM contains a set of socially constructed categories that incorporate conventional thinking about what is currently considered problematic in human behavior (Maddux, 2002). For example, in 1952, homosexuality was included in the DSM as a disease, and this classification was not revoked until 1973. Such classifications have real consequences. One recommended treatment in the 1950s for homosexuality in men was a course of estrogen injections, the side effects of which included the development of female breasts. Alan Turing, the pioneering computer scientist and war hero, was forced to accept this treatment for his homosexual “disease” under threat of imprisonment (Davis, 2000). More recent disease categories have included sibling rivalry, caffeine dependence and jet lag. Maddux (2002, p. 17) captures the process by which modernist social science reifies socially constructed judgments into scientistic categories. “First we see a pattern of behaving, thinking, feeling, or desiring that deviates from some fictional social norm or ideal . . .. We then give the pattern a medical-sounding name, preferably of Greek or Latin origin. Eventually, the new term may be reduced to an acronym. . . . The new disorder then takes on a life of its own and becomes a disease-like entity.” The reification of socially constructed categories allows

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for the apparently objective classification of people as “abnormal” or “normal”, thus conferring enormous power on the scientific establishment. It is this objectification of socially constructed categories within an overarching ideology that deconstruction exposes. The second step in postmodernizing research within a social science research area is to ask: What has been ignored in this research tradition as a result of our uncritical adherence to reified categories and socially constructed truth? In the case of clinical psychology, the answer is that the obsession with categorizing pathology and abnormality left unexplored the whole vast territory of “work, education, insight, love, growth, and play” (Seligman, 2002, p. 4). Postmodernism seeks not a paradigm revolution in the Kuhnian sense, because this replaces one ideology with another. Rather, postmodernism seeks to undermine all pretensions to overarching grand theory. The aim is to focus attention on local and mid-range theories, neglected issues, marginal populations and alternative approaches, rather than to substitute one hegemony for another. Thus, the third step in postmodernization is to take existing results, methods, and approaches and use them as a basis to pursue neglected topics. Postmodern research allows a thousand flowers to bloom – it signally departs from the modernist emphasis on paradigmatic unity within which puzzle solving is the rule and deviation punished by oblivion. The field of positive psychology that blossomed from the critique of clinical psychology’s disease ideology has welcomed research on a range of neglected topics that include: positive emotions, creativity, optimism, wisdom, uniqueness, compassion, love, altruism, humor, spirituality and ethics (see Snyder & Lopez, 2002, for a complete review). The eclecticism of postmodernism invites into the fold approaches that may be completely modernist in their orientation – such as, for example, Ayn Rand’s emphasis on the pursuit of one’s own happiness as the highest moral purpose (Locke, 2002). Such narrow agendas are welcomed as part of a diverse portfolio of approaches. The spirit of postmodernism is inclusiveness rather than exclusivity. The fourth point to make, however, is that postmodernist social science has an emancipatory agenda. The postmodernization of clinical psychology derives from the pragmatic determination to try the whole panoply of ideas and methods that might conceivably emancipate people from reified categories, enacted limitations and institutionalized failure. Rather than continuing to search for yet more examples of how laboratory subjects can be tricked into biases and errors on carefully contrived scenarios, those studying positive psychology examine the conditions under which people intensely enjoy work, creatively solve problems, invoke positive emotions to improve decision making and bring playfulness into everyday organizational activity. What is particularly impressive about work

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within the positive psychology tradition is that psychology’s research methods are selectively exploited in myriads of local interventions. This research has both an amelioratory and an emancipatory agenda that involves researchers engaged not just with their own academic colleagues but also with politicians, executives, teachers, opinion leaders and technologies to encourage the dissemination of best practices for the improvement of working lives. Finally, eclecticism and discovery are constantly threatened by those who seek to reify socially constructed categories and thereby exclude work considered discrepant. Positive psychology may yet relapse into carefully guarded domains of enquiry with officially approved topics and methods. The drive to keep eclecticism and discovery a part of research endeavor is perhaps the most characteristic postmodern gesture of all.

QUESTIONS AND SPECULATIONS To what extent can researchers retain liveliness, openness and respect for the margins? Can we find the intellectual and pragmatic resources to rescue the fruits of the enlightenment in pursuit of eclectic thinking, playfulness and emancipatory practice? What is the role of the social scientist in the production and use of knowledge? These are some of the questions that will engage all social scientists in the decades ahead. They concern the meaning and direction of social science research as applied to such pragmatic fields of enquiry as management and organizational studies. From a postmodern perspective, science emerges from the workings of heterogeneous networks of humans, materials, ideologies and traditions that come together at a particular point in time within a particular context (Latour, 1987). The scientist is immersed in such networks but cannot manage them in a mechanistic fashion. The involvement of the scientist in the research enterprise is always experiential and localized. The pursuit of truth is never a neutral, value-free affair, but rather a project of partisan passion. Studying the production of scientific results in laboratories, both Latour (1987) and Knorr-Cetina (1983) conclude that science is not the mere application of abstract and objective procedures to the object of study but a messier process located firmly in everyday life routines and conditioned by the politics of the organizational setting. The passionate devotion of social scientists to their work is, indeed, to be welcomed, not disparaged. The ideal is for dedicated researchers to pose questions that address gaps, not in some selected literature, but in the understanding of important processes that affect the lives of people in organizational settings. Postmodernism valorizes not the humdrum verification of the obvious, but

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advances in discovery and practice that change lives for the better. Postmodern enquiry seeks not to remove science from the understanding of the curious, but to engage scientists in the pursuit of the extraordinary. Postmodernist enquiry regards all scientific texts as rhetorical documents that embed the passions and politics of the research team in carefully stylized formats (Latour, 1987). Scientific discovery can be aided by the transmission of results in standardized texts that embody the modernist principles of objectivity and logic. But the objectivity and logic of these texts (including the use of complex footnotes, impressive citations, and so on) must be subjected to as much skepticism as the importance of the scientific project itself warrants. Postmodernist science has a special responsibility toward transparency in its procedures even as it avails itself selectively of the impressive legacy of the enlightenment. The prose of the scientist must open up the process of discovery to readers rather than obscure the judgment calls that produced the results. Postmodern researchers tend to move away from voluntarist stances that depict the individual in total control of the world just as they dispute structuralist positions that portray individuals as victims trapped within broader social structures. Postmodernism is most compatible with a position that recognizes the individual uniqueness that results from the innumerable decisions made by and for individuals as they move through the social networks that constrain and enable action (cf. Kilduff & Krackhardt, 1994). One of the challenges facing postmodern research, therefore, is to understand how people’s engagement in a range of organizations and activities helps create the unique identities that in turn change the social contexts of engagement (cf. Oh, Kilduff & Brass, 2002). We invite readers to incorporate into their own research projects transparency of theory and methods, pursuit of the nonobvious and emancipatory potential. We invite debate concerning theories and perspectives that we should practice and disseminate. There is no predetermined set of theories or methods that we, as management researchers, must conform to. The ideas we implement in our research, and the questions we pursue, are ones chosen by us as interacting individuals. If we learn nothing else from postmodernism, we should at least learn this: We constitute ourselves in the practice of our science.

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POSTMODERNISM VERSUS TRUTH IN MANAGEMENT THEORY Bill McKelvey INTRODUCTION Organizational researchers live in two worlds. The first demands and rewards speculations about how to improve performance. The second demands and rewards adherence to rigorous standards of scholarship (March & Sutton, 1997, p. 698).

Those of us who study organizations and are professors of management work on the front lines, so to speak, where the beliefs we have about how to improve managerial performance get passed directly on to practitioners. The question is, What right do we have to put our beliefs in a privileged position? Beliefs, by definition, are supposed to be true. According to Webster’s (1996) a belief is a conviction about the truth of some statement and/or reality of some phenomenon, especially when based on examination of evidence. Are all of our lectures based on consensually agreed upon evidentiary standards? What are these standards and who should maintain them? No one states the dilemma facing management scholars more clearly than March and Sutton. They conclude their analysis by observing that the questionable status of organizational research and its underlying methodology is no secret, but it persists in the form of journal-based legitimacy expectations anyway. Why so? They point to “research context” or institutional structure that serves to create barriers against “. . . the kind of richly detailed, multiple-site, long historical studies using in-depth scholarly analysis and complex models that might yield data more

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appropriate to the task” (p. 702). They imply that the narrative and text-analysis methods of postmodernists are better (see Cal´as & Smircich, 1999; Langley, 1999; for example). Unfortunately, this could be no better than pitting the shaky 20th century modernist, normal science research standards against the anti-science rhetoric of the postmodernists. March and Sutton suggest that “. . . scholarship is probably better served by maintaining a tension . . .” (p. 704). Well, okay, but tension can lead to strokes and heart attacks. I think there is a better way. Philosophy of science examines when a researcher has the right to claim a belief is true. In the 60+ years since Reichenbach’s (1938) distinction between “justification” and “discovery” logics, the record of science shows that there is no shortage of discoveries. The problem is not lack of insight, innovation, new theories, and so forth. The problem lies with justification logic. We live in a world where Gary Hamel makes the front cover of Fortune magazine by trumpeting his “discovery” of ten simple rules to make billions of dollars. But it is not just Fortune’s problem. I have a colleague who has served on several of my dissertation advisory committees. To him, theory sections are irrelevant. All a student needs to do is build a rich enough data set such that some number of statistical findings at the p < 0.05 will appear and, Voila, the minimum standard for publication has been met – American dustbowl empiricism at its best. Surely there is more to good science than this! The question becomes, “What is an appropriate justification logic for management scholars?” As one indication of the importance and relevance of this question, most of the authors contributing to the Academy of Management Review’s special issue on Theory – “Perspectives on Developing Management Theory, Circa 1999: Moving from Shrill Monologues to (Relatively) Tame Dialogues” – develop their approaches with almost no attention to justification logic or truth of “beliefs” based on their style of research. Should beliefs based on these methods be promulgated to managers? The “logic-in-use” of normal science (Kaplan’s term, 1964) has come to be termed “modernism”, seen as a product of the Enlightenment. Modernism replaced premodern thinking resting on “dogmatic rationality based on theo-logic” and held the prospect of understanding “objective reality based on scientific logic” (Carter & Jackson, 1993, p. 87). According to the modernist ideal, truth is “. . . discovered in the causal relationships of a transcendent and pre-existing natural world . . .. Social science could discover social laws, in the same way that natural science could unlock the laws of the natural world, and through human intervention solve problems and enhance human existence” (p. 85). “From this it followed that the world could be controlled and rationally ordered if we could only picture and represent it rightly” (Harvey, 1989, p. 27). Carter and Jackson continue with their postmodernist evaluation, saying, “But modernism has obviously failed to realize this project. War, ignorance, hunger and pestilence are still rife in the world;

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and, at the organizational level, for example, amongst many other problems, modernism has failed to solve the problem of motivation to work” (pp. 85–86).1 Postmodernists throw out the systematic search for justified truthful beliefs, when the real problem is that researchers have mostly depended on an inappropriate application to social phenomena of the modernist, physics-based, normal science justification logic. In the main, management researchers ply their trade in business schools dominated by economists who have lifted their logic-in-use from the laws of motion and thermodynamics of classical physics (Friedman, 1953; Mirowski, 1989; Samuelson, 1947) and inappropriately applied it to rapidly changing, nonequilibrium economic phenomena (Anderson, Arrow & Pines, 1988; Arthur, Durlauf & Lane, 1997; Colander, 2000; Nelson & Winter, 1982). This situation only makes the search for management research legitimacy more problematic. Pfeffer (1993) demonstrates that management research has minimal legitimacy. More careful allegiance to modernism’s logical positivism and logical empiricism won’t help; Suppe (1977) wrote the epitaph on these long ago. In fact, they never existed in the world of real science anyway. Relativism is not the answer either; Kuhn’s (1962) reading of the history of science has been shown to be false. Underlying the legitimacy problem, Pfeffer observes, is the failure of management researchers to find plausibly true theories that work. This failure has become the launching pad for various “POST” positivisms. There are many: relativism, ethnomethodology, historicism, radical humanism, naturalism, phenomenology, semioticism, literary explicationism, interpretism, structuralism, poststructuralism, critical theory, etc., and postmodernism. All of these predate the program promulgated by the Academy of Management Review’s (1999) special issue – a search for better theories, with little attention paid to justification logic and truth. As an alternative approach, one could say that truth is irrelevant to good theorizing. If a theory works – the pragmatists’ view (Van de Ven, 1989) – or is predictive – the instrumentalists’ view (Friedman, 1953; van Fraassen, 1980), why worry about finding more truthful theories? However, these solutions also have significant problems. In the first case, a new theory that fails the pragmatic test for publication could be abandoned at an early, basic research stage, well before practical outcomes have been discovered. Most new basic research ideas would fail this test, thus vastly limiting the generation of useful knowledge. As for instrumentalism, even the logical empiricists (Hempel, 1965) discovered that one cannot equate prediction with explanation and understanding even in the world of classical physics (the sun going around the earth being a classic totally predictive and totally false explanation). As we move away from the linear equilibriumdominated world of classical physics to coevolutionary nonlinear phenomena, the “predictive” criterion is increasingly problematic (Arthur, 1990, 2000; Colander, 2000; Maruyama, 1963; McKelvey, 1997, 2002a, b; Organization Science, 1999b).

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If positivism never existed, if relativism is in disrepute, and if postmodernism ignores the truth requirement underlying science-based beliefs, how can we gain legitimacy among our university colleagues and offer better advice to practitioners? After more adequately supporting the foregoing three “if” claims, I draw on complexity science to define a modern logic-in-use. Then, I merge complexity and postmodernist ontologies to deal with localized interactions and language games, as the postmodernists would put it. I conclude by outlining an agent-based computational modeling method by which truth claims may be based on transcendental realist causal analyses of coevolutionary nonlinear organizational phenomena. I do so in terms of Siggelkow’s (2002) case-style narrative and Aristotle’s material, final, formal, and efficient causes.

WHY THE PREDOMINANT LOGICS-IN-USE FAIL Failure of Positivism Much of the rhetoric in support of postmodernism in organization studies is founded upon inaccurate critiques of positivism (for example, see Burrell & Morgan, 1979; Girod-S´eville & Perret, 2001; Guba & Lincoln, 1994; Silverman, 1970; Wicks & Freeman, 1998). As Hunt (1994) argues, these critiques typically are based on a caricature of positivism that (1) may have been a dream of some early positivists that no scientist ever followed; and/or (2) presumes aspects of positivism that philosophers rejected long ago. Putnam (1981, p. 114) states that both logical positivism and the main thesis of relativism – incommensurability – are self-refuting. (For example, a self-refuting statement is “All generalizations are false.”) Logical positivists define the components of science to be either analytic statements (primarily mathematics and formal logic) or synthetic statements (empirical findings) that unequivocally define the meaning of theoretical statements, with all other statements being meaningless. This fundamental definition is self-refuting, since it is neither analytic nor synthetic. Despite come critical logical flaws, and because of the systematic misinterpretations of the logical positivist program, the many constructive contributions it made have been obscured. Due to these problems, . . . The word ‘positivist’, like the word ‘bourgeois’ has become more of a derogatory epithet than a useful descriptive concept, and consequently has been largely stripped of whatever agreed meaning it may once have had (Giddens, 1974, p. ix).

“Positivism” does indeed have both strong and weak points, and how it is defined has evolved. Positivists worry about the fundamental dilemma of science, How

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to conduct truth-tests of theories, given that many of their constituent terms are unobservable and unmeasurable, seemingly unreal, and thus beyond the direct, first-hand sensory experience of investigators? The term, positivism, was coined by August Comte. He attempted to avoid the dilemma by disallowing into science terms not directly apparent to the human senses. Comte claimed that the goal of science is prediction based only on observable terms (Audi, 1995, p. 147). This is now termed “classical” or “na¨ıve positivism”. Modern management research examples are Pfeffer’s (1982) organizational demography and Donaldson’s (1996) positivism. The Vienna Circle physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers who created logical positivism – ca. 1907 – faced a similar problem. They wondered how to deal with Hegelian idealism (nothing is real), German mechanistic materialism (things not seen cannot be truthfully researched), quantum, and relativity theories (cannot be seen and are probabilistic or relativistic at best). Their response to the fundamental dilemma produced the logical positivist epistemology founded on axiomatic theories, using terms comprising three languages: “(1) logical and mathematical terms; (2) theoretical terms; and (3) observation terms” (Suppe, 1977, p. 12). Theory terms are unreal, abbreviated representations of phenomena described by the observation terms. Logical positivists rigorously avoided metaphysical terms, emphasizing instead an objective external physical world, clear separation of unreal theory terms and real observation terms, axiomatic/syntactic language, formal logic, empirical verification, theory terms defined by reference to observation terms, and reductionism down to basic physical entities.2 They developed an intricate solution to the problem of how to conduct truth tests of explanatory theories, given the circle’s self-imposed conditions of: (1) Empirical tests based only on terms and entities amenable to direct knowing. (2) Theory terms defined as unreal because they refer to physical entities that cannot be seen or touched and hence have no experienced indication of their reality. (3) Abhorrence to the use of causality, because it was seen as a metaphysical concept. (4) Directly experienced verification of truth and falsity. (5) A required axiomatic/syntactic logically precise formal scientific language. Their “correspondence rules” (C-rules) were meant to be the means whereby the knowing attached to directly sensed observation terms transferred to unreal theory terms in a method so logically rigorous that if a “real” observation term was verified as true, it followed that the related “unreal” theory term was also true. They held that theory terms are unreal and, thus, theoretical explanations of causality are also unreal, leading to the view that theories may be accepted

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only as instrumental summaries of empirical results (Boyd, 1991; Hunt, 1991, pp. 276–277). The “scientific truth” in theory terms is ascertained via verification in observation terms. Logical positivists tried to clarify the language of science by expunging metaphysical terms not amenable to direct sensory testing and by insisting that logic terms be verified as to cognitive meaning and truth, thereby “. . . ridding it [science] of meaningless assertions by means of the verifiability principle and reconstructing it through formal logic into a precise, ideal language” (Hunt, 1991, p. 271). Subsequently Braithwaite (1953), Nagel (1961), and Hempel (1965), evolved an epistemology focusing on laws, explanation, and theory, known as logical empiricism. It replaced logical positivism by mid-20th century. The logical empiricists immediately encountered a problem with the verifiability principle, since for a law to be verified it must be empirically proved universally true for all times at all places, an impossibility. Consequently, verifiability was abandoned, to be replaced by a somewhat relaxed testability criterion that all propositions have to be amenable to some measure of empirical test, a view earlier championed by Popper (1935) as his falsifiability principle. This modification finally admitted that theory terms could never be directly “verified” empirically. Instead, the meaning of operational terms “seeps up” to theory terms. In responding to the fundamental dilemma, the logical empiricists focused on problems pertaining to the logical positivists’ strict separation of theory and observation terms via the use of C-rules. This approach sought to answer the question, How to have an “unreal” theory term explicitly defined via C-rules without having the theory term simply be the result of an observable measure? This becomes an operationalist treatment of theory – it is whatever is measured (Hempel, 1954). It created the “theoreticians dilemma”: (1) If all theory terms can be explicitly defined by reduction to observation terms, then theory terms are unnecessary; and (2) If theory terms cannot be explicitly defined and related to observation terms they are surely unnecessary because they are meaningless (Hempel, 1965, p. 186). Further, if theory terms are isomorphic to operational measures there is no possibility of using the theory to predict new phenomena, as yet unmeasured. It is clear that the term “positivism” is now obsolete among modern philosophers of science (Aronson, Harr´e & Way, 1994; De Regt, 1994; Devitt, 1984; Hunt, 1991; Nola, 1988; Rescher, 1970, 1987; Suppe, 1989). Nevertheless, many key ingredients of positivism still remain in good standing among scientific realists, such as: theory terms, observation terms, observables and unobservables, intangible and metaphysical terms, auxiliary hypotheses, causal explanation, empirical reality, testability, incremental corroboration and falsification, generalizable law-like statements, counterfactual conditionals, and the centrality of

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experiments (Henrickson & McKelvey, 2002; Hunt, 1991; McKelvey, 1999b, 2003b). The various positivisms are ontologically strong, in the sense that they posit an external reality and that successive scientific discoveries and theories over time more and more correctly describe and explain this reality – reality acts as a strong external criterion variable against which scientific theories are held accountable.

Failure of Relativism The Vienna Circle’s focus on justification logic created a static view of science. Other philosophers began to study science in motion and as an artifact of the intersubjective social constructions of meanings within scientific subcommunities. According to Suppe (1977), the founding contributors are Toulmin (1953), Bohm (1957), Hanson (1958), Feyerabend (1962, 1975), and Kuhn (1962, 1977). Nola separates relativism into three increasingly nihilistic kinds: (1) Semantic relativism holds that truth and falsity are “. . . relativizable to a host of items from individuals to cultures and frameworks. What is relativized is variously sentences, statements, judgments or beliefs” (1988, p. 14) – ontologically weak. (2) Epistemological relativisms may allege that: (1) what is known or believed is relativized to individuals, cultures, or frameworks; (2) what is perceived is relative to some incommensurable paradigm; (3) there is no general theory of scientific method, form of inquiry, rules of reasoning or evidence that has privileged status. Instead they are variable with respect to times, persons, cultures, and frameworks (1988, pp. 16–18) – ontologically very weak. (3) “Ontological relativism is the view that what exists, whether it be ordinary objects, facts, the entities postulated in science, etc., exists only relative to some relativizer, whether that be a person, a theory or whatever” (1988, p. 11) – ontologically nihilistic. Nola observes that Hanson, Kuhn, and Feyerabend espouse both semantic and epistemological relativism. Campbellian realism accepts semantic relativism (McKelvey, 1999b). Kuhn’s views dominate. Weltanschauung (world view) dynamics consist of long periods of relative stability, termed normal science, broken intermittently by paradigm shifts. In Kuhn’s view, science evolves through long periods of convergent “normal puzzle solving” activities punctuated infrequently by dramatic paradigm shifts – caused by accumulated anomalies. While the anomalies cannot be accounted for within the dominant paradigm of a scientific discipline, they

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increasingly appear to be explicable in the terms of other, often newer, lessdominant paradigms. These less-dominant paradigms slowly accrue followers as their ability to explain the anomalies becomes increasingly evident to the several subcommunities of scientists. These scientific subcommunities within a discipline, each with different exemplars and different conceptual perspectives, see the world and conduct their research differently. The puzzles seen by one paradigm may not be viewed as significant within other paradigms; the anomalies of one paradigm may be inexplicable within another paradigm. Consequently there is no “neutral” comparative language, and, so, incommensurability results, preventing scientists in different Weltanschauungen from being able to conduct cross-paradigm theory tests. Complaints against Kuhn’s framework are legion: (1) Masterman (1970) identifies twenty-one definitions of the term “paradigm”; (2) others complain that under Kuhn’s framework science becomes irrational and subjective, leaving it with no objective or independent basis of resolving disputes – “an anti-empirical idealism” (Suppe, 1977, p. 151) that is no different than Hegelian idealism (Scheffler, 1967); (3) many disagree that a correct reading of scientific history offers any indication of disjunctive shifts between normal puzzle solving and revolution (Suppe, 1977); (4) meanings may not in fact change just because paradigms shift. Lack of Objectivity The strong form of historical relativism holds that observation and facts are both theory-laden – there is no such thing as neutral observation or neutral facts. This is ontological nihilism in that real-world phenomena simply do not exist as criterion variables against which to truth-test theories. This thesis – that objects, facts, and properties are colored by the nature of the theory held by an observer – is rejected by Scheffler (1967) as being no different than Hegelian idealism in which all objects in the world are perceptions and “in the mind.” If this is true, one of the basic tenets of science fails, namely objectivity. However, Suppe (1977) says that neither Toulmin, Bohm, Hanson, Feyerabend, nor Kuhn ever pin their claims on the strong form. They all accept a weaker form – that objects, facts, and properties, as they exist, are independent of an observer, that is, neutral – but that the nature of objects, facts, and properties thought to be observed by an individual might indeed be determined by the influence of the Weltanschauung. The facts of nature, as represented by language terms, are colored, if not camouflaged, by individual interpretations of semantic meanings and social constructions of meanings within scientific subcommunities that impinge on individual scholars. Suppe accepts this as a tenable outlook, but only if Weltanschauungen exist. He then argues that Weltanschauungen do not exist, using arguments summarized below.

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Lack of Historical Accuracy The complaint about an inaccurate reading of scientific history is particularly telling, since the basis of Kuhn’s attack on the positivists is that they misread history. Hunt (1991, p. 326) continues this analysis by quoting Hull (1975, p. 397) as saying, “The periods which he [Kuhn] had previously described as pre-paradigm contained paradigms not that different from those of normal science. [N]or does normal science alternate with revolutionary science; both are taking place all the time. Sometimes a revolution occurs without any preceding state of crisis.” Laudan (1977, pp. 74, 151) concludes: [V]irtually every major period in the history of science is characterized both by the coexistence of numerous competing paradigms, with none exerting hegemony over the field, and by the persistent and continuous manner in which the foundational assumptions of every paradigm are debated within the scientific community . . .. Kuhn can point to no major science in which paradigm monopoly has been the rule, nor in which foundational debate has been absent. (Quoted in Hunt, 1991, p. 326.)3

Meaning Variance Relativists claim that as a field shifts from one Weltanschauung to another the meanings of all of the underlying theory terms also change – the basis of incommensurability. Suppe (1977, pp. 199–208) argues that the strong form preferred by Feyerabend and Bohm – that “any change in theory alters the meanings of all the terms in the theory” – is untenable. No historical relativist has established that any change in a theory changes all the terms. He then offers several arguments why a weaker form preferred by Toulmin, Kuhn, and Hanson – that “meanings of terms in theories are determined partially by the principles of the theory” – is also untenable: (1) theories are constantly reformulated to generate propositions fitting particular empirical circumstances for deductive tests; (2) once it is agreed that only “some” terms might change meaning, the opposite is true, which is that some terms do not change in meaning;4 (3) theories are not simply “linguistic formulations” in the sense that a theory changes just because terms, as linguistic entities, change. Theories are not thought to change if translated from English to Japanese. Thus, the linguistic terms are amenable to translation, just as happens when English terms are translated into Japanese. The incommensurability thesis is also self-refuting, as follows. If we know enough about the terms of one paradigm to say that they are incommensurable with the terms of another paradigm then we know enough about the terms to render their incommensurability false. For example, the availability of many cross-paradigm terms is illustrated in the Handbook of Organization Studies (Clegg, Hardy & Nord, 1996). It contains chapters falling into the positivist, interpretist, and postmodernist paradigms. Yet the obvious presumption of the editors is that the terms used

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in each chapter share meaning across paradigms – otherwise the editors are in the awkward position of having “edited” a book much of which they do not understand. Lack of Agreement A Weltanschauung is typically a complex framework supposedly emerging from the collective beliefs of a scientific community. These beliefs are the result of years of training, exemplars such as textbooks, apprenticeships, research programs, and journal articles. Beliefs are also composed of all the relevant theory language of principle and terms, various theory formulations, experimental methods, and so on – truly a multifaceted belief system. How likely is the community of individual scientists to agree on all of these items? More likely each individual is somewhat different by virtue of being trained at different places, apprenticed to different mentors, and studying different books and articles. If the individuals are diverse, the strong form of Weltanschauungen is illusory – the diversity of training and experience greatly reduces the likelihood that the interpreted meanings of one subcommunity will be incommensurable to members of other subcommunities. If we accept the weak form, however, then the level of incommensurability is not high enough to support Kuhn’s argument that incommensurability does not allow cross-paradigm truth tests. Again, Einstein’s change of t in the Lorentz equations is a classic case in point. And, again, in the Clegg, Hardy and Nord Handbook . . . (1996), while various chapters come from authors in different “weak form” subcommunities, with considerable diversity of backgrounds and interpretations of textual meanings, the editors clearly thought that most readers would understand most textual meanings throughout the book. Suppe (1977, pp. 217–221), reflecting the 1969 Illinois symposium and his own analysis, concludes: (1) historical relativists deserve credit for alerting us to the dynamics of how science progresses; and (2) the idea is false that scientific communities consist of such strongly incommensurable Weltanschauungen that cross-paradigm truth testing is impossible. For these specific reasons, and the accumulated problems discussed above, relativism has been abandoned by most philosophers of science today.

Failure of Postmodernism Organizational Postpositivism Many key tenants of postmodernism have been present for some time in organization studies. They have been identified and elucidated by organizational postpositivists who take a closer, richer, thicker, more subjective view of organizational phenomena, coming to appreciate its fundamentally complex, idiosyncratic,

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and multi and mutually causal nature (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Geertz, 1973; Lincoln, 1985a; Silverman, 1970). They conclude that the prevalence of idiosyncratic phenomena precludes the use of conventional positivist methods, calling instead for subjective, richly descriptive, natural history-style case analyses (see also Cal´as & Smircich, 1999; Eisenhardt, 1989; Langley, 1999; Pentland, 1999; Van Maanen, 1989). Postpositivists focus on people as data-collection instruments, qualitative methods, use of tacit knowledge, grounded theory, inductive analysis, purposeful rather than random sampling, idiographic interpretation, and the case study reporting mode. They emphasize alternative bases for justification logic and see their results as a “negotiated” outcome of investigator and participants. Seven principle assumptions underlie this kind of postpositivism: (1) Empirical reality appears as complex and diverse rather than simple and probabilistic. (2) Complexity is organized by heterarchy rather than hierarchy, which is to say that events are subject to multiple orders and constraints at the same time. (3) The world consists of vast networks of interconnections. (4) The world, the social world in particular, is indeterminate, not determinate. (5) Linear causality is replaced by mutual causality. (6) Morphogenesis replaces reductionism – the whole is not simply the sum of its parts nor determined by them. (7) Scientific objectivity is replaced by a “perspectival” view in which neither objectivity or subjectivity prevails but rather “what is out there” depends on the perspective of the observer – a kind of social science theory of relativity (Clark, 1985; Guba, 1985; Lincoln, 1985b). Most significant for my concerns, postpositivists abandon justification logic. Long-established elements of justification logic are generalization, prediction, replication, falsification – all elements of a methodology aimed at self-correction (Hunt, 1991; Popper, 1935). The postpositivist program clearly makes no claim to follow these requirements. A review of the basic elements of postpositivism detailed in Lincoln (1985b) shows that:





There is no basis for generalizability. There is no basis for replication and corroboration. There is no basis for prediction – anywhere at anytime. There is no basis for codification and teaching. What is learned by one observer in one location has little credible meaning anywhere else.
There is no empirical “criterion variable” such that a theory may be tested as to its validity or reliability.

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There could be an idiosyncratic theory for each researcher for each of thousands of local organizational units – limiting generalization and falsification.
There is no basis for even a weak form of incremental corroboration or disconfirmation.
There is no basis for self-correction – there is no basis even for deciding whether one researcher is more correct or closer to the truth than another. Postmodernism While building on the foregoing postpositivist principles, postmodernism has more of an anti-science tone, appearing very much against normal science practice in general (Gross & Levitt, 1998; Gross, Levitt & Lewis, 1996; Holton, 1993; Koertge, 1998; Norris, 1997; Sokal & Bricmont, 1998) and has what some might call a “lunatic fringe.” A reading in organizational postmodernism (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996; Burrell, 1996; Chia, 1996; Hassard & Parker, 1993; Marsden & Townley, 1996; Reed & Hughes, 1992) suggests the overlap between postpositivism and postmodernism is 50%. This is confirmed in Alvesson and Deetz’s Fig. 1 (1996, p. 196). They show postmodernism anchoring the end of the principle diagonal opposite positivist science, with interpretist cultural relativity in between. By this figure postmodernists place themselves even further away from positivism and justification logic than the relativists and organizational postpositivists. While postpositivism is simply rebelling against linear, math-bound justification logic, postmodernism is more demonstrably antiscience. Sarup (1993) attributes the origin of the term “postmodernism” to the artists and art critics of New York in the 1960s. From there it was taken up by French theorists such as Saussure (1974), Derrida (1978), Baudrillard (1983), Lyotard (1984), and Latour (1988b). Subsequently the theme was picked up by those in the “Science, Technology, and Society Studies . . . feminists and Marxists of every strip, ethnomethodologists, deconstructionists, sociologists of knowledge, and critical theorists” (Koertge, 1998, p. 3). From Koertge’s negative perspective, some key elements of postmodernism are (pp. 3–4):
“. . . Content and results [of science are] . . . shaped by . . . local historical and cultural context.”
“. . . Products of scientific inquiry, the so-called laws of nature, must always be viewed as social constructions. Their validity depends on the consensus of ‘experts’ in just the same way as the legitimacy of a pope depends on a council of cardinals.”
“. . . Scientific knowledge is just ‘one story among many.’ ”
“. . . The best way to appraise scientific claims is through a process of political evaluation . . .. The key question about a scientific result should not be how well tested the claim is but, rather, Cui bono?”

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“. . . The results of scientific inquiry are profoundly and importantly shaped by the ideological agendas of powerful elites.”
“. . . Euroscience is not objectively superior to the various ethnosciences and shamanisms described by anthropologists or invented by Afrocentrists.”
“. . . Science is characterized chiefly by its complicity in all the most negative and oppressive aspects of modern history: increasingly destructive warfare, environmental disasters, racism, sexism, eugenics, exploitation, alienation, and imperialism.” A comprehensive view of postmodernism is elusive because its literature is massive and exceedingly diverse (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996; Sarup, 1993). But if a “grand narrative” were framed it would be self-refuting, since postpositivism emphasizes localized language games searching for instabilities (Lyotard, 1984). Also, it interweaves the effects of politics, technology, language, culture, capitalism, science, and positivist/relativist epistemology as society has moved from the Industrial Revolution through the 20th century (Sarup, 1993). Even so, Alvesson and Deetz offer a positive view of postmodernism, emphasizing the following elements (1996, p. 205): (1) Reality, or “ ‘natural’ objects,” can never have meaning that is less transient than the meaning of texts that are locally and “discursively produced,” often from the perspective of creating instability and novelty rather than permanency. (2) “Fragmented identities” dominate, resulting in subjective and localized production of text. Meanings created by autonomous individuals dominate over objective “essential” truths proposed by collectives (of people). (3) The “. . . indecidabilities of language take precedence over language as a mirror of reality.” (4) “Multiple voices and local politics” are favored over meanings imposed by elite collectives in the form of “. . . grand narratives . . . theoretical frameworks and large-scale political projects.” (5) The impossibility of separating political power from processes of knowledge production undermines the presumed objectivity and truth of knowledge so produced – it loses its “. . . sense of innocence and neutrality.” (6) The “real world” increasingly appears as “simulacra” – models, simulations, computer images, and so forth – that “. . . take precedence in contemporary social order.” (7) Research aims at “resistance and indeterminacy where irony and play are preferred [as opposed to] . . . rationality, predictability and order.” In addition to an epistemological critique, as reflected in my earlier quote from Carter and Jackson (1993), postmodernism is a critical response to the political

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detritus falling out from modernism. Alvesson and Deetz (1996, p. 194) see modernism as: . . . the instrumentalization of people and nature through the use of scientific-technical knowledge (modeled after positivism and other ‘rational’ ways of developing safe, robust knowledge) to accomplish predictable results measured by productivity and technical problem-solving leading to the ‘good’ economic and social life, primarily defined by accumulation of wealth by production investors and consumption by consumers.

Hassard (1993) agrees that postmodernism responds to a particular historical epoch, exemplified by modernism, as well as an epistemological response to positivism – my main interest here. I offer a minimalist critique against Alvesson and Deetz’s (AD’s) seven characterizations of the postmodernist perspective as it relates to organizations, as follows: (1) “Reality” is never more than what appears in the textual discourse of investigators and that discourse is disconnected from reality. This is true as far as it goes, but just as theoretical terms range from metaphysical to the observable, so too, textual discourse. While one-time-only descriptions of an “objectively real” automobile accident may vary widely, there is no reason that think that extended conversation over time would not bring researchers into agreement about textual representations and interpretations of tangible objects such as chairs, rulers, measuring scales, and eventually how these tangible measures represent less tangible objects. This kind of convergence has been going on among scientists for centuries. As virtually all of the authors in Koertge’s (1998) book, A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science show, most of the textual disconnection from reality is by postmodernists, not by scientists. Just to name one, Sokal (1998) identifies several gross misinterpretations of Einstein’s relativity theory by Latour (1988a). As Popper put it The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected (quoted by Redman, 1991, p. 4).

(2) Individual identity is not only the result of social construction, but since discourse is increasingly heterogeneous, identities are increasingly fragmented. Gross and Levitt (1998, p. 72) refer to postmodernism as flirting with nihilism in its rejection of foundational truths. They argue that postmodernism has supplanted Marxism as the “. . . unifying doctrine of the academic left.” Just remember that when you read AD’s postmodernist text: (1) your interpretation

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of their text is surely idiosyncratic to your own perspective; (2) their language use is by their own argument indeterminate; (3) their text has only their own “local” as opposed to general “theoretical framework,” interpretation, and signification, thus it shouldn’t be relevant to you; (4) their text is based on their own idiosyncratic view of the “object,” in this case modernism, and consequently could in no way relate to your view of modernism, should you ever be able to describe your view to others, which they point out, is actually impossible – so we would never really know whether your view is different from theirs. The most obvious critique is one that parallels the critique of relativism. If text is object, and if object is defined only by perspective, and if meanings are idiosyncratic to authors and readers, and if texts are indeterminate, then, Why are they trying to communicate? How could we the readers – in our own little subjective localities – possibly understand their meanings? (3) Perspective creates object. This argument is based on Saussure’s “. . . demonstration that the point of view creates the object” (AD, 1996, p. 207). Based on Saussure’s style of analysis, AD go on and on about trying define “What is a worker, really?” They talk about his/her “essence,” relational aspects such as division of labor, products of linguistic practices, relational systems, and so forth. But really, is it that difficult to tell the difference between the “worker” hitting the button every 10 seconds on the punch press from the engineer in the white shirt and the boss in the blue suit? Is it that difficult to count the “workers” in coveralls as opposed to the white shirts and blue suits? I do not think so. And even if all the engineers did not wear white shirts – some apparently do not – would it take more than a few hours of conversation to figure it out? Perhaps the person in the blue suit thinks he/she is a worker as well, but surely it doesn’t take a group of rocket scientists to come to an agreement that the people in blue suits are somehow different from the so-called ‘workers.’ (4) “Foundations” and “master narratives,” that is, general theories or theoretical frameworks, are denigrated. AD couch their argument against grand narrative by pointing to grand narratives such as Marxism, social Darwinism, or the market economy’s invisible hand. These narratives are held in place by people in power, they say. True, it took 100 years from the discovery of Brownian motion till Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics took hold in German physics. It is true, so they say, “that economics progresses one funeral at a time.” I have a paper in which a number of Nobel Laureate economists talk about how the first paper of what eventually was Nobel Prize-quality work was rejected by a journal – a power-play by the editor. But eventually the younger scholars prevail and science moves forward. Why? Because eventually contact

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with real-world phenomena and mathematical rigor win out over power plays. Agreed, sometimes it takes a long time and sometimes, like Boltzmann and Mendel, the originator is dead, but eventually objective reality always wins out over power – except of course in postmodernism where senior, well placed, so-called theoreticians are not held accountable to anything but their own thoughts. (5) Formation of discursive texts is inseparable from power. Drawing from Foucault (1977, 1980), AD don’t talk about power that one might possess, but rather the kind of power, or lack of same, that results from language formation. Thus the language that defines “manager” gives power to one group and takes it away from another. They say, “Power thus resides in the demarcations and the systems of discourse that sustain them, including material arrangements, for example, recruitment and selection procedures, office arrangements, reward and control structures . . . and so forth” (p. 209). Is it really possible that any random group of people could come together and via their discourse create language, such as “manager,” “CEO,” “worker,” and the like, and then somehow have it happen that some people have more power than others? More likely, the people creating the discourse already had power to create such “power” designations, and by virtue of an already existing higher level institutional structure also had other people already in positions of power, perhaps because they own the firm or have been given rights to office by an external legitimating body, ready to enforce the designations of the discourse. In short, Foucault and AD have it quite backwards. (6) All textual systems of representation are simulacra. Even when it is admitted that a text has some relation to the real-world, it represents an artificial, language-produced model of reality in which the model “exceeds” the real object – makes it more real than it is, paints it in brighter colors, accentuates some things but not others. Thus, most of the world sees America as the larger-then-life society that screen writers and directors portray in their movies. Postmodernists leap from the many occasions where discourse produces larger-than-life images of real-world phenomena to conclude that all language usage, including scientific language usage, does so. Undoubtedly this is true in initial readings of results, initial writings of drafts, and even in initial publications and claims. But as Popper noted, this is all part of the “history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error” in the progression of science. Any scientist would stipulate to this. But this does not make it indefinitely so. Science has a long history of overcoming dreams, obstinacy, and error to converge on a more truthful view of reality. (7) “Deconstruction” uncovers indeterminacies in modernist texts. This is definitely true and of great value. Any rereading of existing scientific

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text – deconstruction if you prefer – that uncovers false rhetoric aimed at persuading readers to accept as plausibly true material that, in fact, may not be, surely is for the betterment of science. One of the advantages of multiparadigm fields is that, since incommensurability does not really exist, members of one paradigm are in an advantageous position to deconstruct the hallowed rhetoric set forth by some other paradigm. Despite its overstatements and false reading of how science works, postmodernism includes a responsible core, which may be characterized in terms of a process of sociolinguistic order-creation that is isomorphic to the connectionist processes at the heart of complexity science and agent-based modeling. This core of postmodernism, when connected with agent-based modeling, provides an additional platform of institutional legitimacy for management research. In short, postmodernist ontology is on target, but its rhetoric against normal science epistemology is based on a positivist epistemology much of which never really existed in scientific practice. In the following section I show how the, mostly French, substrate of postmodernism fits with the modern, normal science of complexity.

COMPLEXITY SCIENCE AS A MODERN LOGIC-IN-USE The American school of complexity science, dominated by the Santa Fe Institute, represents a normal science originating from over a dozen preexisting natural sciences (Pines, 1988). Two foundational emphases are coevolutionary processes (Arthur, 1988, 1990, 2000) and heterogeneous, agent-based computational models (Holland, 1975; Kauffman, 1993; Langton, 1989; Wolfram, 1983, 2002). I begin by focusing on coevolutionary agent behaviors as the basis of the nonlinearities a new management epistemology has to contend with. Next, given postmodernist and complexity views of organizational ontology, I turn to the inappropriate ontological warping effects of math modeling, which remains the most dominant legacy of logical positivism. Finally, I show the parallels between the ontologies of complexity science, and postmodernism.

Nonlinearities from Coevolution It is not hard to find evidence of coevolutionary behavior in organizations. The earliest discoveries date back to Roethlisberger and Dixon (1939) and Homans (1950) – both dealing with the mutual influence of agents (members of informal

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groups), the subsequent development of groups, and the emergence of strong group norms that feedback to sanction agent behavior. Much of the discussion by March and Sutton (1997) focuses on the problems arising from the use of simple linear models for measuring performance – problems all due to coevolutionary behavior of firms and agents within them. In a recent study of advanced manufacturing technology (AMT), Lewis and Grimes (1999) use a multiparadigm (postmodernist) approach. They study AMT from all of the four paradigms identified by Burrell and Morgan (1979). With each lens, that is, no matter what lens they use, they find evidence of coevolutionary behavior within firms. Many of the articles in the Organization Science special issue on coevolution (1999b) report out evidence of microcoevolutionary behavior in organizations. Finally, a number of very recent studies of radical organization change show much evidence of coevolution between organization and environment and within organizations as well (Erakovic, 2002; Kaminska-Labbe & Thomas, 2002; Meyer & Gaba, 2002; Morlacchi, 2002; Siggelkow, 2002). In a truly classic paper, Maruyama (1963) discusses mutual causal processes, mostly with respect to biological coevolution. He also distinguishes between the “deviation-counteracting” negative feedback most familiar to general systems theorists (Buckley, 1968) and “deviation-amplifying” positive feedback processes (Milsum, 1968). Boulding (1968) and Arthur (1988, 1990, 2000) focus on “positive feedbacks” in economies. Negative feedback control systems such as thermostats are most familiar to us. An equally familiar positive feedback system emerges when a microphone is placed near a speaker, resulting in the high-pitched squeal. In these two instances there is no adaptive reaction; the process is active, or activating, meaning that the response to the instigating action is predictable and causal – a happens; b happens; a happens; b happens, and so on. Coevolution is different in that responses are reactively adaptive and frequently time-delayed. Clearly, viruses and bacteria are fast reactors, but still not at the causal speed of thermostats or the speaker/mike feedback loop. Even with fast reactors, however, the nature of the reaction is not predictive. Just exactly how a bacterium will adapt to an antibiotic is not predictable. We can, however, predict that coevolution will occur and some kind of adaptation will result. At the time of Maruyama’s paper, the term “coevolution” had not been coined; Ehrlich and Raven came up with it in 1964. “Mutual causal” is really a misleading term to use in referring to evolutionary processes since they are reactive and not predictive-causal. But, “positive feedback,” as Arthur applies it to economies, is appropriate for the coevolutionary context: Small reactions to each other by two agents may mutually and positively expand indefinitely. In this way large-scale coevolutionary developments are instigated by very small initiating events, as noted by Maruyama (1963), Gleick (1987), and Ormerod (1998). For this reason coevolution is inherently nonlinear. We also need

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to remember, however, that negative feedback is often present in coevolution – most coevolution events are damped out (McKelvey, 2002a) – though more so in biology than in social behavior. There are various kinds of coevolution. Maruyama mentions four; I add two more: (1) Coevolution between mutation (change) rate and environment. The more we develop antibiotics, the faster the bacteria change; the faster they change, the faster we change the antibiotics in their environment; and so on. The more the Internet develops, the more people develop Internet skills; the more they develop their skills, the faster the Internet develops, and so on. (2) Predator/prey coevolution. The faster rabbits can run, the faster the foxes have to run; the faster the foxes run, the faster the rabbits have to run, and so on. The faster large firms buy up start-up firms, the faster start-ups and IPOs materialize; the more start-ups and IPOs there are, the more large firms can buy them up, and so on. (3) Supernormal coevolution. In the American culture, for example, people who are good-looking and/or smart tend to be more attractive sexual partners; the more this is true, the more they reproduce offspring who are good-looking and/or smart; the more that supernormal people comprise a population the faster they will multiply, and so on. The more that firms see MBAs as preferred, the more MBAs will be hired; the more MBAs are hired, the more they will tend to prefer hiring additional MBAs, and so on. (4) Inbreeding and population size. The more inbreeding there is within in a small population (between cousins, for example), the more different and isolated the population’s gene pool will become; the more restricted and different the gene pool, the more rapid the rate of differentiation by inbreeding [this is the basic logic of Eldredge and Gould’s (1972) concept of punctuated equilibrium (which I note that Maruyama anticipated by nearly 10 years)], and so on. The more a small discipline uses its members as referees, the more narrowly restricted are the ideas in their papers and the more intellectually inbred it becomes; the more restricted are the ideas (the more inbred), the more narrow the membership allowed into the population, and so on. (5) Symbiotic coevolution. The more tick-birds eating ticks on a hippo warn of approaching predators, the more the hippos survive; the more that they survive and multiply as hosts, the more the ticks and tick-birds survive, and so on. The more that a large firm hires surrounding suppliers, the more they survive and grow; the more that the suppliers survive and grow, the easier it is for the large firm to thrive in its competitive context, and so on. The more a business school’s reputation depends, say, on its finance group, the more it attracts

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finance-oriented MBAs; the more the school attracts finance-oriented MBAs, the more finance faculty members it needs and the better its finance reputation grows; the better its finance reputation gets, the more high-quality finance MBAs are attracted, and so on. (6) Micro–macro coevolution. Many people think coevolution occurs only between a population and its environment. This is Ehrlich and Raven’s (1964) level of analysis. Kauffman’s (1993) analyses, however, range from DNA, RNA, and protein sequences, to molecules, to cells, to genetic regulatory networks, to organisms and species – from micro to macro coevolution. Chapters in the Baum and Singh (1994) and Baum and McKelvey (1999) books, and articles in the Organization Science special issue on coevolution (1999b) range from micro to macro coevolution. Burgelman’s (1991) study is about microcoevolution. Lichtenstein and McKelvey (2003) recognize emergent coevolutionary dynamics at several social levels. A firm’s ability to efficaciously macrocoevolve with competitors depends on how its internal microcoevolutionary processes are unfolding. Some of these processes are nicely described by Erakovic (2002), Meyer and Gaba (2002), Kaminska-Labbe and Thomas (2002), Morlacchi (2002), and Siggelkow (2002). Earlier I distinguished between mutual causal processes, positive feedback, and coevolution. The key difference is that the first two are predictive-causal, whereas coevolution is reactive-unpredictable. One of the key questions that complexity scientists face is the nature of knowledge limitation, given the unpredictable, nonlinear outcomes of coevolving agent processes. It is clear from the work by Juarrero (1998), which I discuss later, that contextual constraints can narrow and expand the range of self-organizing outcomes. Elsewhere (McKelvey, 2002a, 2003c), I discuss ways in which the management of contextual effects can steer coevolution in one way or another. Still, coevolution is essentially unpredictable due to the following effects: (1) Nonlinear effects. Taken together, the chapters by Arthur and Brock in Colander’s edited volume, The Complexity Vision and the Teaching of Economics (2000), join coevolution and inverse power laws as the two focal elements driving the nonlinearity effects so central to complexity science’s view of phenomena, especially social phenomena. Whereas most scientific analysis, from Boltzmann on forward, focuses on the analysis of averages, the emphasis of power laws focuses our attention on the tails of distributions. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in Gleick’s discussion of chaos theory, Krugman’s (1996) study of Zipf’s Law applied to cities, and De Vany’s analyses of the profits of movies and the effects of the superstars (1997; De Vany & Walls, 2001).

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(2) Complex causality, emergent “macro” structure, and new hierarchical contexts. Lichtenstein and McKelvey’s (2003) review of agent-based models in the organizational research literature shows that complex causality emerges in a series of steps: (a) emergence of initial networks; (b) emergence of hierarchical institutionalized properties; (c) emergence of causal intracacy; and (d) emergence of purposeful complex adaptive systems. The ultimate result is the emergence of both upward and downward causality. Whereas most earlier sciences were reductionist, focusing on only upward causality, systems theorists and holists have been telling us for half a century about the effects of downward causality (Buckley, 1967; Cohen & Stewart, 1994). This is also indicated in my foregoing review of (organizational) postpositivism. From this it follows that coevolution, resulting as it does in the emergence of macro structures, also results in the emergence of both upward and downward causality. This means that the study of coevolution requires more complicated views of causality than has been true in the past, especially in the more traditional sciences. (3) Damping effects. In the biological world, at least, most coevolution is brought to a halt by damping mechanisms. Absent damping, coevolving species could show dramatic nonlinear effects. Usually, each partner to a coevolving pair may be coevolving with other predators and the latter help damp out the unlimited expansion of the initial coevolving pair. Population regulation effects also keep coevolution under control. Boulding (1968, p. 103) recognizes that in business/economic systems coevolutionary dynamics may be constrained to operate between “floors” and “ceilings.” Elsewhere I discuss a variety of damping mechanisms occurring in organizations (McKelvey, 2002a). What sets off bursts of nonlinear order-creation via coevolution? The American complexity literature (mostly the Santa Fe school) focuses on coevolution, power laws, and small instigating effects. Gleick (1987) details chaos theory and its focus on the so-called butterfly effect (the fabled story of a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a storm in North America), ever since the founding paper by Lorenz (1963). Bak (1996) reports on his discovery of self-organized criticality – a power law event – in which small initial events can lead to complexity cascades of avalanche proportions. I have already mentioned Arthur’s (1988, 1990, 2000) focus on positive feedbacks stemming from initially small instigation events. Casti (1994) and Brock (2000) continue the focus on power laws. The rest of the Santa Fe story is told in Lewin (1999). In their vision, coevolution is the “engine” of complex system adaptation. The European school of complexity science (Haken, 1983; Mainzer, 1997; Nicolis & Prigogine, 1989; Prigogine, 1955, 1997) focuses mostly on phase transitions that occur because an imposing energy differential, what I term

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adaptive tension, exceeds what is called the 1st critical value, Rc1 (known as the Rayleigh number in fluid dynamics) – which defines the lower bound of the region of emergent complexity. Emphasis on coevolution is much less evident. American complexity scientists, in contrast, often focus on Rc2 – the “edge of chaos” (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998; Kauffman, 1993, 2000; Lewin, 1999), which defines the upper bound of the region of emergent complexity. What happens at Rc1 is better understood; what happens at Rc2 is more obscure. The “edge of chaos,” long a Santa Fe reference point (Lewin, 1999), is now in disrepute (Horgan, 1996, p. 197). To overcome the boiled-frog effect,5 both visions are important – they do not really compete. Phase transitions are often required to overcome the threshold-gate effects characteristic of most human agents. This in turn requires the adaptive tension driver to rise above Rc1 .6 Once these stronger-than-normal instigation effects overcome the threshold gates, then, assuming the other requirements are present (heterogeneous, adaptive learning agents, and so forth), coevolution starts. Neither seems both necessary and sufficient by itself, especially in social settings. Churchman and Ackoff (1950) would call phase transition and coevolution coproducers.

Heterogeneous Agent-Based Models What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for coevolution to occur? (1) Heterogeneous agents must exist. “Agents” has become a general term; agents may be quanta, particles, molecules, biomolecules, genes, chromosomes, organelles, organs, organisms, species, language concepts, organizational processes, people, groups, firms, populations, and the like; (2) agents must have adaptive/learning capabilities; (3) agents must be able to interact and mutually influence each other; (4) there must be some kind of higher-level constraint, adaptation to which motivates the coevolutionary process; and (5) there needs to be the initiating event. Coevolution also presumes that some number of agents and/or agent groups (horizontally and vertically) respond to observed changes in other competing groups. Agents cannot coevolve against forces they remain unaware of. Presumably each agent has some threshold level of responsiveness. Neurons in the brain “fire” only after some level of signal reaches them via the synaptic links. Neurons are known as “threshold gates” because of this. Agents in general may be defined as behaving in a threshold-gate manner – the only question being, How high or low is the threshold? Cohen and Levinthal’s (1990) absorptive capacity acts as a threshold gate. Thus, because of the boiled-frog effect, a set of agents in a system may in fact be surrounded with all sorts of initiating events, but, since none of the

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events rises above the threshold attention/response gates, coevolutionary reaction remains dormant. The increasing use of agent-based models (described later) over the past decade has forced researchers to zero in on what the rules are that govern or guide adaptive agents. There are various ways that agents can change: (1) Biological agents can change by genetic mutations; by cross-over (when the genes of two sexually connecting agents are half-each passed on to offspring; and by random error at any point (Holland, 1995). (2) Human agents may experience changes of varying kinds as the knowledge and skills of older agents are passed down to newer agents. Many aspects of this are detailed in Argote (1999). (3) Agents (even nonhuman ones) – as nodes in a system – may change by altering their intentions, strategies, goals, intelligence, fitness, and so on, through some kind of learning process (Argote, 1999). (4) Contextual changes and adaptive tensions from outside a system may change what agents view as important. External events or actions of other agents could lower or raise their threshold gates. Agents would become more or less responsive and, therefore, more or less likely to escape the boiled-frog effect. There are many kinds of agent-based (adaptive-learning) models. Some are very simple; some quite complicated.7 Agents can be at any level of analysis: atomic particles, molecules, genes, species, people, firms, and so on. The distinguishing feature is that the agents are not uniform. Instead they are probabilistically idiosyncratic. Therefore, at the level of human behavior, they fit the postmodernists’ ontological assumption. Using heterogeneous agent-based models is the best way to marry postmodernist ontology with the Semantic Conception’s8 model-centered science and the current assumptions of effective modern sciences. Specifically, in models: (1) Behavioral activities of human agents are discrete, random, and idiosyncratic. (2) Agents have some minimal adaptive-learning capability. (3) Agents have no ambition other than to incrementally improve their own “fitness” however they define it. (4) Organizations having greater agent fitness improvements will have a survival advantage over those that do not. There is no uniform rationality or constrained maximization assumption. Agents may improve the level of their rationality incrementally along with other kinds of learning and order creation.9

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Connectionism in Complexity Science and Postmodernism The key development underlying my claim that postmodernism does in fact fit with “modern, normal science of complexity” comes from Cilliers (1998) – Complexity and Postmodernism. He spent 10 years of his life as a neural network computational modeler, after which he became a Lecturer in Philosophy in South Africa. He draws principally from the poststructuralists Saussure, Derrida, and Lyotard. He interprets postmodernism from the perspective of a neural net modeler, emphasizing connections among agents rather than attributes of the agents themselves. This perspective comes from modern conceptions of how brains and (distributed) intelligence function. In the connectionist perspective – and as in neural net models – brain functioning is not in the neurons, nor “in the network,” but rather “is the network” (Fuster, 1995, p. 11). Distributed intelligence also characterizes firms and many other social systems (McKelvey, 2003c). Cilliers (p. 6) first sets out ten attributes of complex adaptive systems, and then makes his foundational argument as follows (p. 37):
Complexity is best characterized as arising through large-scale, nonlinear interaction.
Since it is based on a system of relationships, the post-structural inquiry into the nature of language helps us to theorize about the dynamics of the interaction in complex systems. In other words, the dynamics that generate meaning in language can be used to describe the dynamics of complex systems in general.
Connectionist networks share the characteristics of complex systems, including those aspects described by a post-structural theory of language. It should therefore be possible to use them (or other distributed modeling techniques with similar capabilities) as general models for complex systems. These models can be physically implemented or simulated computationally. These three points link the poststructuralist responsible core of postmodernism and complexity science together by virtue of their common focus on connectionism. From this platform, Cilliers connects the ten attributes of complex adaptive systems (shown in italics) to key elements of postmodernists’ characterizations of current society (pp. 119–123) – to which I add additional postmodernist themes. The centrality of interacting agents is obviously essential to both: (1) “Complex systems consist of a large number of elements.” Postmodernists focus on individuality, fragmented identities, and localized discourse. (2) “The elements in a complex system interact dynamically.” Postmodernists emphasize that no agent is isolated; their subjectivity is an intertwined

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“weave” of texture in which they are de-centered in favor of constant influxes of meaning from their network of connections. “The level of interaction is fairly rich.” Postmodernists view agents as subject to a constant flow and alteration of meanings applied to texts they are using at any given time. This is increasing in modern society. Texts imposed on any given agent are, needless to say, richly diverse in variety, content, and interpreted meanings. “Interactions are nonlinear.” Postmodernists hold that localized interactions of multiple voices lead to change in meanings of texts, that is, emergent meanings. Given that texts and their variety and meaning do not flow evenly, that social interaction is not predictably systematic, that power and influence are not evenly distributed, and that none of the foregoing are stable over time, it follows that textual meaning flows and interpretations, and consequent emergent new meanings and concomitant social interactions, are nonlinear and potentially could show large change outcomes from small beginnings. “The interactions are fairly short range.” Postmodernists emphasize “local determination” (Lyotard, 1984) and the “multiplicity of local ‘discourses’ ” (Cilliers, p. 121). Though long-range interactions and influences on textual meaning are not precluded, most agents are seen to respond to locally available information. Locally determined, socially constructed, group-level meanings, however, inevitably seep out to influence other groups and the agents within them. “There are loops in the interconnections.” Postmodernists translate this into reflexivity. Local agent interactions may form group-level coherence and common meanings. These then, reflexively, supervene back down to influence the lower-level agents (Lawson, 1985). This fuels their view that meanings – interpretations of terms – are constantly in flux – “they are contingent and provisional, pertaining to a certain context and a certain time-frame.” Local-level interpretations are subject to the potentially greater influence of power-elites emerging to control the higher-level collectivities and their interpretation of meanings. “Complex systems are open systems.” If there is any implicit pervasive subtext in postmodernism it is that agents, groups of agents, and groups of groups, etc., are all subject to outside influences on their interpretations of meanings. Postmodernists see modern societies – the modern condition – as increasingly subject to globalization and complication of influence networks. Cooper and Burrell (1988) note that “knowledge and discourse have to be ‘constructed’ from a ‘chameleonic’ world” (quote in Hassard & Parker, 1993, p. 10). “Complex systems operate under conditions far from equilibrium.” McKelvey (2003c) translates Prigogine’s concept of “far from equilibrium” into

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adaptive tension. In postmodern society the mass media provide local agents, and groups of virtually any size, constant information about countless disparities in values, culture, economics – about the human condition in general. These disparities set up adaptive tensions generating energy and information flows (what Salthe, 1993, refers to as “infodynamics”) that create conditions: (1) for social self-organization and increasing complexity (McKelvey, 2003c); and (2) novelty, and economic change away from equilibrium (McKelvey, 2003d) – Schumpeter’s creative destruction; that (3) lead to rapid technological change, scientific advancement, and new knowledge, which in turn reflex back to create more disparity and nonlinearity (McKelvey, 2002a). (9) “Complex systems have histories.” By viewing agents as not self-directing, Derrida “de-centers” agents by locating them in a system of interconnections among strata (Hassard & Parker, 1993, p. 15). Postmodernists see history as individually and locally interpreted. Therefore, though systems have histories – the economists’ path dependencies writ large – histories do not appear as grand narratives uniformly interpreted across agents. (10) “Individual elements are ignorant of the behavior of the whole system in which they are embedded.” This shows up most clearly in postmodernists’ view “. . . that attempts to discover the genuine order of things are both na¨ıve and mistaken” (Hassard & Parker, 1993, p. 12). Agents are not equally well connected with all other parts of a larger system. In addition, agents have fragmented identities and localized production of textual meanings. Any agent’s view of a larger system is at least in part colored by the localized interpretations of other interconnected agents. Even if information about the whole system is available, it is always subject to localized interpretations. These are compounded by reflexivity effects. Hassard and Parker (1993, pp. 11–15) highlight five postmodern elements foreshadowing Cilliers’ merging of connectionist modeling and postmodernism. Representation: “Language which is produced by the empirical process does not equate with an increasingly accurate correspondence with reality. Instead, it represents a process of professional self-justification” (p. 12) – a local agent or group level supervening effect. Reflexivity: Grand narratives and broad scientific “truths” cannot be disentangled from local agent interpretations. Nor are agent interpretations independent of interpretations espoused by higher level social constructions. Writing is seen as “. . . in the grip of an autonomous self-propelling force that lies beyond the intentions of the individual actor” (Cooper, 1989, p. 486). “Differance”: A knowledge “. . . concept is never present in and of itself . . . every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to” other

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concepts (Derrida, 1982, p. 11; quoted in Hassard & Parker, 1993, p. 14, who retain Derrida’s French term, diff´erance). De-centering: Agents are seen as no longer self-directing but instead are embedded in a system of interrelations among different sociostructural levels (Derrida, 1978) – agents are a convenient location for the throughput of discourses (Hassard & Parker, 1993, p. 15). The latter notion is not unlike the view that biological phenotypes are simply temporary repositories for the genetic code of a species (McKelvey, 1982) or Fuster’s view that intelligence “is the network.” The foregoing demonstrates that the poststructuralist (responsible) core of postmodernism strongly supports a strong interconnection between “new” normal science – as reflected in complexity science – and postmodernism: Both rest on parallel views of socially connected, autonomous, heterogeneous, human agents. The ten points above, drawn from Cilliers’ analysis, give evidence of this. Now to support more fully Cilliers’ claim that complexity arises “through large-scale, non-linear interaction.”

Warping Effects of Math Models10 The parallel ontological views of complexity science and postmodernism bring them head up against the dominant legacy of logical positivism – the presupposition that scientific theories are rooted in foundational axioms and mathematical rigor is the only means of proving a theoretical statement back to its axiomatic roots. In this section I first demonstrate that the course of science is as much determined by one’s choice of modeling approach as it is by choice of theory or data. Then I show that the assumption-set of math modeling drives theory formation and research away from what is most ontologically relevant to management research. Models as Autonomous Agents Mathematical models have dominated science since Newton. Further, mathematically constrained language (logical discourse), since the Vienna Circle – ca. 1907 – has come to define good science in the image of classical physics. Math plays two broad roles in science. In logical positivism, math supplied the logical rigor aimed at assuring the truth integrity of analytical (theoretical) statements. As Read (1990) observes, the use of math for finding “numbers” actually is less important in science than its use in testing for rigorous thinking. But, as is wonderfully evident in the various chapters in the Morgan and Morrison (2000) anthology, math is also used as an efficient substitute for iconic models in building up a “working” model valuable for understanding not only how an aspect of

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the phenomena under study behaves (the empirical roots of a model), but also for better understanding the interrelation of the various elements comprising a transcendental realist explanatory theory (its theoretical roots).11 Traditionally, a model has been presumed to be an accurate “mirror” of theory or phenomena – as a billiard ball model might mirror atoms (Cartwright, 1983) – it is simply instrument to bridge the gap between theory and data. In this role the model is a catalyst that speeds up the course of science but without altering the chemistry of the ingredients. Morgan and Morrison and contributors (including Cartwright) take dead aim at this view. They show that models are third-party autonomous agents that do affect the chemistry. It is perhaps best illustrated in a figure supplied by Boumans (2000, p. 93). He shows that many ingredients influence the final nature of a model, such as: stylized facts, metaphors, analogies, policy views, empirical data, math techniques, math concepts and theoretical notions. Boumans’ analyses are based on business cycle models by Kalecki, Frisch, and Tinbergen in the 1930s and Lukas (1972) that clearly illustrate the warping resulting from “mathematical molding” for mostly tractability reasons. The influence of the various nontheory and nondata ingredients is also indicated. Models as autonomous agents, thus, become so both from (1) math molding, and (2) influence by all the other ingredients. Since the other ingredients could reasonably influence agent-based models as well as math models – as formal, symbol-based models, and since math models dominate formal modeling in social science (primarily in economics) – I emphasize the molding effects of math models stemming from classical physics. As is evident from the four previously mentioned business-cycle models, Mirowski’s (1989) broad discussion (not included here), and Read’s (1990) analysis (below), the math-molding effect is dramatic. Much of its effect is due to two heroic assumptions: First, mathematicians in classical physics make the “instrumentally convenient” homogeneity assumption – all atoms are assumed the same, for example. This makes the math more tractable. Second, physicists principally study phenomena under the governance of the First Law of Thermodynamicses and, within this law, make the equilibrium assumption. Here the math model accounts for the translation of order from one form to another and presumes all phenomena vary around equilibrium points.12 Math’s Molding Effects on Sociocultural Analysis Read’s (1990) analysis of the applications of math modeling in archaeology illustrates how the classical physics roots of math modeling and the needs of tractability give rise to assumptions that are demonstrably antithetical to a correct understanding, modeling, and theorizing about coevolving social behavior. Though his analysis is ostensibly about archaeology, it applies generally to sociocultural systems. Most telling are assumptions he identifies that combine to

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show just how much social phenomena have to be warped to fit the tractability constraints of the rate-studies framed within the math-molding effects of calculus. Applications of mathematics assume that: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

Universal processes exist. Linear relationships prevail. A model’s form is structurally stable over time. Parameter values remain constant over time. There is some set of state variables that fully describe the system at t1 . Analysis consists of determining stability and equilibrium properties. There is an equilibrium solution. Social systems respond to external forces as physical objects respond to forces of motion. Social rules are deterministic as opposed to being the result of evolved agent behavior. State parameters are not subject to modification by agents. (9) External constraints are stable over time. Social systems inevitably drive toward stable equilibrium. Math focuses on universality, stability, equilibrium, external forces, determinism, and global dynamics at the expense of the individual dynamics that postmodernists are concerned about. Given the molding effects of all these assumptions, it is especially instructive to quote Read, the mathematician, worrying about equilibrium-based mathematical applications to archaeology and sociocultural systems. (1) In linking “empirically defined relationships with mathematically defined relationships . . . [and] the symbolic with the empirical domain . . . a number of deep issues . . . arise . . .. These issues relate, in particular, to the ability of human systems to change and modify themselves according to goals that change through time, on the one hand, and the common assumption of relative stability of the structure of . . . [theoretical] models used to express formal properties of systems, on the other hand . . .. A major challenge facing effective – mathematical – modeling of the human systems considered by archaeologists is to develop models that can take into account this capacity for self-modification according to internally constructed and defined goals.” (2) “In part, the difficulty is conceptual and stems from reifying the society as an entity that responds to forces acting upon it, much as a physical object responds in its movements to forces acting upon it. For the physical object, the effects of forces on motion are well known and a particular situation can, in principle, be examined through the appropriate application of mathematical representation of these effects along with suitable information on boundary and initial

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conditions. It is far from evident that a similar framework applies to whole societies.” (3) “Perhaps because culture, except in its material products, is not directly observable in archaeological data, and perhaps because the things observable are directly the result of individual behavior, there has been much emphasis on purported ‘laws’ of behavior as the foundation for the explanatory arguments that archaeologists are trying to develop. This is not likely to succeed. To the extent that there are ‘laws’ affecting human behavior, they must be due to properties of the mind that are consequences of selection acting on genetic information . . . ‘laws’ of behavior are inevitably of a different character than laws of physics such as F = ma. The latter, apparently, is fundamental to the universe itself; behavioral ‘laws’ such as ‘rational decision making’ are true only to the extent to which there has been selection for a mind that processes and acts upon information in this manner . . .. Without virtually isomorphic mapping from genetic information to properties of the mind, searching for universal laws of behavior . . . is a chimera.” Common throughout these and similar statements are Read’s observations about “the ability of [reified] human systems to change and modify themselves,” be “self-reflective,” respond passively to “forces acting” from outside, “manipulation by subgroups,” “self-evaluation,” “self-reflection,” “affecting and defining how they are going to change,” and the “chimera” of searching for “behavioral laws” reflecting the effects of external forces. Molding Effects on Economic Analysis The “attack” on the homogeneity and equilibrium assumptions in Orthodox Economics occurs when Nelson and Winter (1982) try to shift the exemplar science from physics to biology. They argue that Orthodoxy takes a static view of order-creation in economies, preferring instead to develop the mathematics of thermodynamics in studying the resolution of supply/demand imbalances within a broader equilibrium context. Also, Orthodoxy takes an instantaneous conception of maximization and equilibrium. Nelson and Winter introduce Darwinian selection as a dynamic process over time, substituting routines for genes, search for mutation, and selection via economic competition. Rosenberg (1994) observes that Nelson and Winter’s book fails because Orthodoxy still holds to energy conservation math (under the First Law of Thermodynamics) to gain the prediction advantages of thermodynamic equilibrium and the latter framework’s roots in the axioms of Newton’s orbital mechanics. Also, whatever weakness in predictive power Orthodoxy has, Nelson and Winter’s approach failed to improve it. Therefore, economists have no reason to abandon Orthodoxy since, following physicists, they emphasize predictive science (Friedman, 1953; Mirowski, 1989, 1994).

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Rosenberg goes on to note that biologists have discovered that the mathematics of economic theory actually fits biology better than economics, especially because gene frequency analysis better meets the equilibrium stability requirement for mathematical prediction. In parallel, complexity scientists Hinterberger (1994) and Arthur, Durlauf and Lane (1997) critique economic orthodoxy and its reliance on the equilibrium assumption. The latter describe economies as follows (pp. 3–4):
Dispersed interaction – dispersed, possibly heterogeneous, agents active in parallel.
No global controller or cause – coevolution of agent interactions.
Many levels of organization – agents at lower levels create contexts at higher levels.
Continual adaptation – agents revise their adaptive behavior continually.
Perpetual novelty – by changing in ways that allow them to depend on new resources, agents coevolve with resource changes to occupy new habitats.
Out-of-equilibrium dynamics – economies operate “far from equilibrium,” meaning that economies are induced by the pressure of trade imbalances, individual to individual, firm to firm, country to country, and so on. Despite their anthology’s focus on economies as complex systems, after reviewing all the chapters, most of which rely on mathematical modeling, the editors ask, “. . . In what way do equilibrium calculations provide insight into emergence?” (1997, p. 12). Durlauf says, “A key import of the rise of new classic economics has been to change the primitive constituents of aggregate economic models: while Keynesian models employed aggregate structural relationships as primitives, in new classic models individual agents are the primitives so that all aggregate relationships are emergent” (1997, p. 33). This critique is continued by the several authors in the anthology edited by Colander (2000). At its core, the critique is about the failure of math models to account for coevolutionary effects and consequent nonlinearity. Scrapping the equilibrium and homogeneity assumptions and emphasizing instead the role of coevolving heterogeneous agents in social order-creation nonlinearities is what brings the ontological view of complexity scientists in line with the ontological view of postmodernists.

TRUTH CLAIMS BASED ON TRANSCENDENTAL REALIST CAUSAL ANALYSIS Having integrated a modern normal science stemming from complexity science with postmodernist ontology and, recognizing that both attend to coevolutionary nonlinear order creations, the final questions is: How to construct an appropriate

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justification logic to underlie truth claims and beliefs? Obviously, linear claims that a causes b don’t quite fit. I begin with a focus on some philosophical studies of the problem and then move into what I think is a more accurate and suitable interpretation of Mohr’s (1982) process theory.

Coevolution Oriented Philosophy The Other Aristotelian Causes In principle, classical physics and neoclassical economics draw, first, on Aristotle’s efficient cause.13 Efficient cause occurs when motions (energy) of one kind causes motions (energy) of another kind. In classical physics this view begins with Newton’s laws of motion, the study of planetary dynamics, and the discovery of the First Law of Thermodynamics – the energy conservation law. Under this law time is reversible, as Prigogine (1955, 1997) notes. Translations of order can go forward or backward, with mathematics acting as a means of accounting for the order-translation process, holding energy constant. Newtonian science, via the application of the First Law, extends into thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and electrodynamics. It also extends to neoclassical economics (Mirowski, 1989), as noted earlier. The use of efficient cause and the energyconservation dynamics of the First Law also led to physics being a predictive science. Matsuno and Salthe (1995), followed by Salthe (1998) and Van de Vijver (1998), among others (see Van de Vijver, Salthe & Delpos, 1998), argue that, in the complexity perspective, dynamics are not governed by Aristotelian efficient cause. Given this view, they focus on local rather than global dynamics. They abandon the idea that there are global energy dynamics that, via efficient cause, cause changes in local phenomena. Instead they emphasize Aristotle’s material cause.14 “Local descriptions of dynamics put priority on concrete particulars, while global consistency becomes secondary and derived – a consequence in a subsequent record of an integration of preceding, uncertain local dynamics and individuations” (Matsuno & Salthe, 1995, p. 312). Local dynamics dominate global dynamics. “From the point of view of any single local situation, the global is almost (but of course not fully) epiphenomenal” (1996, p. 315). Van de Vijver points out that this perspective is based on the view that people can have only limited insights into the outcomes of nonlinear systems dynamics. Also, she notes that complex systems are “continuously evolving” (really continuously coevolving) and, thus, “can only be grasped locally, hence partially and inadequately” (1998, p. 250). This, she says, means that complex systems follow from material causes. Material causality means that systems emerge from the materials at hand,

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as opposed to efficient causes which are the result of energy dynamics – that is, movements of one kind cause movements of other kinds. Interacting Aristotelian Causes Juarrero (1998) deals with a puzzle: How is it that contextual constraints limit and create order at the same time? She starts with Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) two information-ordering theorems: (1) “Context-free redundancy” and (2) “Contextsensitive constraints.” In the first theorem, information accuracy is improved by creating redundancy by adding constraints that shift the information content away from randomness. Under theorem 1, accuracy is improved by limiting the number of possible interpretative alternatives. The limit occurs with a flashing light bulb; it goes on and off and flashes an “on-off” type message that is context free. With theorem 2, a signal is interpreted as a function of its context. Consider the message: “Fire. Run.” What does this mean? One the one hand, a manager is running throughout a store shouting “Fire. Run.” On the other, the leader of an armed group of rebels facing opposing police shouts, “Fire. Run.” The meaning of the words is totally different depending on the context. In this case the context adds another degree of freedom to the two simple words. As a result complexity, defined as increasing degrees of freedom, is increased. In theorem 1 contextual constraints reduce order; in theorem 2 contextual constraints increase order. Consider what happened at UCLA a couple decades ago: (1) A group of professors – agents – distributed across the many academic departments discover that they all have a deep interest in the advancement of statistics at UCLA (at this point they are heterogeneous on everything but pursuit of statistics); (2) they slowly self-organize and lobby to the point of being allowed to form a statistics department [the emergent similarity of all agents supporting statistics becomes the driving “control parameter” (Haken, 1983) leading to emergent probability and order creation out of randomness]; (3) the new department then develops norms, policies, missions, schedules and so forth – it develops an institutional structure and then supervenience (downward causality) emerges; (4) as a result of a system forming, new roles emerge and the professors become social stars, loners, committee chairs, department heads, and so forth; and (5) the emergent constraint – that they all discover a homogeneity and become members of one group – also introduces higher levels of organization, multiple roles, degrees of freedom, and in short, new order and complexity. The discovered homogeneity and emergent group reduces degrees of freedom (the many into one), while subsequently creating increased degrees of freedom (creation of new roles and intradepartmental structure). Juarrero (1998, p. 239) summarizes: “The local order that contextual constraints effect at the component level is more than offset by the increased potential message variety occasioned by the new level of organization

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which the contextual constraints enable.” (her italics) She notes that though the term “constraints” implies a reduction of options, in fact, once a system is created, options multiply. Thus, constraints become enablers – seemingly an oxymoron! Over time, the whole supervenes to reinvent its parts and the parts self-organize to recreate the whole – all without any necessary influence by external drivers. Here there is an interaction between material, formal, and final cause – initial agent and system attributes (material cause) interacting with emergent group-level norms, hierarchy, plans, organizing behaviors, and means of accomplishment (formal cause) in pursuit of agent and system-wide objectives (final cause). How Interacting Causes Keep Coevolution Going Kampis (1998) asks, Why do biologists use Darwinian selectionist theory to explain order in the biosphere? In this view, variation, selection, retention, and struggle for existence exist (Lewontin, 1978), optimal species emerge, given the resource constraints of their habitat, and the Law of Competitive Exclusion prevails: one species wins. This looks like an argument favoring the minimization of diversity, not what is apparent – tremendous diversity. In fact, why doesn’t evolution come to a halt, having produced one optimal species for the available habitats, or even more so, one species so generalized that it dominates all habitats? This is not so far fetched. The human race is busily destroying biodiversity, forcing extinctions seemingly every day, and manages to thrive in virtually every habitat on earth. Kampis observes that “. . . no truly major technical [biological] invention took place in the last 70 million years” (p. 257), implying that all optimal forms have long since been evolved. By this logic most of the diversity we see must be comprised of suboptimal species. Kampis says that in the classic Darwinian view, “. . . the point where the selective-competitive picture is essentially misleading is that it suggests that resources are independently given and therefore the job is to adapt to them” (p. 258). He goes on to state that “it is other species above all, and not the physical surrounding that constitutes a given species’ environment. Evolution takes place in the web of interactions among the species – therefore, natural selection is not a cause but a consequence of the change of this web” (p. 258; his italics). Kampis proposes to “rediscover” coevolution. He first notes the prosaic view of coevolution in the context of the Red Queen Paradox (Van Valen, 1973) – in which Darwinian selection inexorably creates an increasingly smaller, surviving set of optimized species evolving competitively against an external resource regime. Coevolution “. . . is an endless, monotonous wandering in one and the same space of solutions (or worse still, an approach to a fixed point)” (p. 259). Thus, absence of a strong external criterion variable produces “endless

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monotonous wandering” and no adaptive change, whereas with a strong external constraint, movement toward an equilibrium point follows. Neither of these fits biological reality. Kampis mentions Popper’s formulation – that evolutionary development is an inherent trait of the biosphere. This view is what Juarrero clarifies: Given that matter and the biosphere consist of agents and the agents self-organize to create wholes (systems), degrees of freedom are created and once out of the barn, so to speak, they set further order-creation processes in motion. While Kampis worries that a mutual causal coevolutionary process might appear circular – A causes A – as you can see from Van de Vijver’s formulation, entity A always consists of parts and whole and, therefore, no one thing is ever actually causing itself. This also means that A, the object, is never a “defined” object that acts as an A causing B, or even A causing A . A is never just A, but is really unseen A , A , A , etc., as the superficially visible cycle A causes A causes A, etc., progresses. Given this, as Kampis observes, no biological entity is a defined object and this is what avoids the superficial circularity of A causes A. Kampis introduces process philosophy, which is a study of entities lacking fixed identities (he mentions the phrase “you can never step into the same river twice”), and biological relationalism. Whereas most of “science” studies entities at times when they have fixed, predictably working identities (physicists don’t base their theories on broken atoms, molecules, pendulums, planets, and most importantly, broken equilibrium!), process philosophy worries about imperfect identities and all those interesting times in between periods of fixed identity and equilibrium. Relational biology focuses on the tendency, in evolutionary process, of parts changing functions or old structures being used for new tasks. In this view, there is no such thing as “just an organism”, but instead parts and organisms exist in a web and hierarchy in which they are wholes that in turn become parts in meta webs comprising even higher-level wholes. This perspective suggests that, indeed, focusing only on material cause is short-sighted. Yes, all biological “wholes” are parts – and hence material causes – in an ever larger web; but, the higher-level web elements, reflexively, also may initiate supervening formal causes which, as Juarrero points out, serve to instigate new order creation-cycles. And of course, both parts and wholes may have differing visions (final cause), especially the kinds of parts and wholes that management researchers study.

Mohr’s Process Model Fits Agent-based Model Structure The best way to talk about the interaction of the Aristotelian causes in organizations is in terms of process theory.

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Mohr’s Process Theory In the AMR (1999) special issue, two papers focus on Mohr’s (1982) process theory (Langley, 1999; Pentland, 1999). Both emphasize process as sequences of events. Like the poststructuralists and postmodernists, they emphasize “narrative,” more in-depth qualitative inductive discoveries, and Weick’s (1995) sense-making. Neither author takes up the problem of discerning the truth content, reliability and validity, or justification of the sense that has been made from narrative analysis. Though I believe my analysis is more in keeping with Mohr’s depictions of variance and process theories and my focus on agent-based models very much more in keeping with his five examples of process theories, this is not to say that Langley and Pentland are inordinately inconsistent with my interpretation. The fundamental difference, however, between Mohr and Langley/Pentland is that the narrative approach is inevitably about the past, with no mechanism for testing the application of the emergent theory as it applies to order creation into the future. Mohr’s process theory replaces Aristotle’s efficient cause with “. . . the operation of the laws of chance” (1982, p. 51) as processes unfold into the future. Narratives from the past vs. order-creation into the future is not a trivial difference. Mohr says, “. . . variance theory rests ultimately on a belief in the metaphysical notion of efficient causality” (p. 51). In variance theory a change in variable a associates with a change in variable b. Scientific realists would like to discover that a is a truthful indicator of a transcendental generating process causing b. Positivists – to the extent that they are instrumentalists – settle for finding out whether a change in a predicts a change in b. For variance theorists, Mohr notes that random processes are seen as error, but in process theory “. . . random processes are explanation” (p. 52) – though he also recognizes that in process theory there still could be random error due to missing variables, faulty measures, or other still-hidden causes. Mohr says that “without external forces and probabilistic processes, alleged, tentative, or incipient process theories are anemic.” External forces instigate a “. . . compelling flow of action . . .. [with] emphasis still on the future.” In this sense, efficient cause is still in Mohr’s framework. The externally imposed tension driving the flow of events seems missing in the Langley and Pentland analyses. Finally, Mohr’s emphasis is on a “. . . series of occurrences of events rather than a set of relations among variables” (pp. 52–54). Langley observes that Mohr keeps events separate from variables but, in contrast, in her process theory diagram (1999, p. 693), she mixes events and variables. She shows a “Strategy 1” (variable) giving rise to a “box” within which are a sequence of events, activities, and choices (her terms) that give rise to another variable, “Strategy 2.” Instrumentalists could easily treat the box as a hidden (and not required to be known) black box with, as a result, variable a (Strategy 1) predicting variable b (Strategy 2) – no cause assigned. This would surely be inconsistent with Mohr. Adding in a little Aristotle, Strategy 1

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could be a mixture of all four causes, none of which is necessary and sufficient. It could be the efficient cause of traditional science – more effort along with the new strategy produces a better outcome. It also could be a final cause (see Mohr, 1982, p. 58) – such as sustained economic rents. In this instance, competition effects, such as Porter’s (1980) five drivers, set up the external tension that, then, drives the flow of sequences inside the box. This, coupled with an intrabox process based on the interplay of material, final, and efficient causes, with some probability, produces a Strategy 2 (which is one of several possible Strategy 2s). If the sequence of events produces a hierarchy and institutional structure of some kind, a top-down formal cause could enter in as well – though bottom-up formal cause from agents is not precluded. Given the apparent interaction of Aristotelian causes in organizational phenomena, the fundamental problem becomes, How to translate Mohr’s process model – and its interacting Aristotelian causes – into a framework that allows the development of a justification logic? Back to Agent-based Modeling Mohr lists five process models: (1) contraction of malaria; (2) Mendelian segregation; (3) diffusion; (4) garbage-can model of organizational choice; and (5) Darwinian evolution – the origin of species (pp. 47–51). These easily translate into agent models. All but 4 have their origin in biology. All agents have some individual attribute assigned via random draw. All conduct searches and contact other agents subject to some process also controlled by a random draw. Outcomes are the result of individual agent attributes and the search results, larger system attributes, and environmental constraints. The garbage-can process was set up as an agent-based model in the original article (Cohen, March & Olsen, 1972). Models 2 and 5 have already been set up numerous times as genetic algorithms (Holland, 1995; Mitchell, 1996). Models 1 and 3 are diffusion models and have been set up as agent models as well. Agent-based models are a method where one may run experiments in which all four of Aristotle’s causes may be involved. Material cause is defined in terms of agent rules, kinds of agents, their search space possibilities, level of initial connectivity, and so forth – the ingredients at hand in the agents’ simulated world from which order creation emerges. Final cause is defined in terms of the agents’ objectives, such as more learning, higher fitness, more wealth, lower cost, more or less differentiation, and so on, and/or system objectives which could be the same or different from agent objectives. Efficient cause is defined in terms of the external forces that drive the flow of the event sequences in the emergent macro structure(s). These take the form of niche resources [such as the sugar in Sugarscape (Epstein & Axtell, 1996)], resource constraints (limitation of sugar at some locations in the search grid), adaptive tensions or energy differentials (these are rules agents

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have that determine when they will activate and decide, say, to copy the fitness of some neighboring agent). It is possible that efficient and final cause could coincide – agents could have the goal of altering an outcome variable, such as performance, that is also subject to efficient cause. In models consisting of more than one level, or in models where there are emergent higher levels (agents form groups, followed by hierarchy and institutional structure), formal cause occurs when the higher levels evolve to the point where they initiate operational means of accomplishment that in turn feedback to influence agents’ behaviors. Of course, the lower-level agents may also initiate methods of accomplishment as well. Given that agents can interact with, adopt the attributes of, and influence other agents, along with the interplay of the various Aristotelian causes, emergent coevolutionary behavior results both horizontally among agents and vertically across levels with both upward and downward causality (Lichtenstein & McKelvey, 2003). As Maruyama (1963) and the Santa Fe school (Arthur, 2000; Brock, 2000; Kauffman, 1993) observe, coevolution and power laws are the primary source of nonlinearities giving rise to novel emergent structures. And as Mohr notes, all outcomes of process models are probabilistic. Consequently, justification logic of the kind where the predictivity of a theory is tested by seeing whether variables Pi predict outcomes Oj work only when the within-box elements behave linearly. One alternative is to follow the guidelines of Eisenhardt (1989) and develop a sampling of narrative event histories of the kind proposed by Langley (1999) and Pentland (1999). It is possible that even a quasi-experiment (Cook & Campbell, 1979) could be set up using multiple narratives. Thus, one subsample could contain variable P while in another subsample it is missing. Theorized outcome differences, Oj , could be proposed and evaluated. Needless to say, collecting this many narrative histories is difficult and time-consuming and many input and moderating variables still could remain uncontrolled. One could argue that several recent studies of radical organization change are good examples of this approach (Erakovic, 2002; Kaminska-Labbe & Thomas, 2002; Newman & Nollen, 1998; Siggelkow, 2002). They are also examples of the interplay of the four kinds of causality. Elsewhere (McKelvey, 2002b) I have used the study by Contractor et al. (2000) as a good example demonstrating two of the elements that improve the justification-logic credentials of agent-based modeling. First, this paper is particularly notable because each of its ten agent rules is grounded in an existing body of empirical research. The findings of each body of research, clouded as they are by errors and statistics, are reduced to idealized stylized facts that then become agent rules. The second justification approach in the Contractor et al. study is that the model parallels a real-world human experiment. The results of their paper focus on the degree to which the composite model and each of the ten

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agent rules predict the outcome of the experiment – some do; some don’t. Another approach, with a much more sophisticated simulation model, is one by LeBaron (2000, 2001). In this study LeBaron shows that the base-line model “. . . is capable of quantitatively replicating many features of actual financial markets” (p. 19). Here the emphasis is mostly on matching model outcome results to real-world data rather than basing agent rules on stylized facts. A more sophisticated match between agent model and human experiment is one designed by Carley (1996). In this study the agent model and people were given the same task. While the results do offer a test of model vs. real-world data, the comparison also suggests many analytical insights about organization design and employee training that emerge only from the juxtaposition of the two different methods. The problem with the “justification logic” used by Contractor et al., LeBaron, and Carley is that the emergent outcome events and sequences, that is, the emergent order creation, is reduced to predictable efficient cause variables just as what Langley’s process approach does. For Contractor et al., the predicted variable is the mean quantity of communication among all networked dyads of agents. For LeBaron (2001), the predicted variables are amount of returns, volatility, amount of excess kurtosis, number of large market moves. For Carley the predicted variable is error rate. Thus, for the justification tests they are back to predicting efficient cause variables with the other Aristotelian causes, intervening sequences, and events black-boxed. Siggelkow’s Narrative In a recent study of “Evolution toward Fit,” Siggelkow (2002) presents a multi-period narrative describing the emergence and change over time of an organization’s core elements. He reports out very elaborate diagrams of “The Vanguard Group’s” organizational systems in the years 1974, 1977, 1978, and 1997. In addition to the emergent configurations, he describes processes of patching, thickening, and coasting, with one other hypothesized process, trimming, not observed in Vanguard but reportedly observed in the Liz Claiborne organization (Siggelkow, 2001). Embedded in the descriptions are elements of various extant theories purporting to describe organizational evolution, specifically, quantum evolution (Miller & Friesen, 1984) and punctuated equilibrium (Romanelli & Tushman, 1994). Siggelkow says, “At the end of each such defined period, the organization replaces all (or almost all) of its core elements and creates an entire new set of core elements” (2002, p. 154). He concludes by noting the limitations of “. . . a single case study” and addresses the question of “. . . why firms add (or do not add) new core elements.” He suggests that “one possible factor is the volatility of the environment” (p. 157). All four Aristotelian causes are apparent. He does not reduce the richness of the emergent structure to one or more outcome variables. In

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this respect he avoids what Langley, Contractor et al., and LeBaron do – black box the emergent structure in favor of input and output variables presumably linked by efficient cause. How much right do we have to “believe” in Siggelkow’s results and use them in an MBA classroom or for consulting purposes? Perhaps their only legitimate use is to set the stage for future research. Using this example, however, suppose we were to set up a justification logic for an agent-based, model-centered science, basic elements of which are described in McKelvey (2002b). In this logic, Siggelkow’s theory would be more believable if: (1) Material-cause elements of the theory are reduced to stylized facts as they pertain to various initializing elements in the model – the organizing materials at hand. The process of using an agent model simulation is useful for reducing an error-prone, low variance-explained body of prior research to idealized stylized facts that can be later altered as necessary to improve their representation of extant research and reality. In the Vanguard case, these would be the “materials” at hand that would serve to give character to the firm: it’s environment, people, and entities it deals with, and other elements and conditions that would affect agent rules at the time of creation and at each subsequent phase transition. Example start-up material causes are elements such as: mutual structure, selling and marketing activities, investors, networks, relation with Wellington Management Company, management fee structure, customer base, competitors, employees, skills, and so on. (2) Final cause would materialize in terms of those rules pertaining to agents’ purposeful objectives for themselves and/or for the firm as a whole. These also should follow from stylized facts. Example start-up final causes are goals, purposes, and strategies such as: low cost, asset growth, long-term performance, missionary zeal, high-quality service, and so on. Agent/employee goals are things like, focus on reducing costs (encouraged by incentives), unwillingness to do Wall Street-style trading, pursuit of the “noble goal” of putting shareholder interest first, long-term employment, learning how to make telephone calls to customers, and the like. (3) Efficient cause is accounted for by introducing contextual forces – such as the environmental volatility variable Siggelkow mentions – along with relevant others. These could range from the insignificant instigation variables that set off complexity cascades (the American approach) or environmental punctuations above the 1st critical value (the European approach). Note that in this example final cause does not “cause” the outcome, per se, but rather activates the agents or otherwise affects how they define their rules. External forces could turn agent rules on or off, make agents more sensitive to some

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material and formal causes, change their interaction and mutual influence patterns and rates, alter their threshold gates, and so on. Example start-up efficient causes reflect some of the final causes: rate of change measures, cost measures, asset growth, cost of management, quality measures, lower wage costs, customer satisfaction, industry rankings, and so forth. (4) Formal causes are the means by which the final and efficient cause “ends” are achieved. They can be designed into the model, follow from stylized facts, or be left to emerge. In most existing models, formal cause, for example in the form of group initiated means or group task agendas, is mostly a designed feature. But it should not be long before models exist where means-of-accomplishment activities become emergent. If designed, formal cause, too, may be based on stylized facts. If it is emergent, at an interim stage it is an outcome structure that itself can be compared with stylized facts. Example formal cause activities are: hiring recent college graduates to lower cost, managing funds internally and inexpensively, no short-term trading, running operations separate from WMC, candid communication, moderate wages, no perks, focus on fixed-income funds, and so forth. (5) By way of justification logic, one advantage of agent models is that various aspects of the four causes can be turned on or off as needed to understand how the theory seems to be working. Designing a model where they all run all the time won’t clarify much of anything. Multifinality General systems theorists used to talk about “equifinality” (von Bertalanffy, 1968) – resulting from the interaction of a system, on the one hand “open” to external forces (efficient cause) and, on the other, subject to goal-seeking negative feedback processes (final cause). Equifinality implies that systems starting from initially different circumstances (material cause) end up similar. This is why many people end up choosing variance theory over process theory – efficient cause variables can predict outcome measures of equifinality. But this ignores the basic thrust of Mohr’s process theory – and all of biology – which shows that the combination of causes can produce multifinality – different, equally viable outcomes even given similar material, final, formal, and efficient causes (Salthe, 1993). It also ignores social ontology. Process narratives of the Langley/Pentland/Siggelkow variety, based on one or a few case studies, fall short because they offer no belief justification – whether equifinality or multifinality is present. The variance model falls short because its efficient cause equation can hide multifinality – a fundamentally important deficiency if results are being used for normative application – one solution is implied when many are equally relevant, including novel possibilities that may

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have more future exploration value than present exploitation value, as March (1991) would put it. The Eisenhardt multicase approach falls short if the sampling of cases suggests multifinality – no clear pattern is apparent; but, if the sampling is sequential and in the context of similar efficient and final causes – and thus trends toward equifinality – it could support the substitution of the variance model for justification purposes. One way to avoid the alternatives of no justification vs. reduction to some kind of efficient cause justified outcome variable is to model all four causes as they create multifinal emergent structures and then take two additional steps: (6) First, let the model create a multifinality sample – a set of varying emergent structures that respond equally effectively to some set of niche constraints – which is what Mohr’s process model examples are doing. Then, using available positional and relational network description algebras that abstract down to common structural elements (see Pattison, 1993, or Wasserman & Faust, 1994, for block modeling methods), an abstract description of the sample may be developed. The composite description abstraction(s) might then be evaluated with respect to one or more outcome (efficient cause generated) variables. In this way the multicausal, multifinality characteristic of the model’s order creation outcomes is preserved while at the same time the composite description abstraction is connected to, say, performance variables. This is not simply to say “Find the ‘average’ of the varying emergent structures.” I think a composite that is built from an abstracted reassembly of modal relations and nodes would be better. Each mode represents a network relation or position that appeared more than once in the model’s “multifinality sample” as an apparent emergent adaptive solution. Quite possibly, no single emergent model solution contains all of the mode-indicted adaptive properties. There could be several contenders. (7) Second, as a further justification, composite description abstractions may be statistically compared to a parallel abstraction based on one or more real-world narratives such as Siggelkow’s, a real-world quasi-experiment, or lab experiment, using goodness-of-fit models of the kind described in Pattison or Wasserman and Faust. To return to the Vanguard case, the theories mentioned by Siggelkow, such as quantum evolution, punctuated equilibrium, and the like, could be translated into the material and final cause agent rules. He has already mentioned environmental volatility as a possible efficient cause; there could be others. Since it is an entrepreneur-founded firm there are, right at the outset, formal cause forces in the form of top-down organizing, motivating, and other operational activities. There could be bottom-up formal causes as well, that are instigated by lower-level agents.

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Some of the formal causes could be inserted as initial design features of the model. With increased programming sophistication, additional ones could be of the emergent kind. The model would be used to generate any number of multifinality samples. These would differ depending on which rules are being used, etc. The multifinality samples would then be reduced to composite description abstractions based on network modes emerging across the multifinality samples. Siggelkow already has some network centrality measures. For the first justification procedure these can be reduced to one or more efficient cause outcome variables – primarily low cost in Vanguard’s case. For the second justification procedure Siggelkow already has a head start. He could construct a baseline model designed to predict one or more of the periodic network configurations presented in his article. Having done this he could then alter the rules of the model in an attempt to get it to produce the Liz Claiborne network configuration.

CONCLUSION The lessons from this chapter are clear. Positivism is a myth. Relativism signified that science is dynamic and needs to account for subjective individual interpretations and social construction, but its notions of paradigm shifts and incommensurability are based on a misreading of how science works. Suppe (1977) wrote the epitaph for both positivism and relativism. Postmodernist teachings give us a correct view of social ontology, but their flagrant disregard of justification logic leaves their belief generation little different from that of witchdoctors. The only thing that separates good science from witchdoctoring is justification logic. March and Sutton (1997) remind us that, as educators, we tell managers how to improve performance and at the same time, as scholars, we publish papers claiming scientific merit. They also point out that we do both quite poorly – our scholarship is based on a logic-in-use that never existed and an ontology that is alien to the research methods preferred by the so-called top journals. Seeing the latter, postmodernists correctly reject the misguided scholarship, but what they offer in place is often anti-science and gives rise to performance oriented beliefs absent any truth justification. Based on my reading of complexity science (McKelvey, 2001, 2002a, 2003c, d), I show that a modern normal science can, in fact, cope with coevolutionary, nonlinear phenomena, which are now seen to characterize “new” economics (Colander, 2000) and organizational phenomena (Anderson, 1999; March & Sutton, 1997; Marion, 1999; Organization Science, 1999a). I also show that postmodern ontology mirrors the connectionist, normal science ontology upon which complexity science is built. Implicit in this is the recognition that good social science should

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include Aristotle’s material, final, and formal causes as well as his more scientifically familiar efficient cause. Given my reconstruction of recent developments in philosophy of science, signified as Campbellian realism (McKelvey, 1999b), I follow the Semantic Conception view by suggesting that organization and management research should become truly “model-centered” (see McKelvey, 2002b, for details). Following the lead of Morgan and Morrison (2000), who demonstrate that models are “autonomous agents,” I shift our thinking about modeling from math models to agent-based computational models. Given all this, I conclude by showing that agent-based models allow the formalization of all four Aristotelian causes. At the same time, the use of agent models allows an integration of the narrative and multiparadigm preferences of postmodernists with the model-centered science requirement remaining from 20th century philosophy of science. I illustrate this by using Siggelkow’s (2002) narrative about The Vanguard Group’s “evolution toward fit.” Combined, all of the foregoing result in a well-formulated justification logic useful for improving the truth value of beliefs stemming from organizational and management research. Now back to the “two worlds” in the opening quote from March and Sutton. I doubt anyone would disagree that the ontological world of management research is the one characterized by organizational postpositivists, postmodernists, and complexity scientists; it is a world of connectionism, coevolution, nonlinearity, and the four Aristotelian causes. In contrast, journal standards typically call for justification logic based on misinterpretations of positivist logic, linear thinking, and/or linear mathematical models, and only Aristotle’s efficient cause. The first world is disconnected from methods aiming toward better justified beliefs resting on more plausible truth findings. The second world appears disconnected from the intricate, multicausal, day-to-day milieu of managers. The reinvention of organization science I propose here brings these two worlds together – really for the first time! Narratives of the Siggelkow kind offer a rich view of what it takes for an entrepreneur to start up a firm. But should we believe any of it? And what might the abstracted message be that we could frame as guidelines for other entrepreneurs to follow? Here is where agent-based models have much to offer. They allow us to accomplish the following objectives: (1) Formal modeling without having to assume away the essential character of postpositivist ontology: complexity, diversity, heterarchy (multiple orders and constraints), vast networks of connections, indeterminate social behaviors, mutual causality, and so forth. (2) Extracting more plausibly true, potentially generalizable, and predictable theories from complicated narratives bound to a particular locality, context, and time.

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(3) Shifting from Mohr’s variance theory and efficient cause to his process theories and including material, formal, and final causes, along with the study of the complex interactions of the four different kinds of causality. (4) Researching multifinality and equifinality and their relation to the three causes in addition to efficient cause. (5) Reducing initially complicated theories about a complex world to agent rules, in abstracted, idealized, agent-based model form, so as to study and model how agent rules lead to order creation and the formation of norms, hierarchy, institutional structure, supervenience, and the like. (6) Seeing whether the analytical truth plausibility of theories may be improved by testing which of the various proposed elements of the theories work best in producing outcomes predicted by the theories, thereby leading toward the production of more elegant theories composed of fewer, but more fruitful, elements. (7) Aiming for theories that have more empirical truth plausibility because they (a) more adequately represent the state-space of real-world firms; and (b) have been tested against real-world phenomena. (8) Forcing elegance on theories by the use of models offers simpler, theorybased, more plausibly true beliefs, and increasingly crystallized, more easily described messages for management researchers to take to practicing managers. Taken all together, these eight objectives provide a means of building from the richness of postmodernist and process theory narratives toward more elegant theories and more plausibly true theory-based beliefs about how to bring the four Aristotelian causes to bear in improving management practice.

NOTES 1. Saying that science is a failure simply because the union stiffs at the bottom of a firm are not fully motivated to help line the coffers of the overpaid CEO robber barons at the top stretches credulity – to me at least, in 2002! 2. Suppe (1977) and Hunt (1991) confirm the centrality of these tenets of logical positivism. Key logical positivist sources are Carnap (1923, 1966), Neurath, Hahn and Carnap (1929), Ayer (1959), Neurath and Cohen (1973), and Hanfling (1981). 3. Geneticists and paleontologists have debated the cause of evolution ever since R. A. Fisher’s book in 1930. Is it ecology or selfish genes (Eldredge, 1995)? These groups each understand the other’s terms. Physicists have debated whether physics was an exact or probabilistic science ever since Brown discovered Brownian motion in 1829. Regarding quanta, this led to Einstein’s phrase “God doesn’t play dice,” his use of “hidden variables” to explain the collapse of wave packets even though a detector wasn’t present at the second slit in the double-slit experiment, the Born–Einstein debate (about whether quanta were real, absent a detector) that went on for years (Mermin, 1991), and Gell-Mann’s

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(1994, p. 150) statement, “The more exact the measure the more probabilistic the law” (my paraphrase). They all understood the terms and eventually came up with relevant experiments that satisfied most everyone except Einstein (Omn`es, 1999). The debate between exact and probabilistic physics paradigms continued for some 100 years. 4. To pick an example, consider the most famous so-called paradigm shift, that from Newton to Einstein. In his 1905 paper, Einstein drew mainly on the work of Faraday 70 years earlier. The reason he cited Faraday was that he (Einstein) defined the problem as how to specify a theory of relative motion for the electrodynamics of moving bodies parallel to the already existing theory of relative motion in Newtonian mechanics. By 1895 both Poincar´e and Lorentz had announced principles of relativity but to balance the equation governing the relative motion of two inertial systems they retained the concept, ether. In contrast, since the speed of light was discovered to remain constant (Einstein, unaware of the discovery, assumed it as a principle), Einstein accommodated relativity by allowing time to change. Thus, in the Lorentz transformation equations, t  = t became t  = (t − vx/c 2 )/(1 − v 2 /c 2 )1/2 . Note that none of the terms on the right side of the equation changed meaning, only the term t changed. What is important to note is that there would have been no reason for Einstein to do what he did if the other terms had not remained unchanged – a clear violation of incommensurability. The fundamental significance of relativity theory is that, in fact, none of the terms changed meaning except time. In addition, the new idea appeared as a journal article by Einstein in his 1st year after finishing his doctorate. How on earth could referees in the old paradigm accept for publication an article by an unknown author in a different, supposedly incommensurable paradigm? This makes sense only if relativity was in fact not incommensurable with existing “Newtonian” thinking. See Holton (1988) for the full range of views on whether or not relativity theory was incommensurable with Maxwell, Poincar´e, and Lorentz. 5. A frog dropped into boiling water will jump right out; a frog put in cold water which is slowly brought to a boil will not jump out, cooking to death instead. This is why the European complexity scientists worry so much about critical values and consequent phase transitions. 6. Elsewhere (McKelvey, 2003d), I review the slow convergence of many complexity scientists toward the realization that order creation in physical, biological, and social phenomena requires an Rc 1 -induced phase transition. I see this as a search for the 0th law of thermodynamics, the so-called order-creation law. 7. Basic introductions to agent-based modeling are: Weisbuch (1991) and Gaylord and Nishidate (1996) on cellular automata; Mitchell (1996) on genetic algorithms; Wasserman (1989) on neural networks; Prietula, Carley and Gasser (1998) on agent modeling in organization studies; and McKelvey (1999a) on Kauffman’s (1993) NK model applied to organizations. For a broader view of agent modeling in organization studies, see the journal, Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory. 8. The “Semantic Conception of Theories” is a post WWII view that places models between theory and data, arguing that theories are never more than explanations of isolated, idealized simplifications of real-world phenomena and that the models are what are tested against real-world data, hence the phrase “model-centered science.” For reviews of this approach, see Suppe (1989) and McKelvey (2002b). 9. I elaborate on Mainzer’s (1997) view of order-creation in complexity science more fully in McKelvey (2001, 2003a, d). 10. This section is slightly emended and enlarged from some of what appears in Henrickson and McKelvey (2002).

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11. I review some of the transcendental realist literature in McKelvey (1999b). 12. A recent view is that the most significant dynamics in bio- and econospheres are not variances around equilibria but are due to the interactions of autonomous, heterogenous agents energized by adaptive tensions. A review of these causes of emergent order in physics, biology, and the econosphere can be found in McKelvey (2003d). 13. Aristotle’s comments on the four causes appear in his book, Physics, which is published in Barnes (1995). 14. Aristotle looked at causes from the perspective of building a house. A grass hut and igloo differ because each is constructed of different locally available materials – material cause. Cheops’ pyramid and Eiffel’s tower differ because their vision of what should be built was different – final cause. Their organizational means of accomplishment (getting the job done on time, under cost, and consistent with the vision; use of hierarchy and technology, motivation of workers, etc.), were also different – formal cause. Their use of force and energy differed as well; flowing river and strong backs to get stones to the site vs. use of fire to form cast-iron girders and wheels to transport them – efficient cause. The latter is the only one that survived into Newtonian, physics-based sciences.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Because of her illness, I subbed in for Carroll Stephens at the last minute to do one of the anti-postmodernist chapters. I am sure that at first glance my chapter looks very different from what she would have written. But if you study the very cleverly written “debate” between Carroll and Rose-May Guignard (Stephens & Guignard, 2000), you will see that I am within the spirit of their discussion. Postmodernism is fragmented; there are some good and bad parts; there are American and European differences; it may or may not be proemancipation, antitruth, and so on. One of the last lines of their debate is: “If the Weiss versus Deetz debate helps us in the organization-science community hammer out issues of knowledge, truth, and accountability, then I am all for it” (p. 742). Here we are in the year 2002: more “truth and accountability” in the managerial community is sorely needed. More “knowledge and truth” from the researchers is needed as well. The spirit of the Stephens-Guignard debate is to discover some common ground between good science and postmodernism. As it progresses, my chapter incorporates this spirit. I wish to thank Benyamin Lichtenstein for many helpful comments. Any errors remaining are my responsibility.

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A CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERNISM IN ORGANIZATIONAL STUDIES Lex Donaldson INTRODUCTION Postmodernism presently enjoys some following in organizational studies. However, a close examination of some of the main postmodernist contributions to organizational studies shows that they suffer from many damaging problems. Accordingly, organizational studies should not utilize the postmodernist approach. Postmodernism, as its name implies, criticizes and seeks to overthrow the established intellectual position. Postmodernism refers to the preexisting position as “modernism” (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999), which may be a somewhat narrow characterization of that preceding position. It may be better termed as simply “the conventional view of knowledge” in the natural and social sciences, and in organizational science more particularly. Traditionally, the objective of research and scholarship in the social sciences is to create knowledge about the social world. The knowledge is composed of general statements that have been shown to be empirically valid (Kincaid, 1996). Each general statement also has to be internally consistent (i.e. not be self-contradictory). These general statements are theories that are abstract, in that they are stated in a conceptual language that holds across many situations (Chalmers, 1999). Science involves imagination and creativity in the creation of new theories (Popper, 1969). Critical analysis is applied to theories, such as about their internal consistency and about their empirical validity (Popper, 1972). There is a contest of ideas in science in that old theories are criticized and new theories

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are offered, which, if they are more adequate, in consistency and empirical validity, replace them. At any one time there may be pluralism, with more than one theory contending to explain the same phenomenon. However, such pluralism, and the debate it fuels, is a means to the end of eventually coming nearer to the truth, rather than being an end in itself or being a condition that should be permanent. When conflicting theories exist, there is no single, coherent explanation of the phenomenon being provided. This is especially a problem where science is to be used prescriptively, because the conflicting theories yield conflicting prescriptions and so the decision-maker is placed in a quandary. Useful knowledge has to be valid and give coherent guidance to decision-makers. These principles about science apply also to the social sciences, including organizational science (i.e. organizational behavior and organizational theory). For organizational science to be useful to managers, it has to be empirically valid, generalize across many organizations, and offer an integrated coherent theory that yields guidance about actions that managers can take. The knowledge also has to go beyond what managers already know through common sense or experience and therefore should preferably not be obvious (Priem & Rosenstein, 2000). This is the view of knowledge that motivates and justifies much management and organizational theory research, and has done so for a long time. Postmodernism offers another view about knowledge and research in the social sciences, in organizational studies and, indeed, in other disciplines such as literature and architecture (Kilduff & Mehra, 1997). It seeks to invert the conventional view of knowledge in several fundamental ways (Cooper & Burrell, 1988; Johnson & Duberley, 2000). Postmodernism says that all generalizations are false and are to be replaced by local small stories (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999). It also denies that a scholarly text has any stable meaning. Moreover, the meaning possessed by words is held by postmodernism to be a purely circular process of words defining other words (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999). Postmodernism says that texts are choices of particular words, which silence or suppress the other words that could have been used. Thus texts are political acts that marginalize and suppress certain views and social groups, while privileging others (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999). In this way, the process is one of power/knowledge, in that knowledge and power are inextricably bound up with each other. By deconstruction and other techniques, postmodernism seeks to give life to the silenced views and social groups (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999). Thus, postmodernism argues that the attempts to construct general theories in social, including organizational, science must fail. Also, the conventional view of a text as seeking to communicate a message from an author to a reader is false, according to postmodernists. Moreover, if the postmodernism doctrine about

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words never representing reality is correct, then empirical science is impossible. And, indeed, according to postmodernism, all scholarship is just a power play (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999). Thus, postmodernism calls into question, and rejects, the conventional view. If the postmodernist view is correct, then the conventional view is wrong. Postmodernism makes a critique of the conventional view and urges academics to abandon the research program associated with it, and, instead, to take up the postmodern program. If, however, the postmodernist critique of the conventional view is fallacious, then the conventional view remains sound. Thereby, any influence of postmodernism on organizational research would be destructive rather than constructive. Moreover, if postmodernism is itself wrong, then following it is a fool’s errand. Thus we need to critically examine postmodernism and its critiques of the conventional view. As we shall show, postmodernism is incorrect. There are many valid generalizations in science, and in organizational science more specifically. While more than one interpretation may be made of some texts, many authors strive to reduce the ambiguity of their texts, and many texts communicate their message more or less clearly, so that meaning is not inherently, highly undecidable. While the meaning of words is affected by the meaning of other words, in science observation statements about the world give discourse empirical content. While texts use some words and not others, this does not necessarily silence or suppress other views. In scientific articles, the narrow topic chosen reflects the principle of specialization. Other authors are at liberty to contribute texts that offer differing, or opposing, views, or that deal in different topics. Such freedom of expression is viewed, rightly, as a cornerstone of democratic societies. The postmodernist view about all writing being political suppression is exaggerated and unrealistically sinister. Moreover, while some views and groups are suppressed in some societies, postmodernism is not their salvation, because it denies the possibility of making definite statements about these groups and about the steps needed for their liberation. For this reason, social activists tend to eschew postmodernism. Thus postmodernism is a set of erroneous doctrines. A central problem inherent in the postmodernist philosophical position is that it cannot say anything authoritative about a text or about the real world. Thus it is a purely negative position in that all that is possible is endless reinterpretation and critique of texts. This is clearly unsatisfactory, in that most writers wish to assert something definite in their text and hope that it will persuade the reader to adopt its viewpoint – including postmodernists (as we shall see). Therefore, the proponents of postmodernism tend to fall into self-contradiction. More generally, postmodernism is marred by inconsistencies, which show that it lacks a coherent, well thought out intellectual position that deserves to be followed.

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The case made against the conventional view by postmodernism founders. Its attempt to overturn and replace the conventional view of knowledge and organizational science should be dismissed, because its critique of the conventional view is wrong. The alternative program offered by postmodernism lacks coherency and validity. Nevertheless, in so far as postmodernist ideas become influential, they muddy the waters and induce confusion, undermining progress in the study of management and organization. Therefore, it is necessary to lay bare the defects in the postmodernist position and to rebut its critique of the conventional, preceding approach. Postmodernism has been classified as an intellectual position that is a fringe movement to mainstream organizational studies, having failed to become a major research school because it is too novel and has insufficient continuity with approaches that are well-established in the field (McKinley, Mone & Moon, 1999). This implies that postmodernism, even if it were shown to be wrong and destructive in its effect, is too small in impact to be worth much worry. However, there are some signs that postmodernism may be gaining ground (e.g. Fuchs & Ward, 1994). This may be reflected in postmodernist articles in major management and organizational journals such as the Academy of Management Review (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999; Kilduff, 1993; Kilduff & Mehra, 1997), and by its prominence in the Handbook of Organization Studies, in chapters (e.g. Alvesson & Deetz, 1996) and the editors’ commentaries (Clegg & Hardy, 1996). Indeed, notwithstanding its postmodernist sympathies, the Handbook went on to win the Terry Award for the best new book at the Academy of Management meeting in 1997. At the ensuing party of its publishers, there was palpably a triumphal air among the postmodernist scholars, who seemed to make up much of the assembled company. The air was full of statements like “the Academy is going postmodernist” and “Postmodernism is taking over the Academy.” With such rumors of an impending intellectual coup, it behooves us to take a close look at what is postmodernism in management and organization studies. Because the focus of this book is on postmodernism and management, we will concentrate upon statements that argue in favor of the adoption of postmodernism in the management field. These writings exposit postmodernism and its supposed advantages and show how it applies in management and organization studies. In particular, two such articles have appeared in the leading management theory journal, the Academy of Management Review (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999; Kilduff & Mehra, 1997). Thereby, they achieved some prominence in the management field and are in a position to influence management scholars internationally. Thus we shall rely upon these articles to understand what is postmodernism and how it tries to work in management studies. This places the emphasis upon the “received postmodernism” as it is represented in the management field, but that is

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consistent with the focus of the present book. We will commence by considering the core characteristics of postmodernism. Then we will identify continuities between some of what is offered as postmodernism and conventional social and organizational studies. Finally, we will examine an example of deconstruction in organizational management studies: Kilduff’s (1993) deconstruction of the organizational theory classic, Organizations, by March and Simon (1958).

CORE CHARACTERISTICS OF POSTMODERNISM Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 650) identify four characteristics of postmodernism as having been “particularly influential in organizational theorizing”: “incredulity towards metanarratives, the undecidability of meaning, the crisis of representation, and the problematization of the subject and the author” (emphasis as in original). We will critically scrutinize these four characteristics of the postmodernist position, beginning with incredulity toward metanarratives. Then we will consider together the other three characteristics, because Cal´as and Smircich (1999) do so, and these three characteristics seem to be closely connected. And then we will discuss the nexus that postmodernism draws between language and knowledge/power.

The Incredulity Towards Metanarratives The incredulity towards metanarratives is an incredulity about universals, and a disbelief in grand narratives or grand stories. It entails “a rejection of overarching propositions” (Kilduff & Mehra, 1997, p. 456). According to Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 465): “From a postmodern perspective, the aim of social science is not generalizability.” Thus generalizations are viewed skeptically. In particular, there is disbelief about the modernist view of history as progress. In place of metanarratives, postmodernists advocate “small stories”(Cal´as & Smircich, 1999, p. 651) that illuminate localized events (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999, p. 652) and “the particular” (Kilduff & Mehra, 1997, p. 456). However, as we shall see, despite their programmatic declarations against generalizations, the proponents of postmodernism in organizational theory research make generalizations – some large enough to count as broad generalizations or even as grand narratives or metanarratives. Moreover, generalizations are important for any socially relevant intellectual movement, and valid generalizations exist in organizational science. Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 666 emphasis as in original) state in their concluding sentence: “. . . ours is not a theory (or a proposition) intended to be

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tested; it is the telling of a very small story that we hope resonates with others.” However, for others to resonate to their “small story,” there must be something in that story that others see as applying to them in their situation or to their intellectual questions. Thus, there must being something in Cal´as and Smircich’s story that somehow generalizes. The extent of the generalizability that they implicitly impute to postmodernism is not trivial, as is revealed by the claims that Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 666) make for postmodernism: that it has affected “our journals,” “our programs,” and that “the boundaries between disciplines are already fallen.” It strains credibility to believe that any intellectual position that has such a wide-ranging effect is a localized, small story that lacks generalizability. Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 651) write that the postmodernist argument about the need to move from metanarratives to small stories “. . . has an uncanny resemblance to how conditions of knowledge in organization studies were changing at the time.” Cal´as and Smircich (1999) identify these changes as being consonant with postmodernism: arguments about the existence of multiple paradigms (p. 651), self-awareness by researchers about their “complicity in the constitution of their objects of study” (p. 651), about “theorizing in organization studies as a political process” (p. 652) and “the ‘poetics’ of knowledge making” (p. 652) (emphases as in original). These changes “taken together . . . marked a radical departure in knowledge making within the field. An ontological/epistemological leap had happened which opened the space for postmodern ‘theorizing’ ” (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999, p. 652 emphases as in original). This history told by Cal´as and Smircich (1999, pp. 651–652) of changes in organizational theory that lead towards postmodernism, which covers many authors over almost 20 years (Burrell & Morgan, 1979 to Scherer, 1998), is, surely, a grand story, a metanarrative. Moreover, for Cal´as and Smircich (1999), it is one of increasing progress, in that these are positive developments for them, leading to the postmodernism that they applaud. Indeed, Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 650) admit that their “chronicle” is “modernist” (see below). Thus, they have told exactly the sort of modernist story that they reject, showing inconsistency in their argument. This indicates how difficult it is for intellectuals, interested as they are in broad currents of thought, to stick to local stories and avoid metanarratives. Also, Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 655) cite approvingly the study of just-intime (JIT) and total quality control (TQC) by Sewell and Wilkinson (1992) as an example of postmodernist organizational theory research: “JIT and TQC make the workers more visible to the control of the organization, while making the mechanics of control more invisible.” This statement is clearly a general description of a control process, expressed in abstract conceptual terms that potentially apply to any workers in any organization that uses JIT and TQC. The statement is not accompanied by any qualifications that it only holds in some localized situation, or

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only in organizations of a certain type or in a certain historical time period. Again, Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 662) state “. . . Western understandings of globalization, development, and the market are closely aligned with the interests of global capital . . ..” This is a theoretical generalization that applies across many countries (otherwise it would not be “globalization”) and invokes a general theory of action as being driven by economic interests. Thus, we see that Cal´as and Smircich (1999) frequently break their own postmodernist precept by generalizing. Similarly, despite rejecting the concept of generalization, Kilduff and Mehra (1997) generalize. They summarize approvingly a theoretical reinterpretation by Burt (1987) of a classic data set as follows: Physicians, according to this view, adopted the innovative drug in order to gain advantage over rivals. Competition among structural equivalents – that is, among rivals who could substitute for each other in the social system – helps explain the diffusion of innovations (Kilduff & Mehra, 1997, p. 469).

The concept of structural equivalence is part of Burt’s (1992) theory of structural holes and social networks, which is a general theory. Similarly, that physicians adopt innovative drugs to gain advantage over their rivals is consistent with general theories of rivalry, competition and self-interest in economics and sociology. Thus Burt’s interpretation is part of the attempt in conventional social science to construct general theories, that is, the generalizability that postmodernism claims to eschew in favor of “small stories” about localized social action. Again, Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 466) assert that “. . . the more we know, the more we realize we don’t know.” They offer this insight about the human condition without placing any boundaries in time or space around it. They go on to assert that: “We progress toward ever greater knowledge of our own ignorance” (Kilduff & Mehra, 1997, p. 466). This statement uses the word “progress” ironically, and thereby inverts and parodies the belief in progress that postmodernists attribute to modernism, and so is in keeping with the postmodernist spirit. Nevertheless, it is another generalization – indeed a sweeping one. Thus postmodernists repeatedly break their own rule by generalizing. According to Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 465), the reasons why generalizability is problematic in social science include: (a) the impossibility of isolating all the possible contingencies that can affect outcomes, (b) the historically situated nature of social science research, and (c) the ease with which research results are translated into policy recommendations or disseminated to the potential subjects of research (thus radically altering the possibilities of replication).

The issue of whether generalization is possible in social and organizational science is a long-standing one. Some scholars have sought to show that generalization is possible in social science (e.g. Marsh, 1967), including by reviewing

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the studies of a relationship between some pair of organizational variables and showing that the relationship generalizes across many different settings (e.g. Miller, 1987). However, Kilduff and Mehra (1997) fail to review or cite any of this work that has sought to demonstrate generalizability, so they do not substantiate their assertion that generalization is “doomed” (p. 465). There are cases of successful generalization in organizational science. For instance, in organizational structure, the relationship between organizational size and functional specialization that was found in a study of organizations in Birmingham, England (Pugh, Hickson, Hinings & Turner, 1969), was then replicated in a study of a national sample in England and Wales (Child, 1973), and subsequently to hold in 38 other studies (see Donaldson, 1996, pp. 138–139; also see Miller, 1987). This size-functional specialization relationship generalizes across many different countries (e.g. Finland, Egypt, and India) (Routamaa, 1985; Badran & Hinings, 1981; Shenoy, 1981, respectively) and types of organization (e.g. labor unions, textile firms, and churches) (Donaldson & Warner, 1974; Clark, 1990; Hinings, Ranson & Bryman, 1976, respectively). Thus some relationships in organizational science are not highly contingent, so that bivariate relationships replicate and generalize (for further discussion, see Donaldson, 1996). Other cases of successful generalization in organizational science are the relationships between size-structural differentiation (e.g. Blau & Schoenherr, 1971; Marsh & Mannari, 1981), size-standardization (e.g. Ayoubi, 1981; Hinings & Lee, 1971), size-formalization (e.g. Horvath, McMillan, Azumi & Hickson, 1981; Mannheim & Moskovits, 1979), and strategy-structure (e.g. Dyas & Thanheiser, 1976; Hamilton & Shergill, 1993; for fuller lists of studies see Donaldson, 1996; Miller, 1987). Similarly, in personnel selection, tests of mental ability (i.e. intelligence) have been shown to predict job performance across a very broad range of different occupations (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). There is evidence of valid generalizations for other relationships in organizational science (e.g. goals and performance (Locke & Latham, 1990)). Thus it is simply false for Kilduff and Mehra (1997) to assert that generalization is not possible in social science. Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 465) also argue that replication is not possible because research results become known to subjects. However, this argument presumes that the behavior of subjects is powerfully driven by the knowledge they possess, whereas many social and organizational science theories argue that behavior is not driven by knowledge, but by other factors, such as the situation, i.e. by the “social facts” (Durkheim, 1938). For instance, the level of functional specialization adopted by managers for their organization, and which characterizes the behavior of its employees, is driven to a high degree by the social fact of its size (Blau, 1972; Donaldson, 1996, 2001; Meyer, 1972; Miller, 1987). Thus, even if the people in the organization became aware of the research finding about

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size-specialization, that would not affect this relationship and so its replication would not be prevented. For this reason, the postmodern fear about the “double hermeneutic by which the human sciences affect the very phenomena (humans and their worlds) that are the foci of study” (Kilduff & Mehra, 1997, p. 466) does not hold for many generalizations. In particular, many organizational science relationships are untroubled by it (see for further discussion Donaldson, 1985, 1996). Generalization is hard to avoid in social and organizational science. Few academics are genuinely content to tell their readers or students something like: “Here is an insight about IBM from 1993 to 1995. It does not hold from 1996 onwards, or for IBM today. And it tells us nothing about other computer companies or other large firms or capitalist corporations.” Their students would probably reply: “If it tells us nothing about today, or tomorrow, or any other company than one in its past, what is the use of this insight?” Most academics typically want to say something that generalizes across organizations, e.g. about the causes of business success (Lenz, 1980) or firm survival (Hannan & Freeman, 1989), or how firms are molded by their institutional environment (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). All of these disparate theoretical stories involve generalization. They are grand stories or metanarratives, which, accordingly, seek to shed light on many organizations and many people across many countries and many years. Similarly, sociologists are interested in broad general processes such as rationalization, which ramifies across many organizations and areas of society (e.g. law and religion) across many centuries (Weber, 1968). Again, social radicals are concerned about globalization or capitalism or patriarchy, as structures and processes that operate in many countries, with the effects of making the lives of many people worse. These latter theories are not narratives of progress – they depict a worsening world – but they are still grand narratives of broad generalizability, in the minds and writings of their adherents. It is one thing for postmodernism to reject progress, but it cannot also reject generalizability, grand narratives, and metanarratives, without making itself inconsequential and uninteresting. Thereby it would make itself unable to serve the intellectual aspirations of most academics and scholars, and unable to meet the concerns of many socially concerned citizens. Thus the rejection of generalizability by postmodernism paints it into a corner of irrelevance. The denial of generalization, however, is such an untenable position that, as we have seen, postmodernists do not keep to it, and, in fact, they generalize. The failure of postmodernists to stick consistently to their rejection of generalizability is further testimony to the error of rejecting generalizability. The rejection of generalizability by postmodernism, if it were followed in organization studies, would provide no basis for a viable and useful intellectual position. In order to be fruitful, organizational science should continue to seek to generalize in its future work, as it has successfully in the past. The inability of postmodernists to

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be consistent about the issue of generalization displays publicly their failure to think through their own position and to present a consistent, coherent position. As we shall see, this failure to be consistent applies also to other postmodernist principles and is a hallmark of their writings. Crisis of Representation, Undecidability of Meaning, and Problematization of Subject and Author In their section on “Poststructuralism: ‘No Solid Grounds’ for Knowledge?” Cal´as and Smircich (1999, pp. 652–654) deal with three other characteristics of postmodernism: the crisis of representation, the undecidability of meaning, and the problematization of the subject and the author. They open with a discussion of poststructuralism to argue that the meaning of words is given by other words, rather than by reference to things, i.e. representation, and thereby exposit the crisis of representationalism. The argument that meaning is undecidable is developed by explaining that there is no stable meaning of a text, nor is there one in the intentions held by the author of the text (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999, p. 653). Crisis of Representation Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 653) write: “Modern knowledge (or theory) is presumed to represent some form of stable phenomena existing outside their representation.” In contrast, postmodernism, according to Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 653), denies such representationalism: For instance, as we read a journal article, we assume that it represents phenomena that exist elsewhere, whether empirically observed or speculated upon. Yet, poststructuralist arguments contend that all we have as knowledge is the representation itself, such as the materiality of the text in which “knowledge” is written. Further, textual representations have no fixed meanings. The text is constituted in signifiers whose referents could always slide to other referents. Words could always be reinterpreted through other words.

Yet, there are reasons to doubt that there is a crisis of representation. Cal´as and Smircich (1999) do not maintain this position consistently, and their philosophical arguments are compatible with representation. Despite their argument that words refer only to other words and not to things outside the text (i.e. do not represent), Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 660) cite approvingly work by Martin (1992): . . . she notices the limitations of deconstruction, and even of her own “reconstructions,” if she were to stay simply at the level of the text. Thus, she reconnects concrete organizational and social issues with the deconstructed text. She notices how task segregation and gender pay inequalities become reified rather than alleviated by small organizational reforms, and she calls

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for “a fundamental realignment of government policies concerning both the family and the marketplace.”

Thus, according to Cal´as and Smircich, Martin sees that there are “concrete” things apart from words: task segregation and gender pay inequalities. And she advocates altering these things through government intervention, that is, by a real social body (i.e. another thing) that can change pay etc. in the real world. Thus, in her text, Martin is (according to Cal´as & Smircich) using words to refer to things outside of a text. Hence, here Cal´as and Smircich (1999) abandon their postmodernist philosophical strictures about the crisis of representation and about words referring only to other words. Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 651) quote approvingly Wittgenstein’s languagegame theory of meaning. However, the Wittgensteinian language-game theory of meaning is compatible with the idea that science involves empirical processes. The language game of science can be seen as one in which an observation statement, based on an observation made about the world, such as a measurement through an instrument, is compared against the expectation derived from theory, i.e. the hypothesis (Chalmers, 1999). When the observation statement matches the hypothesis, then the theory is said by the scientists to be supported and, to that degree, empirically confirmed. When the observation statement does not match the hypothesis, then the theory is said by the scientists to be not supported and, to that degree, empirically disconfirmed. In this way, science seeks to arrive at true statements about reality, i.e. to represent the reality that exists independently of the text. Through empirical testing, reality places limits on what is, and is not, said about it in the scientific literature, so that reality influences the texts of science (Chalmers, 1999). In these ways, scientific statements can have empirical content without having direct access to reality. The conventional philosophy of science does not presume that such access is involved in science. Thus conventional, social science is not founded upon some false philosophical presupposition. Therefore, there is no need to overturn a false “modernist” philosophy of science in order to analyze organizations more truthfully. In the conventional philosophy of science prior to postmodernism, truth is not viewed as an absolute, nor as being readily attainable or readily knowable. Instead, truth is sought by replacing less true by truer theories, so that science moves toward the truth. In that sense, truth is relative, not absolute. Whether science ever attains the complete truth of a matter is unknown, and unknowable, because there is no way to know truth other than through the theories. Therefore all science can ever know is that present theories are better than previous ones (Popper, 1972). The possibility always exists that at some future time the best present theory will be shown to be less true than some new theory. However, the replacement of less

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true by truer theories means that scientific theories are becoming truer and in that sense science is making progress (Popper, 1972). The philosophy of science being drawn on here is the Popperian view, which predates, and in no way relies upon, postmodernism – indeed Popper is often considered to be one of the central figures of conventional, or “modernist,” social science and is revered by many conventional social scientists. Hence, there is no crisis of representation. Satisfactory philosophical accounts of how scientific knowledge relates to reality can be given. There is no need on philosophical grounds to take the despairing position that words refer only to other words so that it is impossible for texts to make valid statements about reality outside of themselves. Undecidability of Meaning and Problematization of Subject and Author In the conventional view of knowledge, an author possesses a viewpoint about what the truth is about a topic (i.e. the truest position about the topic as it seems to him or her). The author then seeks to communicate this message to others through writing a scientific publication. However, postmodernism radically challenges this view and seeks to overturn it, replacing it with the doctrine of the undecidability of meaning. According to this doctrine, there is no stable meaning of a scholarly, or any other, publication, because any text has many possible interpretations. Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 653 emphases as in original) explain this poststructuralist view: Poststructuralist analyses demonstrate how signification occurs through a constant deferral of meaning from one linguistic symbol to another. At its most basic, postructuralist approaches suggest that there is no stable or original core of signification and, thus, no foundation, no grounding, and no stable structure on which meaning can rest. This insight affects . . . the Enlightenment conceptions of knowledge and science. For example, consider searching for meaning in a dictionary that always refers you to another word, in a neverending movement from word to word and with no final meaning to be found to stop this process . . . There is no essence on which to ground meaning . . .

Moreover, one cannot appeal to the meaning the author intended because that is not unambiguous. Postmodernists reject as “[m]odernist philosophy” the idea that “human beings are autonomous subjects, whose interests and desires are transparent to themselves and independent from the interests and desires of others” (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999, p. 653). Instead, “ ‘the author’ is understood as embedded in a social context and in relation to others . . . He or she is an ‘authorfunction’ . . . Thus, invoking ‘intention’ mostly activates a chain of signifiers, which are the several authors and writings that stand behind that tradition . . . these multiple interpretations have already constituted the author” (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999, p. 653). But, even if it were possible to identify the intention of the author, that would not settle meaning, because “. . . the minute the work leaves the

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author’s hands it becomes a public document . . . The document is meaningful only because it can be read by others, and once this happens, the author becomes just one interpreter among other readers” (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999, p. 653). Thus, according to this argument, there is no settled meaning of any scholarly publication and there is no message that the author is trying to communicate, thereby contradicting the basic supposition of the conventional view of publications and authors in science and social science. However, again, Cal´as and Smircich (1999) fail to maintain this position consistently, and it is too pessimistic to be accepted as valid. Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 660) say of Martin (1992): “she notices the limitations of deconstruction . . . she reconnects concrete organizational and social issues with the deconstructed text. She notices how task segregation and gender pay inequalities become reified . . . and she calls for ‘a fundamental realignment of government policies . . .’ ”. What Martin writes is apparently straightforward in its meaning for Cal´as and Smircich (1999), who do not offer multiple meanings of her text. Their description of Martin is of an author who is sending a clear message, not some nebulous “author-function” issuing a text that has multiple meanings. Thus here Cal´as and Smircich (1999) fail to follow their postmodernist philosophy that meaning is undecidable. If the protagonists of postmodernism do not sustain what they hold are its cardinal properties for the space of an article, how much credence should these principles be given? The philosopher, Chalmers (1999, pp. 105–107), explicitly rejects the argument that the meaning of a concept in science is given by other words, as in a dictionary definition. He points out that the meaning of a concept in science is given by a theory, which may entail abstract ideas quite foreign to the common sense contained in dictionary definitions. While some scholarly work may be interpreted in more than one way by readers, scholarly writing is not inherently hopelessly beset by undecidable meanings. A consensus develops within a scientific community about the meaning of texts, especially ones that are viewed as central (Chalmers, 1999). Shared meanings become institutionalized through repetition in textbooks. This process is reinforced when certain interpretations become part of the stock of conventions (Kuhn, 1970). On some issues in a science there may be disagreements over interpretation and this may be part of a dispute within the science, and may accompany attempts at paradigm revolution (Kuhn, 1970). However, the normal science phase is marked by consensus on central issues (Kuhn, 1970). Clear writing is valued positively in science and authors strive to attain it, reworking manuscripts until they are less capable of multiple meanings. Editors and reviewers aid authors to clarify their writings and enforce clarity by making this one of the criteria of acceptance for publication. Some organizational theorists have written in praise of ambiguous

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statements (Astley & Zammuto, 1992), but this has been hotly contested, precisely because it breaches a core scientific and scholarly value (Beyer, 1992; Donaldson, 1992). Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 653) culminate their discussion of these issues rather abruptly by posing the question: “Despite all these speculations, one may contend, we are surrounded by meaningful texts of knowledge, whose authors gain accolades for their ideas – ideas that may be put into practice in the ‘real world.’ How is this possible, if all that constitutes such knowledge is unstable language, illusory representations, and author-functions?” This seems a valid, damaging objection to the foregoing arguments of Cal´as and Smircich (1999), and the reader waits in anticipation to see their reply. However, instead of answering their question, Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 654) immediately shift to an exposition of the postmodernist idea “that language is a system of differences.” Thus having problematized their own critique, they fail to rebut the reasonable objections that they offer against it, rendering unsatisfactory their arguments against representation and meaning.

Language and Power/Knowledge Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 654) offer the following postmodernist account of language and communication: “If we observe how we say what we say, we are always making choices between the words we write or speak and those we do not write or say but that are ‘the other’ (i.e. the difference) of what we are saying.” Clearly if we say one thing, we are not saying some other things, but Cal´as and Smircich (1999) refer to the not-said things in terms that make the process of not-saying sound sinister: “conceals its other,” “that which the visible makes invisible,” “suppress,” “closing the possible vocabulary of the field,” “excluding other meanings,” (all p. 654) and “silencing” (p. 662). Similarly, Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 476) describe the “postmodern commitments to . . . giving voice to view-points and perspectives hitherto silenced.” Indeed Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 654, emphasis as in original) go on to argue, as a core proposition, that “it is possible to see how the stabilization of meaning is constituted within a system of power relations – a system of inclusion and exclusion – which defines as acceptable or not the marks that will appear on the page as knowledge . . . these issues are also linked with the institutional politics of knowledge making.” Thus, the role of postmodernism is to offer a critique of established texts that unsettles their meaning, and reveals the hidden messages and silenced voices, to allow marginal social groups to express their view and gain some power (Kilduff, 1993, p. 29). As Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 658) put it:

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By decentering “true knowledge,” these analyses can help us accept the possibility of “other knowledges,” which otherwise may be ignored or deemed illegitimate – that is “marginal.” Further, a particularly important contribution of theorizing done in this fashion is that it provides a different language with which to address conventional issues (e.g. Gergen, 1992). As such, it makes it possible to “see” conventional theories in a different light and, further, to write knowledge in a different form.

While this sounds as if postmodernism offers some new theory, as we shall see, its emphatically critical and skeptical stance towards any text, including its own texts, means that it produces not some new, authoritative view on a topic, but rather an endless process of critique in which all statements are treated as ripe for further reinterpretation or deconstruction. If the conventional, “modernist” approach is flawed and postmodernism provides a better approach, then we should expect that those advocating postmodernism would demonstrate this new and improved postmodernist approach in their own writing. However, Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 650) confide: . . . as we write these lines and the rest of this article, we are struggling with the same problems of representation and form we discuss below as postmodern topics. At the most immediate level, writing this article as a commentary and a chronicle of some recent past and current issues in the field is writing in a modernist form that betrays our assumed location as postmodern intellectuals. As commentators, we are taking the authorial position as narrators of this “knowledge.”

Thus, Cal´as and Smircich (1999) candidly admit that their article advocating postmodernism actually betrays it and is written in the modernist way. If two experienced protagonists of postmodernism cannot exemplify this new approach that they deem superior, what hope is there that other scholars can do so. Why are Cal´as and Smircich (1999) unable to practice what they preach? Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 650) go on to offer an extenuating circumstance: “At the same time, the act of writing for this particular journal, under the premises of this special issue, already defines some limits of our writing.” Thus it seems Cal´as and Smircich (1999) were forbidden by some countervailing force. It seems unlikely that this would be just the pre-existing norms of the format of an AMR article, because in an earlier AMR article Smircich, Cal´as and Morgan (1992, pp. 607–611) blew up traditional literally conventions by having the text running about over the pages. One might imagine that powerful editors might be the dour culprits somehow suppressing postmodernism. But if Cal´as and Smircich (1999) were suppressed in this way, surely their stance, as critical radicals, would be to fight the editors. At the least, one would expect to read a fiery denunciation, or an appeal to smash the power structure. On the contrary, however, Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 650) conclude their explanation of their failure to write in a genuinely postmodern way: “We can also anticipate for our readers that we have not found a ‘way out’ of these multiple contradictions, but, as postmodernists, we were

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certainly not expecting that we would.” Thus, according to Cal´as and Smircich, they do not know how to write postmodernism, and their postmodernism leads them not to expect they would. The advocates of postmodernism themselves say that there is no satisfactory way to write postmodernism. The enterprise is doomed at the outset. Thus postmodernism critiques all pre-existing forms of writing as being fatally flawed, yet cannot actually write in a way that better accords with its own precepts. This problem is inherent in postmodernism being a process of critiquing all texts, which necessarily prevents it from offering a new theory that it treats as being authoritative. Unlike conventional science and social science (Phillips, 1992), in postmodernism there are no grounds for warranting that statements are true, because postmodernism treats everything skeptically and capable of multiple interpretations. Therefore postmodernism is only capable of negative writing, i.e. criticism, and cannot offer positive writing, i.e. texts that seek to make the case for a theory. Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 652, emphasis as in original) write of postmodernism: . . . postmodernism offered an important contribution . . . The contribution was that of an occasion for reflexivity that allows for a critical examination of the way modern (paradigmatic or foundational) knowledge has been constituted, without needing to provide for an alternative knowledge.

Thus postmodernism is a movement that critiques other theories, but does not itself offer a better theory or any theory. It creates no new knowledge, and, apparently, Cal´as and Smircich (1999) are content with this state of affairs. Theirs is a nihilistic agenda. This negative quality is succinctly caught by Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 475) in the heading they use for their final section: “AntiConclusion.” Johnson and Duberley (2000, p. 100) comment: “deconstruction does not get the deconstructor closer to a ‘fixed,’ or privileged, truth . . . In these respects postmodernism is parasitic in that it can only feed off existing texts.” Further, postmodernist articles that offer some positive theoretical interpretation sometimes accompany it by statements that warn that this is only one possible interpretation and that others are possible, thereby calling into question the validity of that theoretical interpretation, e.g. Kilduff (1993, see below). Moreover, this negative characteristic of postmodernism leads to a problem with the claim that postmodernism helps reverse the enslavement of people that texts bring about. Kilduff (1993, p. 26) expresses the postmodern perspective on writing in this way: . . . Derrida has commented: “It has long been known that the power of writing in the hands of a small number, caste, or class, is always contemporaneous with hierarchization” (1976, p. 130). Additionally, Levi-Strauss (cited in Derrida, 1976, p. 130) has stated the matter more bluntly:

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“If my hypothesis is correct, the primary function of writing, as a means of communication, is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.”

These are sweeping generalization about all writing, therefore, they must necessarily apply also to postmodern writing (e.g. Kilduff, 1993). How, on this view, can postmodern writing contribute to the liberation of people if, like any writing, it enslaves people? Therefore, if it is to be internally consistent, postmodernism cannot offer any liberation. The postmodernist philosophical position, by the sweeping nature of its negative principles, necessarily implies that its own work cannot really liberate. Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 649) write at times in the vein of radicals leading organization studies towards some sort of socially committed action: “Viewing theory as a representational form places decisions regarding ‘for what’ and ‘for whom’ we are going to speak in the core of our scholarship.” Yet if words refer only to other words and not to things, which, as we have seen, Cal´as and Smircich (1999) argue (in their philosophical position about the crisis of representation), how can words in a postmodernist text speak about “for what,” which implies referring to something outside of the text? Similarly, how can a postmodernist text speak “for whom,” that is, speak on behalf of some persons and their interests, when Cal´as and Smircich (1999) argue that in postmodernism there is no stable meaning of a text, and so a postmodern text could be read equally as either supporting or attacking a social group. Again, how does this challenge to authors (that they commit their scholarship to advancing the cause of some social group) sit with the statements of Calas and Simrcich (1999) that an author has no definite grasp on the meaning of his or her text? Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 660) recognize this defect of postmodernism for a would-be radical movement that wishes to help social change, in their discussion of “Feminist Organizational Theorizing and Postmodernism,” where they note: . . . the relationship between feminist theories and postmodernism has been, at best, uneasy . . . The critics . . . point at the depoliticizing effects of these antiessentialist approaches when it comes to claiming agency and empowering representation. The problematics of the subject and the undecidability of meaning stand in the way of positive political alliances . . .

Indeed they do stand in the way. For this reason, there is a long history of bitter hostility of social radicals against intellectual positions that claim to fight for the oppressed, while simultaneously calling into question the objective existence of oppression, the oppressed, the means of their liberation and any possibility of objective knowledge of these matters. Johnson and Duberley (2000, p. 113) go as far as saying that: “Postmodernism could thereby promote a conservative disinterestedness that tacitly supports the status quo.” Thus postmodernist philosophy fatally undermines postmodernist aspirations towards assisting social change.

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The postmodernist argument, that by using one set of words a text silences other words, makes writing an exercise of power. This is reflected in the concept of power/knowledge that postmodernists deploy (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999, p. 654). This conflation of two concepts, power and knowledge, is false and unhelpful. Knowledge and power are well understood, separate constructs in sociology and organization studies. While some power has its base in expertise or other forms of knowledge, other bases of authority and power include bureaucratic (i.e. rationallegal or positional), charismatic, traditional (Weber, 1968), and coercive (Etzioni, 1961). Empirical studies reveal that power in organizations frequently rests on bases other than knowledge (e.g. Etzioni, 1961; Hinings, Hickson, Pennings & Schneck, 1974). While power and knowledge may go together sometimes, they are not always highly correlated, which is presumed by the unitary concept of power/knowledge. Thus, nothing is gained, and much is lost, in the potential for clear analysis, by conflating power and knowledge together into the concept of power/knowledge. Hence, postmodernism does a disservice to social science by promulgating power/knowledge as a unitary concept. It is a regressive move, in that it undoes all the work whereby social analysts came to distinguish these two aspects of social standing to enable more penetrating analyses of social phenomena. More specifically, to equate knowledge and writing with power is erroneous, in that writing can be an act of freedom, or even of resistance, and knowledge production can benefit from the free expression of competing ideas. We reject the negative view of writing that postmodernist philosophy asserts. Clearly, if a person writes an article about a topic, then he or she is not writing an article about other topics. Any text focuses on a topic, or topics, and not on others. Indeed, a hallmark of much distinctively scientific literature is that each contribution, such as each journal article, is specialized, e.g. it is about the reproduction of frogs, not giraffes (Boorstin, 1983). However, to omit another topic is not to “silence” it. The word “silence,” used as a verb, has the meaning, according to The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) “Prohibit or prevent (a person) from speaking, esp. to prevent the free expression of opinion.” Thus to silence is to prevent speech. Yet, when a scientific author writes an article about frogs, that does not prevent someone else writing an article about giraffes. It is a gross exaggeration to equate the fact that a text has a focus, with the act of stopping other texts from expressing another view of that topic or from focusing on another topic. Learned journals in the natural and social sciences are full of articles that disagree with previous articles, or that apply methods and theories from previous articles to new subjects, or that use new methods and theories that differ from previous articles. The postmodernist assertion, that, when a text states X, it silences all non-X, is false. By the use of the word “silences,” postmodernism confers on writing a sinister quality that by no means all writing possesses.

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Thus, the postmodernist argument that all texts and knowledge are essentially political is derived from their false depiction of all writing as silencing. Whereas silencing is a power-laden political act, writing is not necessarily, or even usually, a political act. Authors writing and publishing their views, which are then read and debated and replied to by other authors, whether in academic scholarship or the newspapers, is a cornerstone of a democratic society. It is part of political liberty. Therefore, to characterize writing as being necessarily totalitarian is quixotic. The postmodernist theory that writing is part of power/knowledge is a distorted view of society. It shows depressive or paranoid tendencies. For a position that promises liberty, it seems confused about processes fundamental to liberty.

CONTINUITIES BETWEEN CONVENTIONAL ORGANIZATIONAL STUDIES AND “POSTMODERNISM” Kilduff and Mehra (1997) argue that postmodernism is a positive force that leads to creativity and revolutionary new developments. The creative breakthroughs offered by postmodernism are contrasted invidiously with the uninspiring results to be had from positivist research. They hold that postmodernism is best pursued by a pluralistic approach that features diverse methods. Postmodernism, they state, builds on traditional, classical approaches. Kilduff and Mehra (1997) are at pains to depict postmodernism as a constructive movement that it is inclusionary rather than narrow. In their eclecticism, they sweep up many different methods and authors as being postmodern or compatible with postmodernism. While broad, inclusionary approaches, and pluralism and eclecticism, normally have much to commend them in organizational studies, as they do here, they also lead to a problem. If so many preexisting ideas and methods are included in, or compatible with, postmodernism, what is new and distinctive about postmodernism? If some of what is proffered as postmodernism is just business as usual in organizational studies, how can postmodernism claim to be a radical overturning of what has gone before? How can postmodernism yield novel insights unavailable from the preexisting, conventional organizational studies if what it does, or the ideas it has, are the same as have been around for many years and are just the conventional ones? There is not clearly a new, distinctive approach in some of what Kilduff and Mehra (1997) attribute to postmodernism, as we shall now see. Kilduff and Mehra (1997) claim as sympathizers Merton, Popper, and Burt. Their effort to assimilate these figures seems inconsistent with the postmodernist position. Merton is a social theorist who has offered generalizations that run

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counter to the postmodernist rejection of generalizations in favor of small stories. While Merton (1957) advocated middle-range theory rather than grand theory, his theories are certainly generalizations of broad scope. Moreover, he has made one of the central statements of functionalist theory in sociology (Merton, 1957), which is part of the establishment sociology of the 1950s and 1960s that many critical or radical sociologists sought to overturn by offering trenchant critiques (e.g. Rex, 1961). The Mertonian functionalist theoretical argument that many institutions have positive functions for other institutions (Merton, 1957), while possessing also dysfunctions, is a grand narrative. In organizational theory, Merton (1957) argued that bureaucracies, by emphasizing conformity to rules, induce rigidity that is dysfunctional for the organization. This is a theory that potentially applies to any bureaucratic organization, in many different countries. To see Merton cited approvingly in an article that is supposed to be offering a new, distinctive approach seems incongruous. Similarly, Kilduff and Mehra (1997) applaud Popper’s characterization of scientists as being critics and revolutionaries (and criticize Kuhn for his emphasis on normal science.) While Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 463) are explicit that “Popper’s views can be hardly be described as postmodern,” they nevertheless go on to write that the emphasis by Popper on constant criticism and questioning of underlying assumptions in science is “consistent with our postmodern epistemology” (p. 463). Yet criticism and intellectual revolution are not distinctive of postmodernism, being staple fare in the conventional view of knowledge and in conventional organizational science. Thus placing a positive value on criticism and intellectual revolution is in no way new or distinctive of postmodernism. Kilduff and Mehra (1997, pp. 468–469) have a section about how postmodernists render “normal science” and “metanarratives” problematic by critiquing “the reigning classic statements that are customarily taken for granted by the scholarly community” (p. 468). They briefly illustrate this with Derrida’s “deconstructions of classic works” (p. 468). However, Kilduff and Mehra (1997) then devote the bulk of this section (a whole page of their article) to an article by Burt (1987). His writings on networks as a general theory of social structure and quantitative analyses (Burt, 1992) render him a well-respected figure in the positivist type of research within the conventional view of social science knowledge. Thus, lauding Burt seems a curious choice in an article about postmodernism. However, Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 468) explain that “Burt’s (1987) reanalysis . . . is one example of research that exhibits some postmodern characteristics without any explicit claim to a postmodernist label.” The postmodernist characteristics Kilduff and Mehra (1997) go on to discuss are that Burt offered the data to others, the methodology used, Burt’s passionate commitment and his radical challenge to the preexisting belief. We will briefly examine each in turn.

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Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 468, emphasis as in original) give as a postmodernist aspect of Burt’s (1987) article that . . . the project is left unfinished in a typically postmodernist gesture of inclusion of the audience . . . in offering (in a footnote to his article) to provide the data on disk to the reader of his radical reanalysis, brought the reader into the project of science rather than insisting on a rigid demarcation between scientist and audience.

Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 469) repeat that this aspect is an important part of what gives Burt’s article an affinity with postmodernism: “By choosing a canonical data set to deconstruct, and by offering everyone the opportunity to confirm his critique, Burt succeeded, like Derrida, in challenging the accepted practice of enquiry.” But offering to provide the data is not unusual in conventional publications of conventional social and organizational science. Indeed many conventional organizational science publications give their data to the reader (e.g. Rumelt, 1974; often in an appendix), thereby allowing others to inspect it and use it in their own analyses. Thus, there is nothing new or distinctive in Burt making the data available, so this is not postmodernist. On methodology, what makes Derrida distinctively postmodern is, presumably, that he used deconstruction, so that he used a method that is used by postmodernists and is not used in preexisting, conventional, “modernist” social science. Thus simply using any method to critique prior work is not sufficient to qualify the critique as being postmodernist. In postmodernism, the method used to make the critique matters. However, while Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 469) say that Burt chose “. . . a canonical data set to deconstruct . . .,” but he did not use the method of deconstruction, so that the method employed in his critique is different to Derrida. Indeed Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 469) admit that “Burt used the tools of the typically modernist structural approach.” This is fine, but why is his work being held up as an example in an article advocating postmodernism? Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 469) explain: “Far from having to ritually reject modernist advances in technology, postmodernists can use such advances for their own ends.” But if this is so, what is distinctive about postmodernism? A critique such as Burt’s that uses “modernist” methods is not thereby postmodern, nor somehow like postmodernism, nor part of some wider zeitgeist in that direction. The mere fact of making a critique does not qualify a text as deconstruction or postmodernism. On this point, Kilduff and Mehra (1997) seem to display a weak grasp of what is this postmodernism that they are advocating. Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 469) also applaud Burt’s article: “As a passionate statement of advocacy for a particular perspective, Burt’s work succeeds in communicating the excitement of personal discovery rather than the dullness of objective analysis.” But much writing in social science advocates a position

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to which the author feels personally committed, and analyses are conducted and presented to support the theory. This is quite compatible with traditional organizational science research and the conventional view of science, and is not distinctive of postmodernism. The remaining attribute of Burt’s work that qualifies it, according to Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 469), as being in affinity with Derrida, is that they both critique a classical work in their field, thereby performing a “revolutionary undermining of assumptions.” But criticizing classical work and overthrowing it by offering a radically different theory is a standard part of science, social science, and scholarship. Cohen (1985) wrote a whole book entitled Revolution in Science, on the history of scientific revolutions. In organizational science, within the conventional literature that has no connections with postmodernism, there have been many examples of critiques overthrowing classical theories and seeking to replace them. Indeed that is a frequent feature of writings that declare a new organizational theory. For instance, Hannan and Freeman (1977) critique the prior work by Chandler (1962) as part of their argument for their new theory, population ecology. Hence neither Burt’s offering his data to others, methodology, passion, nor radical challenge to the preexisting belief, make his work postmodernist; it is within the traditions of conventional social science. In summary, it is bizarre that Kilduff and Mehra (1997) invoke Merton, Popper, and Burt as writers who work in, or in support of, postmodernism. These three are bastions of the conventional views in social science, which predate postmodernism and which postmodernism is supposed to be challenging and overturning. This overenthusiastic effort to assimilate establishment figures may be an attempt to borrow their authority (McCloskey, 1983). It is part of the pitch by Kilduff and Mehra (1997) that postmodernism is a constructive, open-minded movement that is not to be feared. However, the exercise in eclecticism undermines the claim that postmodernism offers something new and different that overturns what has existed before in organizational studies. Similarly, as we have seen, Cal´as and Smircich (1999, p. 662) utilize concepts such as “globalization processes” and “the interests of global capital.” These theoretical concepts are of a type familiar in preexisting social science, so it is hard to see in them anything new, distinctively postmodernist, or involving the overthrow of the modes of theorizing that existed in social studies before postmodernism. Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 466) make negative statements about conventional research methods, especially involving statistics, so that hostility to quantitative methods might be taken to be distinctive of postmodernism: Researchers working from a postmodern perspective may limit themselves to the detailed examination of one or a few cases rather than trying to generalize over hundreds of cases. The postmodern preference is for detailed understanding of the particular, for local knowledge

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and local times, as opposed to statistical trends . . . Standard statistics are not enough to provide authenticity to the research report.

However, Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 467) also embrace quantitative methods as part of their postmodernist approach: “We champion the simultaneous availability of apparently incongruous research methods including laboratory experiments, deconstruction, ethnography, and sophisticated statistical analyses.” Also, as we have just seen, Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 469) approve of Burt’s use of “the tools of the typically modernist structural approach.” Thus, if postmodernism embraces quantitative methods, hostility to them is not a defining attribute of postmodernism. Given the wide sweep of methods to be included in postmodernism, according to Kilduff and Mehra (1997), it does not seem that postmodernism requires the use of some distinctive new method such as deconstruction. The methodological diversity advocated by postmodernists such as Kilduff and Mehra (1997) undermines any sense that postmodernism is characterized by a method that differentiates it from conventional organization studies. Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 466) write that: “An activist postmodern stance challenges conventional wisdom and transgresses established boundaries with bold conjectures and innovative methods.” Yet the phrase “bold conjectures” was used approvingly by Popper (1969) in describing the theory development process in science. As mentioned already, Popper is an influential philosopher for many conventional organizational scientists, so when Kilduff and Mehra (1997) advocate bold conjectures they are not taking a distinctively postmodernist position. Kilduff and Mehra (1997, p. 473) also write that “postmodernists prefer the interesting over the obvious . . .” and highly value “counterintuiton” among other things. Yet these values are in no way unique to postmodernism. Conventional social and organizational science place a low value on proving the obvious. Within conventional organizational science, for instance, Blau (1970, 1972) shows that the widely presumed “fact” that organizations become top heavy with managers as they grow, i.e. that the ratio of managers and administrative staff to total employees increases with organizational size, is false. The ratio decreases with organizational size (Blau, 1970, 1972). This is a counterintuitive finding. Philosophers of science who are not allied to postmodernism have pointed out that science values bold conjectures that turn out to be empirically valid, whereas simply proving what everyone already knows contributes very little (Chalmers, 1999). Davis (1971) points out that an interesting finding and argument is one that challenges and inverts the background knowledge. Thus, a preference for the interesting over the obvious is not distinctive of postmodernism and is not new. Organization studies is not dependent for the discovery of interesting and counterintuitive knowledge upon abandoning the conventional approaches and adopting postmodernism.

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In summary, while we share the positive appreciation of Kilduff and Mehra (1997) of the attributes discussed above that they ascribe to postmodernism, none qualify it as a new approach to organizational studies. Their eclecticism may be laudable, but the compatibility with conventional organizational studies of the attributes discussed above reduces the distinctiveness of postmodernism. The postmodernism they advocate confuses postmodernist with conventional organizational studies. The positive aspects of these attributes provide no basis for embracing postmodernism in place of conventional organizational studies, because these attributes are already contained in conventional organizational studies.

“DECONSTRUCTING” ORGANIZATIONS Cal´as and Smircich (1999) give two main types of “Postmodern Organization Theorizing” (pp. 654–658): “Genealogical analyses”(p. 655) and “Deconstruction” (p. 656). In their section on “Deconstruction” (Cal´as & Smircich, 1999, pp. 656–658), they write approvingly of Kilduff (1993) as being “an excellent and very sophisticated illustration of this approach in organization studies” (p. 657). Therefore, let us examine this article to understand more about deconstruction when it is used in organizational studies. Kilduff (1993) presents a deconstruction of March and Simon’s (1958) classic, “foundational” (p. 13) text, Organizations. Kilduff (1993) begins the article with a section headed “Deconstruction” (pp. 14–16) that explains deconstruction, drawing extensively on the work of Derrida (1976, 1988). He then presents the main section of his article, “Deconstructing Organizations” (Kilduff, 1993, pp. 17–28). This argues that March and Simon (1958) made as a major argument that preceding writing about organizations viewed employees as machines (Kilduff, 1993, p. 17). This depiction is argued by them to be present in scientific management, classical management theory and in Weber (Kilduff, 1993, pp. 17–18). March and Simon critique this view and seek to replace it with the view of employees as decisionmakers. However, this entails likening employees to computers, so that March and Simon are also depicting employees as machines, Kilduff argues (1993, pp. 19–21). Thus, according to Kilduff, March and Simon are really continuing in a tradition of theorizing that they claim to reject and replace (Kilduff, 1993, pp. 19–21). Further, for March and Simon, cognitive limitations on rationality means that decision-making has to be guided by programs that assemble programs from the past and fit them to the new circumstances (Kilduff, 1993, pp. 19–21). This programming is done by managers, so that there is little real innovation and employees are not allowed to use their discretion, says Kilduff (1993, pp. 21–23). Hence March and Simon are creating an ideology of managerial

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control of lower-level employees, according to Kilduff (1993, pp. 24–26). Kilduff (1993, pp. 25–26) argues that these restricted jobs that result from programming actually dull employees, thereby reducing their cognitive capacity. He criticizes March and Simon for failing to discuss alternative approaches to job design that grant discretion to employees, such as job enlargement (Kilduff, 1993, p. 26). Plainly, Kilduff offers a critique of March and Simon, but is this through the method of deconstruction? Kilduff uses some of the language of deconstruction, such as “Presence and Absence” (p. 17) and “absence and presence” (p. 28), but the use of these pieces of deconstructionist language is not enough to make his critique a deconstruction. As seen, the main critical point Kilduff makes against March and Simon is that, while they reject the machine view of employees propounded by earlier organizational scholars, they offer the view of employees as computers, which is also a view of employees as machines. The logic here is that March and Simon’s view is like the earlier view because both views belong to a higher-order category, i.e. the category of machine. Showing that a theory that claims to reject A and replace it with not-A fails, because the not-A is really A, is a damaging criticism of a theory. But, surely, this type of criticism has long been used in science and social science. Its roots go back into logic and the dialectic of debate. There is nothing in this criticism that qualifies it as being of a new type or distinctively deconstructionist. In particular, there are critiques, which preexist, or exist independently of, deconstructionism, which argue that approaches to organization that are claimed by their proponents to replace controls on employees are really just another form of control. Child (1972a) argued that while large organizations are decentralized, so that employees are subject to less supervision, they are also subject to more bureaucratic control (e.g. rules and regulations), which is an alternative form of control. Similarly, the absence of bureaucratic controls in professional organizations is accompanied by greater professional controls (i.e. norms internalized through professional training), so that the control is not necessarily that much reduced (Blau & Scott, 1963). Again, in autonomous work-groups, formal organizational control over workers is reduced, but it is replaced by informal control by other workers (Barker, 1993). Thus, the theme that the decline in one form of control is compensated for by the rise of another form, so that control is maintained, is a familiar one in organizational science. Hence there is nothing distinctively postmodernist about Kilduff’s thesis that March and Simon’s theory just substitutes one machine metaphor for another and thereby the imagery of control over employees is maintained. In commenting about what has been done in the article, Kilduff (1993, p. 28) writes: “Deconstruction alerts the reader to the existence of a subtext that may

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undermine adherence to the agenda the explicit text asserts.” Subtext sounds like something that is wholly, or partially, hidden, so that this sentence seems as if deconstruction has some special way to revel what is hidden. If it has, then this could be a way to fulfill the opening promise that deconstruction reveals a “hidden textual level” and a “hidden text” (Kilduff, 1993, p. 16). However, Kilduff’s method to show the “subtext” is simply to quote and cite passages from March and Simon that document that March and Simon are using a machine view of employees (e.g. 1993, p. 20). There is no revelation of something hidden, for these are explicit statements by March and Simon, which are available for any reader to notice. Kilduff is doing the work for the reader of bringing together these disparate statements from across the text in a unifying way. Yet, this is a completely orthodox technique of criticism, of a kind that has long been used in scholarship. Again, there seems nothing new or distinctively deconstructionist in this aspect of his critique. Kilduff’s (1993, pp. 17–18) opening critique is that March and Simon construct rhetorically an argument in which preceding approaches are treated as falling within the category of viewing employees as machines. They do this in order to create a deficiency that they can make good by going on to present their supposedly newer view. Kilduff (1993, p. 18) implies that some of those categorized in the machine view, such as Weber, have to be shoehorned into the category for the sake of depicting all prior approaches as belonging to the flawed school. However, none of this seems to allege anything more than that March and Simon have constructed an argument that exaggerated the extent to which all preceding writers have the same flaw, in order to make their own contribution the more original, greater and more important. Yet, surely, this kind of criticism is a conventional one. It is quite explicable in terms of the tendency of some authors to try to overstate their own originality, in order to attain better the novelty that is valued in organizational studies (Mone & McKinley, 1993). Similarly, one way to be interesting is to say something that runs counter to the preexisting beliefs of the audience (Davis, 1971), so telling the reader that the prior work all falls into one category, which the writer then overturns, is a possible device in academic writing. Here Kilduff is essentially claiming to find a mechanism in Organizations that belongs to rhetoric, a study that is centuries old (McCloskey, 1983). Also, Kilduff (1993, p. 18) writes that March and Simon omit from their review of the prior literature Roethlisberger and Dickson (1939), which would have been awkward for March and Simon to acknowledge, because it had already filled the gap that they were seeking to fill. But pointing out that an argument is flawed, because it omits an important part of the prior literature that contradicts its argument, is again a familiar mode of criticism. There is nothing distinctively new and deconstructionist in this opening critique. In a section headed “A Confessional Tale,” Kilduff (1993, p. 27) writes candidly of his motives:

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. . . my motive for this deconstruction is not only to expose textual limitations, but also to permanently change the way the text is used in management education and research. To the extent that the ideology of programming as embedded in Organizations continues to legitimate fractionation of work and restriction of innovation, I believe the text must bear some responsibility for the prevalence of these problems in industry. The deconstruction of the text, then, focuses attention on an ideology that extends from the text – to the Academy – to the world of work.

However, toward the end of his article, Kilduff (1993, p. 29) makes the argument that all deconstructions, including his article, because they are texts, are capable of multiple interpretations. And Kilduff (1993, p. 27) also writes: . . . I should caution the reader about the epistemological status of this deconstruction of Organizations: Is it the only one possible? Can I claim that the analysis performed here is simply the application of a method to a problem that is independent of my own agenda? Clearly, such a claim cannot be sustained. Different readers can potentially unlock different narratives from the same text.

But, logically, this implies that those other, equally valid interpretations of Organizations could include narratives that hold Kilduff’s critique of March and Simon to be false, or hold Organizations to be correct. Usually, when a scholar critiques earlier work as being incorrect, the work done in making the critique is offered to the reader to warrant that the critic is right and that the critiqued text is truly defective in the way the critique claims. The critique is supposed to have authority, and to be rational grounds for the reader to accept what the critique says and to adopt its conclusions. If a deconstructionist critique does not offer this authority, so that any other interpretation of the text, including opposite interpretations, are equally valid, then it is a very weak form of critique, and far weaker than conventional critiques that damage, refute, or falsify a text. While this sort of very open, inconclusive status of Kilduff’s critique may be consistent with the philosophy of deconstruction and postmodernism (unstable meaning etc), it is hardly consistent with his statements that Organizations is an “ideology of programming” (p. 27), which “continues to legitimate fractionation of work and restriction of innovation” (p. 27). Kilduff makes these assertions as definite characterizations of the text, not just one possible interpretation. If they were just one possible interpretation then they would not allow Kilduff to build on them to make his moral judgment that “the text must bear some responsibility for the prevalence of these problems in industry” (p. 27). You can hardly hold Anne responsible for murdering Joe, if you say that the sentence that Anne killed Joe is only one possible narrative of the events and that many other widely differing interpretations are possible (e.g. that Joe killed himself). Similarly, Kilduff’s (1993, p. 27) socially activist reason for critiquing March and Simon is “to permanently change the way the text is used in management education and research.” For Kilduff to attain that end, his readers – the

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management educators and researchers who read AMR – have to believe that there is truth in his critique and that it is not just one of a multiplicity of equally valid interpretations of Organizations. Here again we see the tension between a radical social activist stance of wishing to affect the world politically and the relativist postmodern posture that texts have no stable meaning. Earlier we saw how proponents of deconstruction argue that there is nothing beyond the text, in that words refer only to other words and not to things in a reality external to the text, i.e. meaning is undecidable and there is a crisis of representation. Kilduff (1993, p. 14) approvingly writes: “For Derrida, there is literally ‘nothing outside the text’ ” (1976, p. 158). However, as we have seen, Kilduff (1993, p. 27) also states: “The deconstruction of the text, then, focuses attention on an ideology that extends from the text – to the Academy – to the world of work.” Clearly, he is here treating the world of work as being an external reality, where people work at their fractionated jobs. Moreover, Kilduff (1993, p. 27) is concerned that March and Simon’s text legitimates an ideology of programming that has negative effects in this real world of work. The force of such a negative evaluation clearly rests on the proposition that March and Simon’s text really legitimates an ideology of programming that really has negative effects in the real world of work. If these statements about March and Simon’s texts are just hypothetical stories with no purchase on reality, then there would be no need to be concerned about their social impact. Thus here Kilduff is not subscribing to the postmodern philosophy about words referring only to other words and the crisis of representation. Kilduff (1993, p. 29) makes the postmodernist philosophical point that “authors” of deconstructions “have no privileged access to the meaning of the text they inscribe.” But this rubs uneasily against statements that Kilduff (1993, pp. 26–28) writes in the section “A Confessional Tale.” In this, he explains how this article builds on his previous work (Kilduff, 1993, pp. 26–27): As an academic researcher I already have a stake in the outcome of the debate initiated by the deconstruction of Organizations. Previously, I have tried to undermine the claims of the information-processing model as applied to job design (Kilduff & Regan, 1988). In that earlier piece, the argument in the present article was prefigured: My coauthor and I tried to show empirically that the model of the employee as a passive, easily programmed automaton was a fiction . . .

Kilduff (1993, p. 27) then goes on to state his motives for the present article (as quoted above), in terms of combating the ideology of programming because of its baleful effect on the world of work. In these statements, Kilduff gives the reader the personal meaning of his deconstruction for him. It seems that he believes he knows his own mind about what he has written and why. In this section, Kilduff describes himself as the cogent agent of his own conduct. It is not at all the vacuous

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author-function, which postmodernism uses (as we saw above). If such confessions by an author contain no valid insight about the meaning of their work, why does Kilduff, as the author, give them to the reader? When he writes his “Confessional Tale” section, Kilduff is subscribing to the conventional view of authorship rather than the author-function of postmodernist philosophy. Here we see the tension between Kilduff as a person with a point of view, of which he is conscious, and the vaporous author-function concept of postmodernism. Clearly, in this section, Kilduff is not embracing the philosophical position of postmodernism that there is no point in asking an author about the meaning of his or her text. As seen, Kilduff (1993) is concerned that Organizations legitimates and perpetuates employee subjugation. This places him in a long line of academics whose scholarly critiques are motivated by a radical impulse to liberate people from subjugation by organizations. This line goes back before deconstructionism and the writings of Derrida that Kilduff cites. For instance, in organizational studies, Silverman (1968) critiqued and sought to overturn functionalism as being an ideology that, in his view, justified subjugation. Similarly, Child (1972b) criticized and sought to overturn situational determinism, because, in his view, it induces metaphysical pathos and fatalism. Thus, being impelled by some radical social agenda may incline a scholar toward critique, but it does not necessitate the adoption of a decontructionist approach. Similarly, though less radically, organizational theory that predates postmodernism argued that programming by managers of employees through rules is ineffectual in a changing environment, and that employees need to be granted discretion for innovation to occur (Burns & Stalker, 1961). Thus, one can advance organizational theories that are critical of programming and seek to advance employee emancipation without having to use postmodernist deconstruction. Therefore, scholars sympathetic to those aims do not have to adopt postmodernist deconstruction. Similarly, the fact that Kilduff has such aims is no reason to believe that he uses deconstruction. In conclusion, Kilduff’s critique of Organizations is by critical methods widely used in conventional scholarship. Notwithstanding the claims made for it by Cal´as and Smircich (1999), his article does not illustrate a new, distinctive method of deconstruction in organization studies. His substantive thesis, that March and Simon’s programming theory of human decision-making contributes to an ideology that legitimates managerial domination, job fractionation, and lack of innovation is in the tradition of earlier critical, radical and conflict theories of organizations. This substantive thesis is in contradiction with the postmodernist philosophy that accompanies it. This is necessarily the case, because deconstructionism cannot make any definite statements that claim to be authoritative and that warrant belief, nor does postmodernist philosophy allow that a text can have a stable meaning or refer to reality. Yet, without stable meanings and reference to reality, there is no

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science and no basis on which to launch any kind of social reform, including the kind that Kilduff wishes.

CONCLUSIONS Postmodern philosophy argues that there is nothing beyond the text. The meaning of words is just other words, and words do not represent things in a reality outside of texts. Any text is capable of multiple interpretations, with no recourse to what the author meant, because the author is just an author-function, a concatenation of the received previous meanings of texts. All texts are political, silencing certain viewpoints and suppressing the groups that hold them. Deconstruction reveals hidden conflicts in texts that reduce the authoritativeness of the text. This creates a space for other interpretations and giving voice and power to suppressed groups. However, each of these postmodernist ideas has been shown here to be fatally flawed. Texts can refer to states of affairs outside of themselves. In empirical science, observations are made of the world and recorded as observation statements in scientific texts, to compare theory with reality – leading to adjustments of theory over time. While texts can have more than one interpretation, scholarly practices exist that seek to provide an authoritative interpretation of a text. This involves close reading of and quoting a text to prove to the reader that the text has the meaning that a scholar claims. This conventional scholarly method is used by Kilduff to justify his interpretation of March and Simon’s Organizations. In practice, an agreed interpretation of central texts tends to arise within a paradigm community, as part of the existence of a paradigm, i.e. shared understanding of the main features of a theory and its attendant research. Additionally, authors are capable of being clear in their own minds about what they mean and why they wrote a text, as Kilduff exemplifies. The fact that any text makes some statements and not others does not amount to that text silencing or suppressing other views on the same topic, or on other topics. This equation of writing with silencing leads to the problem for postmodernism that all its texts would necessarily also be silencing and suppressing, so that postmodernism cannot offer a way out of the impasse it depicts. However, the postmodernist view of writing is a sinister and paranoiac phantom. Writing allows the expression of multiple, and sometimes conflicting, views on a topic, and on a multitude of topics, so that writing is a mainstay of liberty in societies. The promise of postmodernism that it will help in rescuing people from oppression and powerlessness is contradicted by its inability to warrant any statement about the oppressed and oppression as being a true statement that justifies belief. Thus, postmodernism provides no basis for radical social action or social change.

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The attempt to follow postmodernist philosophy and apply it to organization studies is beset by problems. It is incapable of offering any positive theoretical view about organizations, because that runs counter to the doctrine about undecidable meanings. Postmodernism is therefore unable to move beyond critiquing previous texts to assert something definite, which precludes postmodernism from making a constructive contribution to organizational studies. Where postmodernists, such as Calas and Smircich, seek to say something definite about developments in organizational theory, they are necessarily forced to abandon the postmodernist approach, as they admit. In this and other ways, postmodernist organizational studies writings frequently fall into self-contradiction. Therefore it is no accident that some attributes of social or organizational studies that are claimed to be postmodern, or consistent with postmodernism, turn out to be familiar features of social or organizational studies, and these attributes do not use some new, distinctive, postmodernist approach. Similarly, some criticisms made by postmodernists in organizational studies are actually conventional, e.g. Kilduff’s supposedly deconstructionist critique of March and Simon. His thesis rests on philosophical assumptions opposite to the postmodernist philosophy he invokes. In particular, he is implicitly assuming that he can make statements with stable meanings that are about the real world outside of the text. Postmodernist philosophy is a nihilist position that can, according to its own view, offer only endless critique and reinterpretation. No positive, new theory can be produced by it. Fortunately, the postmodernist philosophical position is wrong. As we have seen, even its protagonists frequently contradict it while seeking to explain or illustrate it. Examples offered of postmodernism in organization studies turn out not to embody a new, distinctive postmodernist approach. Therefore, neither at the philosophical nor at the case-illustration level are there any good reasons to adopt postmodernism in organization studies. Organization studies should continue to pursue the conventional approach, which is capable of producing valid generalizations and other scientific fruits.

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POSTMODERN EPISTEMOLOGY IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL William McKinley INTRODUCTION During the last 10 years, there have been several calls for a postmodern epistemology in organization studies (e.g. Hassard, 1994; Kilduff & Mehra, 1997). While most organization studies researchers would probably not think of themselves as postmodernists, one response to these calls is that the callers are preaching to the already converted. That is, the implicit norms that govern what are considered desirable scholarly contributions in organization studies today already bear the stamp of a postmodern epistemology. It is an epistemology that has not been consciously adopted by most organization studies scholars, but nevertheless has left its imprint on their work. The purpose of this chapter is to develop that argument, focusing first on three scholarly norms that are prominent in contemporary organization studies. These three scholarly norms are: (1) the positive valuation of the attribute “insight”; (2) the use and positive valuation of broad-scope theoretical constructs; and (3) the positive valuation of multiple schools of thought. I will discuss each of these norms in turn and argue that each is consistent with, and supported by, underlying currents of thought in postmodernist epistemology. I will identify the elements of postmodernist epistemology that I believe support each norm and then critically appraise the norm in light of reservations I have about postmodernist thought. While the three norms identified above

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certainly do not cover the entire range of scholarly “best practices” in organization studies today, I believe they are sufficient to illustrate the link between everyday scholarly practice in the discipline and postmodernist views of knowledge. In the second half of the chapter, I will raise the possibility that a general postmodernist epistemological paradigm is solidifying in organization studies. I will identify three themes of that paradigm – fragmentation, theoretical flux, and ambiguity – and again subject these themes to critique. The purpose of this latter exercise is to further elaborate the process of postmodernization that seems to be ongoing in organization studies, so that readers can decide for themselves whether that is a productive direction for the discipline to take. Before beginning the agenda outlined above, I want to provide some definitions. In contrast to the postmodernist epistemological tendency toward “undecidability” (Cooper, 1989; Derrida, 1981), I hope that these definitions are clear and unambiguous. Following Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Merriam & Company, 1964, p. 765) I define epistemology as “the study of the method and grounds of knowledge.” Thus epistemology entails a theory of how knowledge is founded and how it should be transmitted between knowledge users. Postmodernism is defined as an intellectual movement that has grown out of various strands of continental philosophy (West, 1996). Contributions typically identified as postmodernist include the work of Jean Baudrillard (1975, 1983), Jacques Derrida (1973, 1976, 1978, 1981), Michel Foucault (1970, 1977a, b), and Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard (1984). To further develop this characterization, we can distinguish between two interpretations of the term “postmodernism” (Hassard, 1994). In the first interpretation, postmodernism (or postmodernity) is construed as a historical epoch that began in the 1970s, following the historical era of modernism (Harvey, 1990). The postmodern historical epoch is marked by certain distinct social and economic features, such as “flexible accumulation” and “time–space compression” (Harvey, 1990). In the second interpretation of “postmodernism,” the term designates a particular theory of knowledge, or epistemology. This epistemology has characteristics that differentiate it from the epistemology that is most often contrasted with it, “positivism.” Some of those characteristics are “reflexivity” in knowledge production, an insistence on the inherent “undecidability” of language, a rejection of “logocentrism” and “metanarrative,” and an awareness of the artificial suspension of fluctuating meaning involved in the act of writing (see Burrell, 1988; Cooper, 1989; Cooper & Burrell, 1988; Hassard, 1994; West, 1996). My focus in this chapter will be almost exclusively on postmodernism as epistemology, and when I use the term “postmodernist epistemology” I will mean a theory of knowledge distinguished by the characteristics listed above. I first want to explore the connection between this epistemology and

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the three organization studies scholarly norms I referred to earlier in this introduction.

FROM TRUTH TO INSIGHT: CELEBRATING THE LOCAL One of the most interesting aspects of contemporary organization studies scholarship is the emphasis placed on “insight” as a norm of good scholarly work. For example, in one affirmation of the value of insight, the Administrative Science Quarterly’s Notice to Contributors reads, in part: “But we take pains not to confuse interesting work with work that contains mere novelties, clever turns of phrase, or other substitutes for insight” (Administrative Science Quarterly, 2001, p. 809). One gets the sense from this statement that insight is an important scholarly attribute in the eyes of the ASQ editors, to be contrasted with less-desirable authorial offerings such as “mere novelties” or “clever turns of phrase.” The term “insight” crops up again in the Information for Contributors section of the Academy of Management Review: “AMR publishes novel, insightful, and carefully crafted conceptual articles that challenge conventional wisdom concerning all aspects of organizations and their role in society” (Academy of Management Review, 2002, p. 482). In the second paragraph of the same Information for Contributors section, we find the sentence: “Although AMR seeks a variety of perspectives, each manuscript published in AMR must provide new theoretical insights that can advance our understanding of management and organizations” (Academy of Management Review, 2002, p. 482; emphasis in original). Again, the message is that insight is a desirable quality to be pursued by organization studies scholars who wish to contribute to the journal. Mirroring the ASQ and AMR guidelines for contributing authors, insight is also extolled in the standard Statement of Editorial Policies that appears in Organization Science: “The editors believe that creative insight often occurs outside traditional research approaches and topic areas, and the journal can help integrate the diverse strands of organizational research” (Organization Science, 1997, p. 710). One could add to these examples the many uses of the term “insight” in the scholarly articles published in these journals and in book chapters in edited volumes in organization studies. These examples provide preliminary support for the argument that insight is viewed as an important criterion of good scholarship by the gatekeepers of the major organization studies journals and the scholars who publish their work there. The word “insight” suggests a deep and penetrating view to the heart of a phenomenon, but the word is also evocative of individualism and idiosyncrasy. In its individualistic connotation, insight positions itself at the opposite pole of

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“aperspectival objectivity,” which Daston (1992) maintained is the dominant meaning of “objectivity” in contemporary usage. Thus insight, while penetrating, implies a condition of subjectivity, which some contemporary commentators on organization studies (e.g. Case, 2003) have begun recommending as a route to authentic organizational scholarship. In its suggestion of subjectivity and idiosyncrasy, insight can be contrasted with the criterion of “truth,” because establishing truth claims requires building a consensus that extends beyond the perspective of a single individual (Latour & Woolgar, 1986; Shapin, 1994; Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). Indeed, Alvesson and Deetz (1996) contrast validity and insight as opposite extremes on one sub-dimension of the consensus-dissensus dimension that anchors their conceptual scheme for understanding critical theory and postmodernism. In summary, the current emphasis on the value of insight in organization studies scholarship appears to offer an alternative to truth as the ultimate standard for evaluating the worth of scholarly contributions (Hunt, 1990). In this respect the rise of insight follows a trail blazed by other criteria that have come to the fore in recent decades as alternatives to truth in judging good organizational scholarship. For example, Davis (1971) maintained that the primary determinant of a theory’s impact was not its validity but how “interesting” it was perceived to be by scholarly consumers. According to Davis (1971), interesting theories attract attention and become the subject of empirical research. However, the diffusion of the theories and associated research does not necessarily depend on how “true” they have been shown to be. Correspondingly, Astley (1985) argued that the purpose of organization studies research is not to generate validated theory or discover objective truth, but to produce theoretical language that can be used in scholarly and managerial discourse. Here again criteria other than truth dominate in the evaluative calculus of what constitutes good scholarly work. In a similar way, Weick (1995) proposed that plausibility trumps accuracy in sensemaking. While Weick (1995) intended this statement to apply to sensemaking in the everyday world, it also appears applicable to the sensemaking that organizational scholars do as they seek to understand the phenomena they are investigating. This implies that plausibility may be as, or more, important than truth in determining the allegiances of organization theorists to existing theoretical schools of thought. Finally, McKinley, Mone and Moon (1999) proposed that novelty, continuity, and broad scope – not validity – were the factors that determine which developing schools of thought become institutionalized in organization studies. In summary, if insight represents a retreat from the evaluative standard of truth, it is a retreat down a path that is already well worn. The espousal of insight as an important measure of scholarly contribution is consistent with, and arguably gains support from, several themes in postmodernist

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epistemology. The most important of those supportive themes is probably the postmodernist rejection of “metanarratives,” or “global world views” (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996; Kilduff & Mehra, 1997). As Kilduff and Mehra (1997) pointed out, the term postmodernism has itself been defined as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard, 1984). A skepticism toward metanarratives creates a climate friendly to insight, because insight involves penetrating, but individualized knowledge that may not generalize beyond the originator. Thus insight protects against the creation of metanarratives, which many postmodernists characterize as “totalizing” (e.g. Lyotard, 1984). Indeed, in postmodernist thinking marked by a rejection of metanarratives, attempts to transcend individual insight to produce a scholarly “truth” would be suspect, because they would run the risk of creating another metanarrative. This compatibility between the criterion of insight and postmodernist epistemology may help explain why insight is advocated so frequently in editorial policies, calls for papers, and other semi-official texts in organization studies. While it seems doubtful that the authors of such texts are adopting a consciously postmodernist stance, they may be unconsciously influenced by the diffusion of postmodernist epistemology from its origin in philosophy into the contemporary social sciences (West, 1996). The criterion of insight is also consistent with postmodernist arguments for local knowledge, which are closely related to the position against metanarratives. For example, in seeking to develop a postmodernist approach to organization studies, Kilduff and Mehra (1997) maintained that we should “celebrate the local” in knowledge production. They suggested that colorful local knowledge about individual cases of organizational phenomena would be more interesting and therefore more desirable than the dull objectivity of empirical conclusions based on many cases. This kind of argument helps legitimize insight, because the individuality of insight is compatible with local knowledge production that does not seek to generalize beyond the individual case or research paper. Insight attains credibility primarily in an epistemological “space” in which the local is privileged over the general, as appears to be the case in postmodernist thinking. While the depth of perception inherent in insight does indeed achieve something that objective generalization cannot, I would argue that insight is not a substitute for the comprehensiveness that is attained by general representations of the world. In other words, merely cultivating insight is inadequate to fulfill the full mission of organization studies. In my (perhaps perspectival) view, we also need to transcend insight by building scholarly consensus about representations of the underlying organizational phenomena we study. I agree with the constructivist historians of science (e.g. Golinski, 1998) that these “phenomena” – things such as motivation, organization structure, power, strategy, etc. – are constructions, developed either by practitioners or by scholars who study the activities of the practitioners.

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However, it is only in generating cross-scholar consensus about the meaning of these constructions that they become externalized and take on enough objectivity to be studied as phenomena (McKinley, 2003). Therefore I have concerns about the apparent ubiquity of the criterion of insight in the organization studies literature, because that ubiquity may threaten the perceived worth of the consensus-building project I am referring to. If our field is to have any status as an enterprise for studying something outside language, we need to move beyond individual insight to create the sort of agreement that can fully objectify unobservable constructs (Godfrey & Hill, 1995). This consensus may end up generating scholarly metanarratives, but perhaps such metanarratives are the only way to make the underlying complexity of organizational reality tractable (Locke, 2002) and to move toward the creation of a quasi-natural organization science (McKelvey, 1997). It should also be emphasized that whether or not organization studies scholars engage in producing metanarratives and transcending local knowledge, such metanarratives and transcendences are out there in the “real world,” as exemplified by the metanarratives of capitalism, democracy, globalization, organizational change, downsizing, business process reengineering, and a host of other objectified constructions. Indeed “organization” itself is probably the most fundamental of those constructions for our discipline, and its objective reality is not in question for most of the individuals who are daily participants in organizations. If we eschew the creation of scholarly agreement about such constructions and rely too heavily on insightful views that resist generalization (precisely because of their insight), I fear we will be marginalized as an irrelevant discipline. In other words, we may lose the possibility of representing and explaining many important organizational phenomena that extend well beyond the subjectivity of an individual perspective on the world.

BROAD-SCOPE CONSTRUCTS: VIVE LA DIFFERANCE The second organization studies norm that I would like to draw attention to in this chapter is the use and positive valuation of broad-scope theoretical constructs in organizational scholarship. By “broad-scope constructs,” I mean constructs that encompass a wide range of empirical observations (Bacharach, 1989) and admit of multiple possible meanings. Examples include the “umbrella constructs” identified by Hirsch and Levin (1999): “effectiveness,” “capital,” “technology,” and “culture.” McKinley (2003) added other examples: “institution,” “transaction,” “power,” and “strategy.” While the use of broad-scope constructs is certainly not confined to the field of organization studies, these lists do suggest the prevalence of this type of construct in the field.

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Because they encompass a broad range of empirical observations and are open to a variety of interpretations, broad-scope constructs are inherently ambiguous. This ambiguity has been noted in previous commentary (see, for example, Eisenberg, 1984) and various explanations have been offered for it. For example, Astley and Zammuto (1992) maintained that ambiguous, broad-scope constructs with indefinite boundaries serve both an integrative and a protective theoretical role, simultaneously increasing the number of empirical observations that can be construed as tests of a theory and reducing the probability that any one of those observations will be judged a conclusive refutation of that theory. Bacharach (1989) also pointed to these dual aspects of organizational constructs, framing them in terms of a tension between utility and falsifiability. The broader the scope of a construct, the more it can serve to integrate diverse empirical cases and therefore the greater its explanatory utility. At the same time, high explanatory utility tends to be correlated with low falsifiability, since the broad scope that imparts utility also makes constructs difficult to measure and renders the theories containing them hard to falsify. Empirical researchers might present results that appear to disconfirm a theory formulated with broad-scope constructs, but broad construct scope always makes it possible for advocates of the theory to question the construct validity of the measures used to generate those results. McKinley and Mone (1998) took this argument one step further, suggesting that broad, ambiguous constructs of the type frequently encountered in organization studies reinforce incommensurability between organization studies schools of thought. The broad scope of the constructs featured in the theoretical frameworks of these schools inhibits the development of consensus-based construct definitions and measures that could provide a rigorous standard for comparison of the relative validity of the schools (McKinley & Mone, 1998, 2003). The preceding paragraph summarizes explanations for the proliferation of broadly formulated constructs in organization studies, founding those explanations on arguments not explicitly linked to postmodernist epistemology. However, additional explanatory purchase can be achieved by reference to some specific elements of postmodernist thought. One of these elements is Jacques Derrida’s stance against “logocentricism,” and his description of the related concepts of “differance” and linguistic “undecidability.” As summarized by Cooper (1989), Hancock and Tyler (2001), Hassard (1994), and Alvesson and Deetz (1996), Derrida’s (1976) epistemology rejects the idea of preformed entities such as “self,” “nature,” “markets,” or “societies” that can be represented through language. For Derrida, this inappropriately assumes “an original ‘logos,’ or presupposed metaphysical structure (e.g. mind, soul, reason, etc.) that validates and gives meaning to human activities” (Cooper, 1989, p. 482). Instead, Derrida points to the constitutive power of language to construct the metaphysical entities that

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we normally assume to be prior to language. Language provides a means, not of signifying pre-existing external objects, but of temporarily halting the flux of reality long enough to demarcate the flux as “objects” and understand them as such. Thus language fulfills an information-processing function and a constructive function as opposed to a mirroring function. If one accepts this view, the parts of the external world that constructs encapsulate are fluid, and it is fallacious to think of a unitary preexisting phenomenon that could drive consensus about the meaning of a construct covering it. This epistemological view is receptive to multiple possible meanings of a single construct, and indeed that multiplicity best matches the fluctuation of reality over time. In such an epistemological context, the use of broad-scope constructs with multiple possible meanings would be encouraged. While Derrida’s epistemology is not explicitly avowed by most organizational scholars (many have probably never heard of the philosopher), their attitudes toward scholarly usage may nevertheless have been influenced by the implications of his views. As additional reinforcement for acquiescence to the institutionalization of broad-scope constructs, these constructs can be attached and reattached to different parts of organizational reality as that reality is constructed and reconstructed by different scholars in a series of novel organizational theories and schools (McKinley et al., 1999). In order for the objectification of constructs that is typical of “positivism” (Knights, 1992) to occur, Derrida maintains that some of the meanings inherent in a term have to be “deferred” in favor of a single meaning. This deferral process is captured by the term “differance,” which, according to Cooper (1989, p. 488) “embodies the two meanings of the French verb ‘diff´erer’: to defer, or postpone, in time, and to differ in space” (emphasis in original). As an aside, it is interesting to note that Derrida and his commentators need to employ “differance” to stabilize the meaning of “differance” enough to discuss what it is. In any event, Derrida’s goal is apparently to deconstruct the invisible process of differance in order to reveal the inherent “undecidability” of language and free observers from the logocentric implications that flow from deferral of some construct meanings in favor of a single meaning. In other words Derrida wants to liberate language from the burden of representing unitary objects and free it for a mission of constant destabilization and production of ambiguity. While Derrida’s concepts of “differance” and “undecidability” are abstract, there is little doubt that, like his stance against logocentrism, they are friendly to the use of broad-scope constructs. Broad-scope constructs break down fixity, because the multiple meanings they incorporate have a deobjectifying effect and reduce the constructs’ power as mechanisms for constituting discrete objects (McKinley, 2003). Thus, to the extent that Derrida’s thought is diffusing in social science, and having an influence, perhaps through commentators, on organization

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studies, we would expect an epistemological climate in which the formation of broad-scope constructs is encouraged. The Derridian position also supports resistance to attempts to move in the other direction, by specifying organizational constructs more narrowly and consensually. McKinley and Mone (1998) advocated such a move in their proposal for a democratically built construct dictionary in organization studies. From a postmodern perspective, such a dictionary would be an unwarranted restriction on the meanings that could be attached to a given construct and, worse, a distortion of the true nature of the empirical “stuff” that underlies the construct. Postmodernists of a Derridian persuasion would argue that a construct dictionary would artificially solidify the organizational world in rigid language and lead to neglect of the continual change that characterizes organizations. These concerns about excessive fixity and ossification are evident in the critical comments that were directed at McKinley and Mone’s (1998) proposal (e.g. Czarniawska, 1998; Gergen, 1998). As additional evidence of the affinity between postmodernism and the use of broad-scope constructs in organization studies, I refer the reader to Baudrillard’s (1983) notion of “simulations” (see Alvesson & Deetz, 1996). I would argue that this notion offers another source of legitimation for the use of broadly defined constructs. Simulations are systems of signs that have ceased to represent anything external in the world; that is, the signs are completely self-referential (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996). By “signs,” Baudrillard (1975, 1983) apparently meant a wide array of signification technologies, including words and texts, but also graphic images, television shows, movies, billboard images, and so on. An example of a simulation, in Baudrillard’s sense, could be a video game based on a television show or a comic strip. The protagonists and action sequences depicted in such games do not refer to any external reality, but rather to characters and events that have appeared as signs in other media. Implicit in the arguments of Baudrillard (1983) and his commentators (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996) is the idea that simulations are becoming more prevalent in (post)modern society, given the proliferation of technologies that permit easy production and transmission of signs. If we are indeed becoming habituated to self-referentiality in the signs we consume, as Baudrillard’s position suggests, it is easier to understand why we might extend that habituation to the constructs we use in organization studies. Complete self-referentiality in our constructs would mean that constructs are defined only in relation to other constructs. Unless those secondary constructs were disciplined by a coherent external reality, there would be no potential limit to their range, and multiple meanings for the original construct would be expected to proliferate. In other words, the routinization of self-referentiality implies the diffusion of broad, ambiguously formulated “umbrella constructs”

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(Hirsch & Levin, 1999) that have ambiguous empirical grounding and admit of multiple meanings. Correspondingly, the routinization of self-referentiality implies a low priority on attempts to limit the meanings a construct can assume, because the sense of an external phenomenon that could constrict meaning is lost. While the use of broad-scope constructs is common in organization studies today, I would argue that it is not necessarily good for the discipline. One can make a strong case, I believe, that a coherent social science discipline requires enough restriction of construct meaning to permit consensus across scholars about what a given construct denotes. This is especially important from a constructivist perspective, because, as I have already pointed out, cross-scholar consensus about meaning helps objectify the construct in question and permits its externalization as a phenomenon accessible to study (McKinley, 2003). Yes, this does undercut the deconstructive agenda of Derrida and his followers, but isn’t that agenda inconsistent with the behavior of the managers and employees we are supposedly dedicated to researching? I would maintain that those individuals are inveterate constructors, not deconstructors: they construct, or enact prior constructions of, organization structure, the hierarchy of authority, and many other characteristics of organizations on a daily basis. They do these things routinely and without question, and it is impossible to conceive of coherent organizations that are capable of producing products and services absent such constructions. Shouldn’t our theories capture the closure of meaning and the suppression of varied interpretations implicit in such native constructions, rather than attempting to deconstruct them? In order to accomplish that agenda, we may need to move beyond the influence of “hard” (skeptical, relativistic) postmodernism (Alvesson, 2003; Hancock & Tyler, 2001) and implement a project that restricts the meanings that our scholarly constructs can take on. One vehicle might be a consensually built construct dictionary of the sort envisioned by McKinley and Mone (1998), but modified to privilege the dominant meaning attached to each construct by native organizational participants. Organizational scholars would then be urged to adopt that meaning in their research and stick faithfully to it, in order to represent (or constitute) organizational reality as seen through the eyes of practitioners. This would require a great deal of preliminary field research to establish what the dominant-practitioner meanings actually are for the constructs in the dictionary, but in my view such research would amply repay the expenditure of time and effort. Alvesson’s (2003) technique of “interpretive unpacking” might facilitate such field investigations. The result would be a reduction in the number of broadly drawn, ambiguous constructs; but I for one would not lament their passing, because I think some of them (e.g. “institution,” “transaction,” “power”) have acquired so many meanings in different empirical studies that they have actually become meaningless.

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MULTIPLE SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT: POWER TO THE PEOPLE A third, salient epistemological norm in contemporary organization studies is the positive valuation of the multi-schooled structure of the discipline. The existence of multiple schools of thought in organization studies has been the subject of commentary for many years. Among the first to discuss this attribute of organization studies were Burrell and Morgan (1979). They identified four distinct perspectives, or “paradigms,” that they claimed were influential in organization studies theory and research. The four paradigms were the radical humanist paradigm, the radical structuralist paradigm, the interpretivist paradigm, and the functionalist paradigm (see also Gioia & Pitre, 1990). Later, Astley and Van de Ven (1983) identified four different perspectives in organization theory; these four were different from the four discussed by Burrell and Morgan (1979). Astley and Van de Ven (1983) differentiated their four perspectives by level of analysis (individual organization vs. organizational population) and by whether the perspective assumed deterministic constraint or voluntary agency as the governing causal force in organizational action. The four perspectives that resulted from this juxtaposition of level of analysis and the deterministic/voluntaristic distinction were the natural selection view, the collective-action view, the system-structural view, and the strategic choice view. Donaldson (1995) also provided a detailed review of contemporary schools of thought in organization studies, singling out structural contingency theory, population ecology theory, institutional theory, resource dependence theory, transaction costs theory, and agency theory for attention. Finally, McKinley et al. (1999) sought to explain the multi-schooled structure of organization studies, proposing that the attributes of novelty, continuity, and scope are critical determinants of which developing schools of thought get institutionalized as legitimate theoretical frameworks. The presence of multiple schools of thought has not only been described by observers of the organization studies scene, but also prescribed by them. The dominant judgment of current organization studies commentators (e.g. Astley & Van de Ven, 1983; Cannella & Paetzold, 1994; Gioia & Pitre, 1990) appears to be that multiple schools of thought are a positive feature of the field. One argument for multiple schools of thought is that each separate school provides a context within which new ideas can flourish and be protected from excessively harsh empirical scrutiny (Jackson & Carter, 1991). A related argument is that multiple schools of thought capture the complexity of the organizational world better than any single perspective could. Advocates for multi-schooled organization studies have also maintained that multiple schools recognize, rather than obscure, irreconcilable theoretical differences (Gioia & Pitre, 1990). Finally, arguments for diversity

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in theoretical perspectives have been developed in response to Pfeffer’s (1993) article pointing out the benefits of consensus and high-paradigm development in scientific disciplines. Critiquing Pfeffer’s (1993) paper, Cannella and Paetzold (1994, p. 332) stated that “the evolution of knowledge requires fuzzy boundaries and a tolerance for (if not acceptance of) a plurality of paradigms.” Correspondingly, Van Maanen (1995a) reacted negatively to the idea of pruning the overgrown organization studies theoretical garden that Pfeffer (1993) had pointed to, suggesting that, as a weed in that garden, he (Van Maanen) was engaged in an understandable effort “to defend my work, to create a space for what I do against what I take to be the shortsighted, overly confident, and more (or less) entrenched views of others” (Van Maanen, 1995a, p. 134). Even Pfeffer noted the positive valuation attached to pluralism in current organization studies, remarking that “in the study of organizations, it is almost as if consensus is systematically avoided” (1993, p. 612). Despite attempts to explain the multi-schooled nature of organization studies, it is still unclear why theoretical pluralism has become so institutionalized in the discipline. After all, as Pfeffer (1993) pointed out, there are costs to this theoretical pluralism, including reduced efficiency in disseminating research findings, difficulty in cumulating knowledge across studies, and less effectiveness in the competition with related social science disciplines for resources. One answer to this institutionalization puzzle is the influence of postmodernist epistemology. Here again, I assume that this epistemology can have effects on scholars’ norms without them necessarily being aware of that influence and without them being conscious disciples of the postmodernist philosophers. The element of postmodernist epistemology that may provide the strongest support for the normative acceptance of multiple schools of thought is the skepticism toward metanarratives (Lyotard, 1984; West, 1996) that was also invoked above to help explain the credibility that insight has gained as an evaluative criterion in organization studies. To the extent that the postmodern disbelief in metanarratives has affected standards of knowledge production in organization studies, we would expect organizational scholars to resist the development of a single, unified paradigm for their discipline. Reinforcing this point, West (1996, p. 199) commented on Lyotard’s (1984) perspective: “It follows that only temporary and local consensus is desirable, only provisional contracts should be sought.” Skepticism toward metanarratives encourages localized fragmentation of theoretical frameworks into independent schools of thought, in the same way that this skepticism promotes positive valuation of insight on a more micro level. The result is a proliferation of compartmentalized schools of thought and the positive valuation of a multischooled structure in organization studies, coupled with resistance to any attempts to consolidate independent schools into a single, unified paradigm (e.g. Donaldson, 1995).

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A second element of postmodernist epistemology that may be encouraging the positive valuation of multiple schools of thought is the view of knowledge derived from Foucault’s work (1977a, b; see also Burrell, 1988). Foucault focused on the role played by power in society and in organizations such as prisons, hospitals, and schools. For Foucault, these organizations were “total institutions,” in which power was used to establish regimes of surveillance and totalizing views of reality to which the “inmates” had to subscribe. The implications of this perspective are that power totalizes not only by creating a hegemony over behavior but also a hegemony over knowledge. If one wants to resist such intellectual totalization one must resist the concentration of power. Any organization theorist influenced by such thinking would be expected to oppose the creation of a single paradigm for organization studies, particularly if such a paradigm appeared to be imposed by academic power-holders. The characterization of Pfeffer’s (1993) essay as a “Pfefferdigm” is symptomatic of this opposition. Advocacy of multiple schools of thought is a way of breaking down the totalitarianism seen to be endemic to an authoritarian paradigmatic view. Although he did not cite Foucault directly, Van Maanen (1995a, p. 133) betrayed a Foucaultian turn in protesting Pfeffer’s (1993) supposed “Stalinist purge of our low-consensus field . . . whereby we might invest authority in a few, well-published elites within our ranks who would be willing if not eager to institutionalize some topical and methodological strictures to guide our work.” In a similar way, Cannella and Paetzold (1994, p. 331) stated that Pfeffer’s (1993) “discussion . . . led him to the conclusion that organization scholars should place control over publication into the hands of a comparatively small elite group who would force a consensus by excluding views that diverge from a dominant paradigm.” Cannella and Paetzold (1994, p. 331) added that “we argue from a different set of assumptions than those of Pfeffer.” Are critics like Van Maanen and Cannella and Paetzold unwitting postmodernists who have become imbued with the notion that uniformity breeds hegemony, and have therefore decided to disavow a unified paradigm and support multiple schools of thought? Their “power to the people” argument makes it tempting to infer so. While I recognize the benefits of theoretical pluralism for stimulating conceptual innovation, I concur with Pfeffer (1993) that the current pluralism in organization studies is excessive. Certainly no-one wants a hegemony over knowledge production in which scholarly elites tell us what to think and what research topics to pursue. However, those who emphasize the costs of multiple, incommensurable schools of thought (e.g. McKinley & Mone, 1998; Pfeffer, 1993) do not seem to have such a hegemony in mind. Instead, they are concerned with the loss of focus and diffusion of resources that occurs when the array of independent schools of thought in a field becomes too large. In particular, they are concerned with the difficulty of cumulating knowledge across studies in a discipline where theoretical fragmentation fosters the use of diverse definitions and measures for a single

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construct. In my opinion tolerance of this type of cross-study inconsistency in definition and measurement is not resistance to unwarranted scholarly hegemony, but rather intellectual libertarianism. The consequence of this inconsistency in definition and measurement is the inability to make conclusive judgments on the relative validity of the multiple schools with which the organization studies scholar is confronted (McKinley & Mone, 1998, 2003). As Pfeffer (1993, p. 616) remarked: “Theoretical and methodological diversity may be adaptive as long as there is some agreement over fundamental goals and on a set of rules to winnow the measures, methods, and theories on the basis of accumulated evidence. In the study of organizations, there appears to have been more agreement on these issues in the past than there is at present, when almost every aspect of the research process is contested.” Critics of the multischool structure of contemporary organization studies (e.g. Donaldson, 1995) would appear to support a voluntary retrenchment to a more restricted array of schools, or even a single paradigm, as a way of concentrating resources on a set of questions that could generate the greatest return on our investment in knowledge production. The problem is that such retrenchment – like retrenchment in real-life organizations – requires difficult decisions about the allocation of scarce scholarly resources between competing uses. In organization studies there seems to be a visceral reaction against any such innovation in resource allocation, which again may reflect a Foucaultian suspicion of the concentration of power that this would require (Mone, McKinley & Barker, 1998). In any case, organization studies today seems to be frozen in (or by) theoretical pluralism, with little attempt to empirically adjudicate between the competing theories of different schools of thought (McKinley & Mone, 1998).

A POSTMODERNIST EPISTEMOLOGICAL PARADIGM FOR ORGANIZATION STUDIES? This chapter has identified three scholarly norms that are currently evident in organization studies: the advocacy of insight, the institutionalized use of broad-scope constructs, and the advocacy of multiple schools of thought. I have argued that each of these norms is supported by elements of postmodernist epistemology, which forms an intellectual context conducive to the promulgation of these norms. Elaborating that argument, I delineated the linkages between each norm and the strands of postmodernist thinking that support it. The ubiquity of these norms and their consistency with postmodernist thought raise the possibility that a postmodernist epistemological paradigm may be solidifying in organization studies, and that it may even generalize beyond the particular norms listed above.

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Put another way, the norms may be outcroppings of a broader viewpoint about appropriate knowledge production that is taking on the character of a coherent paradigm (Kuhn, 1970). If that is indeed the case it represents an extremely interesting development, not least because of the irony involved in the coalescence of postmodernist ideas into an integrated (and hegemonic?) paradigm. Hard evidence for the evolution of such an epistemological paradigm awaits future empirical research in the sociology of organization science (McKinley et al., 1999). At this point I will merely permit myself to speculate on some possible themes of the paradigm and what they would mean for the future of organization studies. In the first place, a postmodernist epistemological paradigm in organization studies would appear to value fragmentation, both on the individual level of scholarly cognition and on the collective level of schools of thought. This is consistent with Hancock and Tyler’s statement (2001, p. 58), which draws attention to “the very fragmentation that is at the heart of the postmodernization process.” On the individual level, fragmentation in organization studies implies the separation of scholarly cognitions into diverse regions of independent perspective, more similar to the type of individualist cognition that obtains in the humanities than to the traditional aspirations for generalizability in social science (Bauerlein, 2001; Zald, 1996). Cognitive fragmentation inhibits efforts to aggregate the insights of separate scholars and produce from them an intersubjective representation of organizational phenomena. In Daston’s (1992) terms, cognitive fragmentation undercuts aperspectival objectivity and makes it more difficult to transcend subjectivity to determine an objective “truth” about organizations. On the collective level, fragmentation suggests the maintenance and continued institutionalization of a multi-schooled structure in organization studies. Given an organization studies epistemological paradigm that values fragmentation, we would expect current schools of thought to thrive and perhaps even be supplemented by additional schools. The proliferation of schools of thought fostered by an epistemological theme of fragmentation might take place through the causal dynamics identified by McKinley et al. (1999). In any event the theme of fragmentation would devalue attempts to subject the theoretical schools to empirical scrutiny and determine their relative empirical validity. Using Pfeffer’s (1982, 1993) terminology, the fragmentation theme would not be friendly to empirical efforts to convert the theoretical “weed patch” of organization theory into a less complex, better manicured theoretical garden. An epistemological emphasis on fragmentation would also work against initiatives to develop a single theoretical paradigm by merging together components of the current schools. Despite some isolated efforts to achieve such integration (e.g. Donaldson, 1995), organization studies scholars seem unwilling to converge on a single theoretical paradigm at this time. In fact, many would denigrate any such attempt as an effort to impose

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a restrictive metanarrative on the field. Thus one begins to discern the paradox of a postmodernist epistemological paradigm in organization studies that creates obstacles to the solidification of a theoretical paradigm for the discipline. Can an epistemological paradigm generate a uniformity of opinion about the proper constitution of knowledge that disrupts uniformity of opinion about the proper way of representing organizations? Our argument in this paragraph would suggest that the answer is yes. A second theme in the general epistemological paradigm that may be emerging in organization studies is theoretical flux. Again, this theme is consistent with the way postmodernism has been described by its commentators. For example, Hancock and Tyler (2001, p. 88), in summarizing the positions of Robert Chia and Robert Cooper, noted that these positions “[rest] on a number of now familiar postmodern propositions. Among these are, first, the idea that reality is in a constant state of flux and movement, and that ‘organization’ can thus be seen as a means by which humans attempt to ‘write’ order on to it.” A postmodern-oriented epistemological paradigm in organization studies would therefore see constant theoretical flux as a way of keeping up with the continually evolving world of organizations and the new organizational forms that are constantly being created (Daft & Lewin, 1993; Zald, 1996). The emphasis on developing new theory that is so salient in statements like the AMR Information for Contributors (Academy of Management Review, 2002, p. 482) is also consistent with the theme of theoretical flux. The stress on theoretical flux in organization studies is also compounded by the fashion for fashion in organizational consultancy (Abrahamson, 1996) and the priority accorded to uniqueness in organizational research (Astley, 1985; Mone & McKinley, 1993). It should be noted that an emphasis on theoretical flux makes it harder to see the possibility that there are enduring principles of organization that do not change much over time. Under an epistemological paradigm with a theme of theoretical flux, such enduring principles would tend to “disappear” and the (perhaps limited) components of organizations that change rapidly would be highlighted. As examples of enduring principles of organization that are subject to little change over time, I would offer satisficing in decision-making (Simon, 1997); the existence of structural differentiation; and the way organization structure responds to growth in organization size (Blau, 1970). For better or worse, a theme of theoretical flux turns the focus away from enduring principles and relationships such as these. Under an epistemological regime emphasizing theoretical flux, organization studies would instead be oriented toward a rapidly changing set of theoretical constructs and frameworks that would remain in use for relatively short periods of time. A third theme of any emerging postmodernist epistemological paradigm in organization studies would appear to be ambiguity (Eisenberg, 1984). This mirrors the postmodernist view of the world as an open-ended place, and it also reflects

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the postmodernist desire to avoid the hegemony of fixed meanings imposed on a “language game” by powerful elites (see, for example, Cannella & Paetzold, 1994). In a field characterized by an epistemological theme of ambiguity, we would expect the use of broadly defined constructs that take on different meanings for different scholars and that accumulate an array of meanings as they diffuse through the scholarly community. Each of the distinct meanings attached to a given construct demarcates a distinct piece of the empirical world, so that there could be a number of valid measures for a single construct. Traditional methodological criteria in organization studies demand that these different measures be correlated with one another, but an epistemological regime favoring ambiguity might lead to the relaxation of those criteria in the future. Thus organization studies might witness the acceptance of orthogonality between multiple measures of a single construct. Arguably this is already the case on a cross-study level, because measures of the same construct used in different studies often seem to share little empirical content, and minimal effort is made to scrutinize these measures across studies to see whether they converge. Such measurement outcomes are consistent with the open-endedness of the world according to postmodernists. The outcomes also have the political benefit of permitting many empirical researchers with very different data sets to use the same “umbrella construct” (Hirsch & Levin, 1999) to make their work credible to scholarly audiences. If the umbrella construct is in fashion in the journals, those empirical researchers gain an advantage in the competition for scarce journal space. To recap, I have suggested that the specific norms discussed in the first half of this chapter may be representative of a more general postmodernist epistemological paradigm that is specific to organization studies. I have identified three themes of that paradigm: fragmentation, theoretical flux, and ambiguity. At this point, I will offer some critical comments about each of these themes and the organization studies epistemological paradigm in which they seem to be embedded. While fragmentation of scholarly cognitions and theoretical schools has the virtue of guarding against intellectual hegemony and an imposed metanarrative, it also reduces the capacity to cumulate knowledge across individual studies. This was mentioned above in connection with my critique of the multischool structure of contemporary organization studies, but I think the critique can be broadened here. In a discipline marked by fragmented scholarly cognitions and theoretical schools, it becomes very difficult to evaluate a body of empirical research originating from different investigators in order to determine exactly what conclusions to draw from it. The diversity of scholarly cognitions and perspectives that often underlies work on a single topic (e.g. vertical integration) inhibits aggregation of findings and theoretical generalization from those findings. Postmodernists would probably see this problem as a non-problem, given their stance against the philosophy of presence

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(see Derrida, 1982; West, 1996) and their belief that there is no reality outside the text to cumulate knowledge about. From that viewpoint, aggregation of findings across studies would represent an inappropriate transgression of individual scholarly insights and constructions. But from the viewpoint of those scholars who still seek at least some degree of aperspectival objectivity (e.g. Hunt, 1993; McKinley, 2003), inability to cumulate is a major shortcoming. It is arguably a shortcoming for practitioners as well, because the case has been made (e.g. Scherer, 1998) that practitioners look to organizational scholars for general guidelines or principles (Locke, 2002) that can direct management action. Given the fragmentation that characterizes organization studies today, it is difficult to produce such general guidelines, or at least to imbue them with the authority of aggregated empirical conclusions. If we are to take seriously concerns about doing useful organizational research (e.g. Beyer & Trice, 1982; Cheng & McKinley, 1983), this is an issue worth thinking about. Turning now to the theme of theoretical flux, an emphasis on theoretical flux is admittedly conducive to conceptual innovation and to the capture of those aspects of organizations that are rapidly changing. But, as already suggested, valuing theoretical flux tends to make it harder to recognize that there are core structural features of organizations that have been relatively constant through the history of organizing. For example, the structural features of differentiation, formalization, and a hierarchy of authority are probably present to some degree in all organizations, and all organizations can be profiled by a set of scores on these structural dimensions (Pugh, Hickson & Hinings, 1969; Pugh, Hickson, Hinings & Turner, 1968). In addition, the variables that influence these dimensions may be understood best by using classic theoretical frameworks that are well-established but have received little empirical attention (e.g. Thompson, 1967). The theoretical flux that seems to be valued currently in organization studies restricts our motivation to do in-depth empirical studies of these classic theoretical frameworks. Indeed, the development of new theories has become so institutionalized and so undiscriminating that some newer schools of thought – population ecology and neo-institutional theory, for instance – have incorporated supraorganizational levels of analysis (McKinley & Mone, 2003) without a serious discussion in the discipline about whether these levels are within the field’s legitimate boundaries. Is it possible that our postmodernist attraction to theoretical flux may be robbing us of the capability to study enduring features of organizations with long-term empirical investigations using classic theories? The argument in this paragraph suggests a possible conclusion in the affirmative. Finally, on the matter of ambiguity, no doubt ambiguity is a wonderful thing for avoiding the confinement that fixed meanings can impose on reality. If one believes that the world is indeterminate and that to fix it with concepts does damage to it

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(e.g. Burrell, 1996), ambiguity is certainly to be valued. Burrell’s (1996, p. 645) observation that “concepts perform an imprisoning act of considerable sophistication” betrays a constructivist ontology. But constructivism can also be oriented in a direction that highlights the benefits of conceptual fixity as well as its liabilities. Additionally, a good case can be made that, if our concepts structure the world, we should be as precise about the meaning of those concepts as possible and seek consensus on meaning across users of a given concept. Otherwise, the constructions on which we (and daily practice) depend for navigating the world run the risk of deobjectifying over time (McKinley, 2003). I think we can live with the realization that our constructs are objectified abstractions that change the reality they represent without having to give up those constructs. Contra Case (2003), the embrace of ambiguity and subjectivity is not the only way to engage in “authentic” organizational science. For better or worse, without objectified constructs there is little for organization science (and indeed natural science) to study, except perhaps texts and critiques of texts. Is that enough to justify the expenditure of time, effort, and money that is currently poured into scientific research? I think most university administrators, representatives of funding agencies, and state legislators would answer in the negative.

CONCLUSION In conclusion, I believe there is an instructive parallel between postmodernist ideas about knowledge and the radical politics that flourished in the student movements in Europe and the United States in the late 1960s. The deconstructionist stance favored by some postmodernists (particularly those of the “hard pomo” persuasion: Hancock & Tyler, 2001) echoes the political rhetoric that was fashionable at that time: tear down established structures (of authority or meaning) and let indeterminacy reign. I acknowledge the sincere wish of many postmodernist scholars (and radical student politicians) to use their epistemologies or ideologies to fight oppression, make a space for marginalized voices, or even to represent the world as they see it. Indeed, I sympathize strongly with those aims. But when carried to an extreme, deconstruction comes to resemble a “bad boy” ethic in which critics relish destruction of established meanings or authority structures simply for the sake of destruction. This ‘bad boy’ attitude comes across, for example, in Van Maanen’s (1995a, b) ad-hominem attack on Pfeffer’s (1993) essay about the problems of low-paradigm development in organization studies. I find the hard, nihilistic postmodernism that deconstructs without reconstructing particularly problematic when applied to a social science field such as

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organization studies. I believe that deconstruction without reconstruction may sometimes be warranted when targeted at corporate or government ideologies, because they have widespread totalizing influences on large segments of the public. Sometimes these ideological metanarratives may become so reprehensible or so stifling that tearing them down without putting another metanarrative in their place is justified. But in my opinion such an approach is much less defensible when directed at social science, because the totalizing influence of social science on the “person in the street” is arguably much more limited. This suggests that the hard postmodernists should confine themselves to harder and more totalizing targets than the social science disciplines. Social science’s ontological and epistemological foundations are fragile enough as it is, and I believe that those foundations should be subject to construction efforts, not deconstruction. Thus I conclude by appealing to organization studies scholars to take a constructivist stance toward their discipline. Let’s seek to build collectively and intersubjectively on those established theories that promise a deep understanding of organizations, rather than tearing them down or abandoning them in the endless, churning flux of short-term theoretical novelty and fashion.

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POSTMODERNISM’S KANTIAN ROOTS Onkar Ghate INTRODUCTION Postmodernism is often held to be a novel viewpoint of the 20th (and 21st) century. In certain minor respects, it is. But in this chapter I will show that, fundamentally, it is a logical derivative of philosopher Immanuel Kant’s revolutionary views in epistemology. As such, postmodernism rises or falls with the cogency of Kant’s basic epistemological approach. A problem one immediately encounters in discussing postmodernism is the lack of a definition of the viewpoint. Many of its adherents and many commentators who analyze it caution that there is no “essential commonality” to postmodernism. At best, there are various different similarities among the various and distinct views of postmodernists. In his well-known anthology on postmodernism, for example, Lawrence Cahoone writes: Certainly the term “postmodern” . . . has been attached to so many different kinds of intellectual, social, and artistic phenomena that it can be subjected to easy ridicule as hopelessly ambiguous or empty. This shows only that it is a mistake to seek a single, essential meaning applicable to all the term’s instances. As one of the inspirers of postmodernism would say, the members of the postmodern clan resemble each other in the overlapping way that family members do; two members may share the same eye color, one of these may have the same ears as a third, the third may have the same hair color as a fourth, and so on (Cahoone, 1996, p. 1).1

Of course it should come as no surprise when postmodernists themselves reject the idea that there is any essential similarity among their views and so reject the Postmodernism and Management: Pros, Cons and the Alternative Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 21, 227–245 Copyright © 2003 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1016/S0733-558X(03)21008-9

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idea that postmodernism is capable of definition. Many if not most postmodernists eschew systematic analysis, logic, reason. Whatever the area of study, the very attempt to define, to essentialize, to abstract, to identify a commonality, they maintain, is distorting. The same would apply to the study of postmodernism itself. As Cahoone writes, it is difficult – some would say impossible – to summarize what postmodernism means, not only because there is much disagreement among writers labelled postmodern, but also because some postmodernists would deny having any doctrines or theories at all. Perhaps the very idea of a summary is antithetical to postmodernism (Cahoone, 1996, pp. 13–14).

Consequently, the critical commentator who attempts to define and analyze postmodernism will be widely seen as attempting to do the impossible. However persuasive his objections, they will be viewed simply as objections attacking a straw man (i.e. the reply to any objection will be: postmodernism does not really advocate that which you are criticizing). But without a definition of postmodernism, how can one assess the viewpoint? Without knowing what a viewpoint stands for, how can one evaluate whether it is true or false, good or bad? Indeed, if the term “postmodernism” does not designate a specific viewpoint, then it does not designate a viewpoint and consequently should be discarded. To circumvent this problem, what many commentators do is present not a definition of postmodernism but a list of the basic, common tenets advocated by those who are recognized as the most influential and celebrated of the postmodernists. Cahoone, for instance, identifies five “famous themes or ideas that appear in most postmodernist work” (Cahoone, 1996, p. 14). Although I think that postmodernism, like any viewpoint, has an essence which can be identified, such a list of themes is sufficient for my purposes in this chapter and will forestall accusations of creating a straw man. When one carefully considers Cahoone’s list, for instance, one realizes that the themes, taken together, compose a single foundation for the more derivative views of postmodernists. Identifying this shared foundation will be sufficient to establish postmodernism’s Kantian origin.2 In Part I of this chapter, therefore, I will examine Cahoone’s list of themes that dominate postmodernism and will show that they amount to a common foundation for postmodernism.3 In Part II, I will show that it is Kant’s epistemology that established the foundation which postmodernism presupposes. Finally, in Part III I will assess the cogency of postmodernism’s Kantian foundation.4

THE FOUNDATION OF POSTMODERNISM Consider the first of the four themes that Cahoone identifies as pervasive in postmodernism. Postmodernism rejects the idea that perception is a self-evident,

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preconceptual awareness of reality, which can serve as a base or grounding for higher-level concepts and principles. Postmodernism “denies that anything is ‘immediately present,’ hence independent of signs, language, interpretation, disagreement, etc. . . . Thus Derrida literally denies there is such a thing as ‘perception,’ that is, an immediate, transparent reception of the given.” Stating it more succinctly, postmodernism holds that the senses are not “immediate conduits for reality” (Cahoone, 1996, p. 14). When you look about the room, in other words, and see the books and newspapers on the table and the oranges and bananas in the fruit bowl resting on the counter top, you are not actually perceiving reality. What you are experiencing is a distortion of reality created by your sensory apparatus and your higher-level cognitive tools, your concepts, language and principles. Postmodernism denies that we can ever be aware of (an independently existing) reality. Our senses do not give us access to reality nor do our higher-level cognitions, since they themselves are derived from sensory data. The only possible objects of study, therefore, are our own sensory representations and linguistic formulations, not reality. Postmodernists “substitute the analysis of representations of a thing for discussion of the thing.” This is “sometimes expressed by saying that, ‘There is nothing outside the text.’ This need not mean that there is no real world, but that we only encounter real referents [distorted] through texts, representations, mediation. We can never say what is independent of all saying” (Cahoone, 1996, p. 14). Second, postmodernism does not consider the idea that we are unable to know reality, that we can only study the “world of appearances” which we ourselves construct, that we are confined to the study of phenomena, to be problematic. For postmodernism rejects the idea that the goal of rational thought is to grasp (an independently existing) reality. Postmodernism denies the possibility of returning to, recapturing, or even representing the origin, source, or any deeper reality behind phenomena, and casts doubt on or even denies its existence. In a sense, postmodernism is intentionally superficial . . . by regarding the surface of things, the phenomena, as not requiring a reference to anything deeper or more fundamental (Cahoone, 1996, p. 15).

The traditional skeptic considered his skepticism about the human mind’s ability to know reality troubling. For the task of the mind was held to be precisely to grasp reality – a task at which it apparently failed. The postmodernist also says that the mind is unable to know reality, but adds that one should not care. There might not even be a reality, and in any case no epistemological standards should be defined by reference to a realm that is at best unknowable and at worst nonexistent. We should stop worrying about reality, therefore, and be content to study phenomena, the world we ourselves create. The postmodernist is a complacent skeptic.

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Third, because postmodernism rejects the idea of an independently existing reality, which is the same for every individual and which determines whether an individual’s ideas are true or false, and because postmodernism holds that subjects can create the phenomenal world in an indefinite variety of ways, it rejects the possibility of a mind reaching a single, true answer – even about phenomena. According to postmodernism “nothing is simple, immediate, or totally present, and no analysis of anything can be complete or final. For example, a text can be read in an indefinitely large number of ways, none of which provides the complete or true meaning” (Cahoone, 1996, p. 15). Stated more plainly and directly, the point is that what is “true” for, say, males need not be “true” for females; what is “true” for Westerners need not be “true” for Middle-Easterners. Why? Because each group can create their phenomenal worlds in different ways. And more: what is “true” for males today need not be “true” for them tomorrow, because the way in which they create their phenomenal world, their world of appearances, may change. Fourth, and relatedly, postmodernism holds that no standards – philosophical, moral or otherwise – can be defined by reference to reality, that is, to facts. Standards are necessarily subjective. Standards such as truth, goodness, beauty, rationality, are no longer regarded as independent of the processes they serve to govern or judge . . . . For example, where most philosophers might use the idea of justice to judge a social order, postmodernism regards that idea as itself the product of the social relations that it serves to judge; that is, the idea was created at a certain time and place, to serve certain interests, and is dependent on a certain intellectual and social context, etc. (Cahoone, 1996, p. 15).

To give an example of this point to make it clear: if an American criticized the killing of freedom-seeking individuals in Tiananmen Square as monstrously unjust, he would simply be expressing his culture’s standard of justice. If a member of China’s Communist Party praised the killing as necessary to keep civil order, he would simply be expressing his culture’s standard of justice. The crucial point is that there is no higher court of appeal: there is no possibility of deciding what in reality justice consists of and requires, irrespective of a particular culture’s beliefs and practices. We now have before us the four pervasive themes of postmodernism according to Cahoone: (1) postmodernism denies that the senses and so the mind are capable of being aware of reality; (2) postmodernism holds that this does not matter because the epistemological goal is to study not reality but phenomena; (3) postmodernism holds that there are no universal truths, whether about reality or about phenomena; (4) postmodernism holds that the mind cannot establish any reality-based standards, philosophical, moral, or otherwise.

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These four themes amount to a single idea: man’s mind is incapable of achieving objectivity. The concept of objectivity was born with Aristotle, who grasped that reality exists independent of anyone’s awareness of it and that if one sought to know and act successfully in reality, one had to conform to it (not the other way around). In order to consistently and explicitly conform to reality, one needed a universal method by which the mind could remain in contact with the facts. In his discovery of the basic nature of logic and of the scientific method, Aristotle made an enormous contribution to defining the method of objectivity. It is the very possibility of such a method that postmodernism rejects. An independently existing reality, declares postmodernism, is unknowable or nonexistent. Man’s rational faculty – his senses, concepts and logic – declares postmodernism, is incapable of grasping reality; one can only grasp and study the way in which one’s particular group constructs its phenomenal world. There can be no method or standards for knowing or acting in reality, declares postmodernism, because methods and standards are inherently subjective, the product of a particular group’s inescapable biases. Postmodernism rejects every essential element crucial to the concept of objectivity. “Postmodernism” is thus an apt term because in rejecting objectivity postmodernists reject the modern Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was the era in which the West’s leading thinkers maintained that the path to objectivity had been identified and defined. If each individual mind were taught the logical and scientific method that Newton and the other great scientists used to make their discoveries, and if each individual had the freedom to apply this method in his own life, the world would be transformed. Progress and prosperity would be the norm. If individuals learned how to conform their thoughts and actions to reality, knowledge and success must abound. As Cahoone observes, the conception of civilization created in the 18th-century Enlightenment “is of a civilization founded on scientific knowledge of the world and rational knowledge of value, which places the highest premium on individual human life and freedom, and believes that such freedom and rationality will lead to social progress . . ., creating a better . . . life for all” (Cahoone, 1996, p. 12). To a still significant extent, we in the West (and in much of the rest of the globe) continue to enjoy the promised fruits of the Enlightenment’s project. It is this project that postmodernists demand that we repudiate. But, if the idea that the human mind cannot achieve objectivity is the foundation of postmodernism, why does postmodernism accept this idea? You will rarely if ever find an answer to this question in the writings of postmodernists.5 The majority take the impossibility of achieving objectivity for granted, as in effect a self-evident starting point from which they can espouse their more detailed “theories.” But what is the actual source of the West’s growing rejection of

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objectivity? And what, if any, are the arguments in favor of rejecting objectivity? To discover the answers, we must turn to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

KANT’S EPISTEMOLOGY: THE SOURCE OF POSTMODERNISM Kant is the man who first argued in explicit, philosophical terms that the Enlightenment’s search for objectivity was hopeless and actually misguided. To understand why Kant rejected objectivity, one must first understand his philosophical context and then consider some of the essential tenets of his epistemology.6 Kant was writing after the development of the rationalist and empiricist systems in philosophy. He found both wanting. The rationalist approach of such philosophers as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, which begins with supposed self-evident, abstract principles and deduces conclusions from these, produces contradictory systems along with the inability to prove a particular system’s claims. For instance, the nature of reality was different, Kant held, if you adopted Leibnitz’s system instead of Descartes’, but there was no reason to choose one system over the other. Rationalists like Descartes and Leibnitz argued, to take another example, that reason could demonstrate the existence of God, but their arguments, Kant maintained, failed. More sweepingly, Kant held that the rationalist approach could never establish the absolute certainty of “truths of fact,” that is, of truths concerning the existing, observable world. On the other hand, the empiricist approach of such philosophers as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, which begins with sensory impressions and requires that all ideas be derived from these impressions, fares no better. Empiricism leads explicitly to skepticism.7 The law of causality, for example, lies at the base of our scientific knowledge of the world, but Hume argued that the law can have no empirical defense. We never perceive a necessary connection between a cause and an effect and therefore can never know that a certain cause will always produce the same effect. Rather, after a long period of observing two events constantly conjoined, for instance the presence of the sun and then the presence of heat, we come to associate the two together and label the first event “cause” and the second event “effect.” By a process of psychological association, in other words, we come to anticipate heat when we see the sun (as Pavlov’s dogs came to anticipate food after hearing a bell), but that by no means guarantees that heat will in fact follow the presence of the sun. The law of causality represents not knowledge but simply custom and habit. Kant agrees with Hume that observation cannot validate the law of causality. Indeed, the empiricist approach cannot lead to the discovery of any necessary

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laws of nature. “Experience teaches us that a thing is so and so,” writes Kant, “but not that it cannot be otherwise . . . if we have a proposition which is thought as necessary, it is an a priori judgment [i.e. a judgment independent of sensory-perceptual experience]” (Kant, 1965, B3, p. 43). But empiricism is suspect not only because it leads to skepticism about laws of nature, but also because it is unable to establish any universal truths. That the men that we have so far observed are mortal, for instance, does not allow us to validly induce that all men are mortal. For when we observe previously unencountered men, who knows what we will find? On the empiricist approach, all our inductive conclusions are undermined. As Kant puts it, echoing Hume, “We can properly only say [on the empiricist approach] . . . that, so far as we have hitherto observed, there is no exception to this or that rule . . . . Empirical universality is only an arbitrary extension of a validity holding in most cases to one which holds in all . . .” (Kant, 1965, B 4, p. 44; emphasis added). Most damning of all from Kant’s perspective, the empiricist approach leads to explicit moral and religious skepticism. Whereas the rationalist tried to demonstrate the existence of absolute moral duties and of God, but failed to do so, the empiricist (or at least Hume) declares that we never encounter moral duties or God in our sensory-perceptual observations, so both notions must be discarded. Why do rationalism and empiricism both produce skepticism? The deepest answer, Kant maintains, is that both approaches make the same erroneous assumption about human knowledge. Both approaches assume that to gain knowledge the mind must bring itself in conformity to a reality existing independent of it. But neither approach can explain how the human mind reaches such conformity nor how one could ever tell that the mind has reached such conformity. The rationalists, as we saw, base human knowledge on self-evident, abstract ideas. But why assume these ideas reflect the actual nature of reality? And how could one ever establish that they do? Wouldn’t one have to step from behind these ideas, so to speak, and compare them to reality in order to see whether or not they conform to it? Similar problems arise for empiricism. The empiricists base human knowledge on (internal) sense-impressions. But why assume that these sense-impressions reflect what is really out there? And how could one ever know whether they do or do not reflect what is out there? In order to know this, wouldn’t one have to step from behind one’s sense-impressions and compare them to reality? But again, this is impossible. According to Kant, therefore, a radically different approach to knowledge is needed. Rather than assume that it is the task of the human mind to bring itself into conformity with an independently existing reality, Kant said, let us assume the reverse. Let us assume that the human mind makes reality conform to it. As Kant famously expresses his new approach: “Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects . . . . We must . . . make trial whether we

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may not have more success in the task of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge” (Kant, 1965, B xvi, p. 22). In advancing this new view of human knowledge, Kant compares his procedure to that of Copernicus, who revolutionized astronomy by suggesting that the sun does not revolve around the earth: the earth revolves around the sun. As a result of this comparison, Kant’s new approach to knowledge has become known as Kant’s Copernican revolution. In launching his Copernican revolution, Kant is maintaining that the human mind does not passively observe a reality existing independent of it, it actively creates its own reality. The mind’s activity, however, consists not of creating a reality out of nothing, but of imposing on independent reality a definite structure and shape determined by the mind’s own cognitive faculties. This creative activity of the human mind is not the result of any deliberation or volitional choice on the part of the subject; rather, it takes place automatically and “behind the scenes.” What we are aware of, then, is never the reality independent of us. What we are aware of is always only a reality that has been structured and shaped by our cognitive faculties (and which by this very fact must conform to our mind and knowledge). A rough analogy is helpful to capture Kant’s basic idea. Imagine that, unbeknownst to you, blue-tinted contact lenses were placed over your retinas while you slept. As a result, when you awake the next morning the objects you see, such as the pages of the book resting on your bedside table, have a bluish tinge. But the bluish color of the pages, so the analogy goes, does not reflect the actual nature of the paper but only the processing activity of the contact lenses (the way in which they affect the light waves striking the retina). The lenses of course do not create from nothing the objects in your visual field, but they do determine the nature of these objects (that is, the fact that they all have a bluish color as one of their properties). You have no choice in this matter nor any direct awareness of the way in which the nature of the visual world is being created for you: the contact lenses work automatically and behind the scenes. Regardless of the actual nature of the independent object, nothing could be an object in your visual awareness unless the lenses imposed on it a bluish color. To be an object of visual awareness, in other words, requires not that your mind conform to the nature of the independent object but that your mind force the object of awareness to conform to the mind’s own nature. Roughly put then, Kant’s idea is that for all human awareness and knowledge, we have on the analogue of blue-tinted contact lenses. Stated more formally, Kant’s basic idea is that the human mind imposes certain epistemic conditions on its awareness of reality, conditions which determine the nature of the reality that it is aware of.8 What reality is like apart from the epistemic conditions the mind imposes, what reality is “really like,” what things are “in themselves,” the human mind can never know.

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But exactly how, according to Kant, does the human mind go about creating its own reality? To condense an exceedingly complex and difficult matter into a few paragraphs, Kant argues that there are two main stages at which the mind determines the nature of the world it is aware of. First, at the sensory-perceptual stage of human awareness, man’s consciousness is somehow affected by things in reality existing independent of it, which allows the mind to receive certain materials or inputs.9 These materials, however, are necessarily shaped and structured by the mind’s sensory-perceptual faculties, which imposes “forms of sensibility” on the materials, as Kant puts it. The forms of sensibility, according to Kant, fashion and structure the inputs received from without into the spatial-temporal world of objects that we perceive. The entire world of space and time is therefore for Kant mere appearance, something our minds have themselves created. “It is . . . solely from the human standpoint,” Kant writes for instance, “that we can speak of space, extended things, etc. If we depart from the subjective condition under which alone we can have outer intuition [i.e. have sensory-perceptual awareness], . . . space stands for nothing whatsoever” (Kant, 1965, B 43–44, p. 71). This is Kant’s own summary of the first stage of processing through which the human mind creates its own reality: What we have meant to say is . . . that the things which we intuit [i.e. sense or perceive] are not in themselves what we intuit them as being, nor their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us, and that if the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish. As appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What objects may be in themselves, and apart from [i.e. independent of] all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us (Kant, 1965, B 163–164, p. 172).

At the second stage of human processing, the conceptual stage, the mind imposes an intelligible order on its spatial-temporal world of appearances. By means of certain basic categories or concepts inhering in the faculty of understanding (such as the concepts of “existence,” “necessity” and “causality”), man’s consciousness brings lawfulness to the spatial-temporal world it has created. Why, for instance, do we experience cause and effect throughout the natural world, no matter where we look? Because the mind, through its category of causality, has imposed that law upon “nature” (i.e. the world of appearances). As Kant states his point in general terms: Categories are concepts which prescribe laws a priori to appearances, and therefore to nature, the sum of all appearances . . . . That the laws of appearances in nature must agree with the understanding and its a priori form, that is, with its faculty of combining the [sensory-perceptual] manifold in general, is no more surprising that that the appearances themselves must agree with the form of a priori sensible intuition. For just as appearances do not exist in themselves but

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only relatively to the subject in which, so far as it has senses, they inhere, so the laws do not exist in the appearances but only relatively to this same being, so far as it has understanding (Kant, 1965, B 163–164, p. 172).

To summarize the essence of Kant’s epistemology thus far, human awareness and human knowledge is restricted to what Kant calls “phenomena,” to objects considered as appearances, to objects whose nature has been created by our sensory-perceptual and conceptual faculties. What objects are independent of our consciousness of them, what objects are, considered not as appearances but as “thing in themselves” or “noumena,” as Kant puts it, must remain forever unknowable to the human mind. We can know phenomenal reality, the reality that consciousness creates and makes conform to it; we can never know noumenal reality, the reality that exists independent of us.10 This new epistemological approach, Kant maintains, allows for the validation of necessary and universal truths. How can we be absolutely certain, for instance, that the law of causality has no alternative and no exception in nature? We can be absolutely certain of this because, as we have seen, our consciousness is lawgiver to nature. The processing activity of the mind, through the a priori category of “causality,” structures our appearances in terms of causes and effects. Our experience (of the phenomenal world), therefore, could never exhibit anything but instance after instance of the law of cause and effect. Truths are necessary and universal, in other words, insofar as they flow from the inherent forms and categories of human consciousness, forms and categories which must always create every phenomenal object in the same way. But the price of validating necessary and universal truths is giving up the idea that they are truths about (noumenal) reality. In the world that the human mind itself creates, we can know that every event has a cause. But we cannot even apply the concept of causality to (noumenal) reality, let alone know that in reality every event has a cause, since the function of the concept of causality is solely to structure our appearances. On Kant’s theory, the human mind is necessarily cut off from reality. We have no grounds to ascribe any characteristics to reality; we cannot even know that (noumenal) reality exists, though Kant thinks we have to posit its existence.11 Kant’s fundamental purpose, however, is not to validate necessary and universal truths. For his “validation” of such truths is an empty victory since it forces us to abandon the idea that these truths represent knowledge of reality. His fundamental purpose, rather, is to open the door for nonrational beliefs, especially non-rational beliefs about morality and God. Such beliefs, Kant argues, precisely because they are beliefs about the nature of (noumenal) reality, are immune from rational criticism. Man’s mind, his rational faculty, is divorced from reality. It can never establish, therefore, that in reality the existence of God is either possible or

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impossible. In regard to (noumenal) reality, one is free to believe whatever one wants. If people feel the need to believe in moral duties or the existence of God, for instance, reason must remain silent. In denying the power of the human mind to know reality, in other words, Kant makes room once again for the guidance of feelings and faith. As Kant famously expresses his fundamental epistemological achievement: “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith” (Kant, 1965, p. 29). In denying that reason can know reality, in making room once more for feelings and faith as a guide, Kant rejects the essence of the Enlightenment. The attempt to enshrine objectivity in every area of life, according to Kant, is misguided. We cannot even know that an independent reality exists, let alone discover its nature. Man’s consciousness can never conform to an independent reality; it necessarily forces the object of awareness to conform to its processing. No standards of human knowledge, therefore, can be defined that transcend the creative activity of the human mind, that are based on the facts of reality. The Enlightenment idea that we can identify a fact-based method by which the human mind can bring itself into conformity with reality, therefore, must be discarded. There is, however, a substitute for objectivity. We can, Kant suggests, distinguish the way in which every human mind must construct phenomenal reality (it must create a world in space and time, for instance, subject to the categories of causality and existence) from individual, accidental constructions by a particular subject. We can distinguish, in short, between universal, collective subjectivism and individual subjectivism. Insofar as one of our ideas reflects the necessary creative activity of the human mind (such as the idea that every effect has a cause), the idea is “objective” because it must conform to phenomenal reality (or, more accurately, phenomenal reality must conform to it).12 Objectivity, then, becomes intersubjectivity: an idea is objective if and only if an individual would agree to its truth because of the species-wide creative activity his mind engages in. Now that we have a clear grasp of the essence of Kant’s epistemology, it is relatively easy to see why the foundation of postmodernism itself rests on Kant’s anti-Enlightenment epistemology. When postmodernists claim that the senses are not “immediate conduits for reality,” that the reality we are aware of is created by our sense organs and concepts and language – they get this idea from Kant. When postmodernists declare that “there is nothing outside the text,” that we can study only the appearance of things, not the things “in themselves” – they get this idea from Kant. When postmodernists declare that the unknowability of reality is unproblematic, that we should be complacent skeptics since we should reject the idea that the goal of rational inquiry is to know reality, that we should be content to study phenomena – they get this idea from Kant. When postmodernists claim that no standards, epistemological, moral or otherwise, can be rationally defined by

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reference to the facts of reality, that all standards are based on the creative activity of the human subject, on inescapable and automatic group biases – they get this idea from Kant.13 This is not to suggest, of course, that there is no difference between postmodernists and Kant. Kant maintained that every individual will construct the phenomenal world in the same way. That is, there is a common structure to the human mind, which enables it to create a common world of appearances. Postmodernists abandon this notion. They reject Kant’s species-wide forms of sensibility and conceptual categories. They hold, in contrast, that there are an indefinite number of ways to construct a phenomenal world, ways that can vary depending on, for instance, one’s race, the culture one is born into or one’s gender. On the postmodernist approach, then, there can be one phenomenal world for Whites and another for Hispanics, one for Westerners and another for Middle-Easterners, one for men and another for women. According to postmodernism, as we saw when examining Cahoone’s list of postmodern themes, there is no single, universal truth even about phenomena. To state the same basic point in somewhat different form, Kant left one last apparent vestige of reason: “reason” now designates the species-wide creative activity of the human mind, which still has a role to play in creating the phenomenal world (but of course this is only an apparent remnant of reason, since “reason” now no longer produces knowledge of reality). This “concession” to reason did not concern Kant because his focus, as we have seen, was on making room for feelings and faith to be our guide to (noumenal) reality. But postmodernists are uninterested in reality. They want feelings to be the guide not to the noumenal but to the phenomenal realm – and therefore they are unprepared to concede to reason any privileged status, however nominal and empty. For postmodernism “reason” is simply the way in which some Westerners create their phenomenal reality, no more “valid” or significant than any other way of creating reality. Accordingly, postmodernists contend that the concepts of reason and objectivity should not be redefined in terms of universal subjectivism, as in Kant’s approach. The concepts of reason and objectivity should simply be discarded (Rorty, 1996, pp. 573–588). Postmodernism is therefore a Balkanized Kantianism: it replaces universal subjectivism with multiple group subjectivism. Despite this difference, however, postmodernism clearly is a derivative of Kant’s Copernican revolution. A fundamental assessment of postmodernism, therefore, must ask the question: What argument does Kant offer in favor of his Copernican revolution?14 Stripped to its essence, Kant’s argument is this.15 The human mind is something finite, definite, limited. Human consciousness is something that has its own nature and that works by certain means and not others. It produces awareness by certain specific processes, by the operation of its organs of sight, touch, taste, smell and

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sound, and by the operation of its concepts, principles, logic. In producing awareness, in other words, the human mind is active: it engages in certain processing that is dictated by its specific nature. To go back to the analogy with the tinted contact lenses, since consciousness has a nature, it must “have on” some specific tint of contact lens, whether blue or green or yellow or aquamarine. This means, according to Kant, that man can know reality only as it is processed by his tinted lenses, i.e. as it is processed by his specific mind, never as it is in itself, apart from the way in which his mind processes it. Our knowledge, therefore, is necessarily confined to appearances, to reality-as-processed-by-consciousness. Because our mind is finite and definite, it can never escape its appearances and penetrate through to reality. This argument applies not simply to man’s consciousness. It applies to any consciousness – whether a dog’s or a sparrow’s or a horse’s – that has a specific nature. What kind of consciousness then could be aware of reality on the Kantian approach? A consciousness that somehow existed, but without any specific nature or identity, any specific means of awareness. Only a consciousness that existed but engaged in no processing could be aware of reality. Only a consciousness that did not have eyes or ears or a conceptual faculty could grasp reality. As Kant says, only a consciousness capable of “non-sensible intuition” would be capable of grasping reality. Finite beings like us, however, are not capable of such intuition; indeed, “we cannot comprehend even the possibility” of such intuition (Kant,1965, B 307, p. 268). Only an infinite consciousness, a consciousness that is “beyond” a specific nature, in short, only God, is capable of non-sensible intuition and therefore of being aware of reality (Kant, 1965, B 71–72, pp. 89–90). Stated most generally, then, Kant’s argument is that identity is the disqualifying element of consciousness. If consciousness has an identity, if it has a means of awareness, by that very fact it cannot be aware of reality. As Rand vividly but accurately states Kant’s fundamental argument: His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes – deaf, because he has ears – deluded, because he has a mind – and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them (Rand, 1961, p. 31).

THE FATAL FLAW IN KANT’S EPISTEMOLOGY Kant’s argument is the most fundamental attack ever launched against knowledge and the concept of objectivity. If the human mind uses specific means in the attempt to reach knowledge, by that very fact, Kant says, the attempt must fail. If the human mind devises a specific method by which to achieve objectivity, by that very fact, Kant says, objectivity cannot be achieved. If the method of objectivity

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consists, for instance, of using the senses to establish primary contact with reality, of using concepts to condense and organize sensory-perceptual data, of using logic to integrate concepts into a noncontradictory system of principles, the method must fail to produce knowledge of independent reality. If the five senses are involved in achieving objectivity, Kant claims, then one cannot actually be in contact with reality; one can be aware only of how the processing of the senses has shaped and distorted material assumed to come from reality. If concepts are involved in achieving objectivity, in condensing and organizing the data provided by sense-perception, Kant claims, then one can actually grasp only how one’s concepts shape and distort the (distorted) perceptual data. If the rules of logic are involved in achieving objectivity, in integrating one’s concepts into a consistent, non-contradictory whole, Kant claims, then one can know only how our logical principles integrate (doubly distorted) conceptual data. To identify Kant’s argument against knowledge and objectivity in essential terms goes a long way toward discrediting it. The fact that we possess eyes and ears, the fact that we possess a mind and conceptual faculty, the fact that we have the ability to think logically – these facts do not preclude knowledge of reality, they are precisely what make it possible. A specific means of achieving objectivity, in other words, makes the achievement of objectivity not impossible but possible. Stating the point most fundamentally, the fact that a consciousness has a means of awareness does not prevent its awareness of reality, it is what makes it possible. Far from identity invalidating consciousness, therefore, the identity of consciousness is its precondition.16 Without a specific means of awareness, no awareness is possible. All of epistemology must accept this basic fact. To fully appreciate the illogic of Kant’s attack against knowledge and objectivity, consider his reasoning applied to an area outside the field of epistemology. Suppose, for example, that you are the head of an up-and-coming software firm and you learn that Microsoft wants to enter into a licensing agreement with your company. Microsoft has drafted a 20-page proposal, which it would like you to consider. You ask your executive assistant to get the proposal today so that you can read it before a planned meeting with Microsoft the following morning. Reporting back to you at the end of the day, your assistant declares that he has looked into the matter and concluded that the task you have asked him to perform is impossible. “I considered asking Microsoft to fax me the proposal,” he tells you, “but then I realized that that wouldn’t work. You want the real proposal. If Microsoft faxed the proposal to me, we would only get a proposal as-transmitted-by-facsimile, not the proposal as it is ‘in itself,’ apart from how it is obtained by facsimile. Then I considered asking them to send us the proposal by Fed Ex,” he continues, “but I realized that that too would not work. We would not get the twenty-page proposal

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as it ‘really is,’ we would only get a proposal as-delivered-by-Federal-Express. How could we know what the proposal is really like, independent of it being delivered by Federal Express? Finally,” he says, “I considered asking Microsoft to send us the proposal by e-mail, but I quickly realized that the same problem arises. We would still not get the proposal as it is ‘in itself,’ we would only get a proposal as sent-by-electronic-mail. There’s an insurmountable obstacle to our obtaining the real proposal from Microsoft: we always have to get the proposal by some specific means or other, whether it is by fax or by Fed Ex or by e-mail. We just can’t get the real, independent proposal. So you will have to be content to go into your meeting with Microsoft without having had a chance to read its twenty-page proposal.” You would without doubt fire your Kantian-inspired assistant for his incompetence and illogic. You should do the equivalent with Kant and his postmodernist followers. There is of course no distinction in the above scenario between Microsoft’s proposal “as it really is” and its proposal “as it is transmitted-by-facsimile” or “as it is delivered-by-Federal-Express” or “as it is sent-by-electronic-mail.” It is one and the same proposal. Likewise, in an epistemological context there is no distinction between reality “as it really is” and reality “as it is grasped by consciousness.”17 It is one and the same reality. Consciousness grasps reality. There is nothing else for it to be aware of. To put the same basic point in a slightly different way, what your assistant would receive from Microsoft in the three cases (fax, Fed Ex or e-mail) is the same: Microsoft’s 20-page proposal. How he would receive the proposal would differ in the three cases: in the first case, he would get the proposal via facsimile, in the second, via courier, and in the third, via electronic mail. The “how” does not preclude or negate obtaining the “what”; the “how” makes obtaining the “what” possible. The fact that there is a specific “how,” that there is specific way of receiving the proposal from Microsoft, does not prevent your assistant from receiving the proposal; it is precisely what makes it possible for him to receive the proposal. The same general distinction applies to awareness and cognition. We must distinguish between what we are aware of and how we are aware of it. What we are aware of is: reality (there is no “non-reality,” which could be the object of awareness). But how we are aware of reality depends on our specific means of cognition, which determine the specific forms of our awareness of reality. The fact that there are specific forms of awareness of reality, however, does not show that there are “many realities” or that we are aware of our forms of awareness; it shows only that there are various forms of being aware of reality. Our eyes, for instance, enable us to perceive the world in a specific form – in the form of visual sensations, such as those of color. Our ears enable us to perceive the

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world in a different form – in the form of auditory sensations. Our mind enables us to identify the nature of existents – in a conceptual form. Logic enables us to gain an integrated awareness of the facts of reality – in the form of principles and theories. A different type of consciousness would grasp reality in still different forms. But the fact that there are specific forms, specific means by which a consciousness grasps reality, does not negate the fact that what consciousness grasps is reality. Rather, it is what makes that fact possible. The concept of objectivity rest on a firm grasp of the difference between the what and the how of cognition, between an independently existing reality and the cognitive processes necessary to grasp it. Objectivity is both a metaphysical and an epistemological concept. It pertains to the relationship of consciousness to existence. Metaphysically, it is recognition of the fact that reality exists independent of any perceiver’s consciousness. Epistemologically, it is recognition of the fact that a perceiver’s (man’s) consciousness must acquire knowledge of reality by certain means (reason) in accordance with certain rules (logic). This means that although reality is immutable, and, in any given context only one answer is true, the truth is not automatically available to a human consciousness and can be obtained only by a certain mental process which is required of every man who seeks knowledge – that there is no substitute for this process, no escape from the responsibility for it, no shortcuts, no special revelations to privileged observers – and that there can be no such thing as a final “authority” in matters pertaining to human knowledge. Metaphysically, the only authority is reality; epistemologically – one’s own mind. The first is the ultimate arbiter of the second (Rand, 1990, p. 18).18

The failure to grasp fully the distinction between the what and the how of cognition, between reality and the cognitive processes used to grasp reality, is what Kant’s attack on objectivity relies upon. But when one understands this distinction, one understands that the fact that the human mind engages in cognitive processing cannot rationally be used to undercut the mind’s power to know reality. As Ayn Rand writes: All knowledge is processed knowledge – whether on the sensory, perceptual or conceptual level. An “unprocessed” knowledge would be a knowledge acquired without means of cognition. Consciousness . . . is not a passive state, but an active process. And more: the satisfaction of every need of a living organism requires an act of processing by that organism, be it the need of air, of food or of knowledge. No one would argue (at least, not yet) that since man’s body has to process the food he eats, no objective rules of proper nutrition can be discovered – that “true nutrition” has to consist of absorbing some ineffable substance without the participation of a digestive system, but since man is incapable of “true feeding,” nutrition is a subjective matter open to his whim, and it is merely a social convention that forbids him to eat poisonous mushrooms. No one would argue that since nature does not tell man automatically what to eat . . . he should abandon the illusion that there is a right and wrong way of eating (or he should revert to the safety of the time when he did not have to “trust” objective evidence, but could rely on dietary laws prescribed by a supernatural power).

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No one would argue that man eats bread rather than stones purely as a matter of “convenience.” It is time to grant man’s consciousness the same cognitive respect one grants to his body – i.e. the same objectivity (Rand, 1969, pp. 109–110).19

The views of the postmodernists rest upon a common foundation: the impossibility of achieving objectivity. To establish this impossibility postmodernists rely, explicitly or implicitly, on Kant’s epistemology. Indeed, all the subjectivist attacks on reality and objectivity since the Critique of Pure Reason – whether it is Hegel’s cosmic mind creating the “external world” in one phase of the cosmic mind’s development, Marx’s economic classes creating their own contradictory realities and logics, or the Pragmatist’s desires and actions shaping the world – all rely on the Kantian premise that mind creates reality. Postmodernism is just the latest and most blatant antireason philosophy to develop from Kant’s basic approach. Kant, as we saw, attacked reason in order to pave the way for a return to irrationalism and mysticism. According to Kant’s perverse epistemology, man can only gain knowledge if he has no means by which to gain it. This illogic, accepted and championed for over two centuries, has virtually destroyed modern philosophy. Postmodernism is simply Kantianism taken to its logical dead end: the nihilistic destruction of all reality and knowledge. Clearly an alternative philosophy is desperately needed.

NOTES 1. The inspirer of postmodernism in question is the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who claimed that a concept is based not on any essential characteristic(s) of its referents but on “family resemblances” among the referents. 2. In the following chapter we identify the essence of postmodernism. 3. Actually, I will consider only the first four of Cahoone’s themes. The fifth is, as he says, a complex application of the first four, which for the sake of simplicity we can leave to one side; see Cahoone (1996, pp. 14–16). Note that I give the four themes my own labels and descriptions. 4. Of course I realize that most postmodernists repudiate the need for or possibility of foundations. This does not change the fact, however, that they count on certain more basic views when they espouse their “theories.” 5. Of course many postmodernists will be unconcerned by the absence of an answer, since they reject the need for and possibility of rational argumentation for their own (as well as anyone else’s) views. 6. Kant himself would not admit that he is rejecting the Enlightenment’s project because he does not discard objectivity or scientific knowledge, he merely redefines them. 7. The rationalist approach, unable to validate its claims, leads implicitly to skepticism, Kant thought. The rationalists themselves, however, were not skeptics. Hume is an explicit skeptic.

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8. The notion of an epistemic condition is Henry Allison’s; see Allison (1983, pp. 10–13). 9. On Kant’s own premises, as Kant himself recognizes (see for example, Kant, 1965, B 294–315, pp. 257–275), we can never gain any knowledge about this “process of affectation” since it lies beyond the reality we create. Nevertheless, we have to assume that some such process takes place in independent reality in order to make sense of human awareness. 10. For Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena, see Kant (1965, B 294–315, pp. 257–275). 11. This is one reason why we cannot know, as I remarked earlier, that noumenal objects affect man’s consciousness and sensory apparatus, providing the material to be shaped by his cognitive faculties. The concept of cause and so of affectation does not apply to (noumenal) reality, even if reality exists. 12. As Kant states the point by way of his own example: “The proposition, that all things are side by side in space, is valid under the limitation that these things are viewed as objects of sensible intuition. If, now, I add the condition to the concept, and say that all things, as outer appearances, are side by side in space, the rule is valid universally and without limitation. Our exposition therefore establishes the reality, that is, the objective validity, of space in respect of whatever can be presented to us outwardly as object, but also at the same time the ideality [i.e. the subjectivity] of space in respect of things when they are considered in themselves . . . without regard to the constitution of our sensibility” (Kant, 1965, B 43, p. 72). 13. One might think that there is a significant difference here between the postmodernists and Kant. For at a superficial level, Kant with his categorical imperative seems to uphold absolute moral duties and standards. But these duties cannot be rationally proved: reason cannot establish their basis in reality. We simply have to have faith that our noumenal selves command us to obey certain rules. Kant’s categorical imperatives are not rationally demonstrable, they are akin to the subjectivism of postmodernism. 14. At a superficial level, Kant proposes his Copernican revolution as a hypothesis. Thus some people maintain that Kant’s argument in favor of his Copernican hypothesis is that it validates the necessary and universal truths that we already think we possess but which the traditional approach allegedly cannot validate. But if this is Kant’s argument, it is obviously a poor argument, in part because, as we have seen, Kant’s Copernican hypothesis is able to “validate” necessary and universal truths only by denying that they are truths, i.e. only by denying that they are truths about reality. 15. Ayn Rand identified the essence of Kant’s argument; see Rand (1961, pp. 30–31, 1979, pp. 100–110). 16. See Rand (1979, pp. 104–110) and Peikoff (1991, pp. 48–52). 17. As Peikoff points out, the phrase “reality as it really is” is a redundancy, since there is no such thing as reality “as it really isn’t”; see Peikoff (1991, pp. 50–51). 18. For a penetrating discussion of the specific nature and method of objectivity, see Rand (1979) and Peikoff (1991). 19. In rejecting Kant’s rejection of objectivity, one is of course not forced to accept either rationalism or empiricism. The alternatives of rationalism, empiricism and Kantianism do not exhaust the epistemological field. In particular, they omit the Aristotelian approach (of which Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a development), which begins not with consciousness – whether innate ideas, sensory impressions or mental categories – but with reality.

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REFERENCES Allison, H. E. (1983). Kant’s transcendental idealism: An interpretation and defense. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cahoone, L. E. (1996). Introduction. In: L. E. Cahoone (Ed.), From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (pp. 1–23). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Kant, I. (1965). Critique of pure reason. N. K. Smith (Trans.). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Peikoff, L. (1991). Objectivism: The philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Rand, A. (1961). For the new intellectual. New York, NY: Random House. Rand, A. (1979). Introduction to objectivist epistemology. New York, NY: NAL Penguin. Rand, A. (1990). Who is the final authority in ethics? In: L. Peikoff (Ed.), The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (pp. 17–22). New York, NY: Penguin Books. Rorty, R. (1996). Solidarity or objectivity? In: L. E. Cahoone (Ed.), From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (pp. 573–588). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

OBJECTIVISM: THE PROPER ALTERNATIVE TO POSTMODERNISM Onkar Ghate and Edwin A. Locke INTRODUCTION You must attach clear, specific meanings to words, i.e. be able to identify their referents in reality . . .. All philosophical con games count on your using words as vague approximations. You must not take a catch phrase – or any abstract statement – as if it were approximate. Take it literally. Don’t translate it, don’t glamorize it, don’t make the mistake of thinking, as many people do: “Oh, nobody could possibly mean this!” and then proceed to endow it with some whitewashed meaning of your own. Take it straight, for what it does say and mean. Instead of dismissing the catch phrase, accept it – for a few brief moments. Tell yourself, in effect: “If I were to accept it as true, what would follow?” This is the best way of unmasking any philosophical fraud . . .. To take ideas seriously means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true. Philosophy provides man with a comprehensive view of life. In order to evaluate it properly, ask yourself what a given theory, if accepted, would do to a human life, starting with your own (Rand, 1982, p. 16).

We begin this chapter by taking Ayn Rand’s advice. We project – by means of a fictional story – what it would be like for a businessman to accept and live by the philosophy of postmodernism.

THE STORY OF TOM WILSON Tom Wilson was excited. He had just completed his MBA program at Ivy University. The course he had loved the most was a brand-new elective entitled,

Postmodernism and Management: Pros, Cons and the Alternative Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 21, 249–278 Copyright © 2003 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1016/S0733-558X(03)21009-0

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“Philosophy for the Modern Businessperson.” It had been taught by Dr. Mortimer Spifkin, a world-renowned philosopher and one of Ivy University’s most popular teachers. His field of expertise was postmodernism. “I decided,” reported Dr. Spifkin, “that I should teach the latest philosophical ideas to people who are going out into the business world.” Tom was not sure that he fully understood everything he had been taught in the course; after all, he was no philosopher. But what a privilege to deal with such a world-renowned mind! There were certain ideas from the course that puzzled Tom and some that even seemed self-contradictory, but Professor Spifkin had told him not to get too hung up on logic. Eventually he pushed his doubts aside. After all, everyone said Spifkin was a great man. Tom had had considerable business experience before entering the MBA program, and his goal in getting the advanced degree was to prepare himself to open his own business. Now he felt ready. His specialty was computer-networking software. He planned to start small, with only about five people, all experienced. Two were classmates who had also taken Dr. Spifkin’s course. The first task, getting financing, was accomplished through loans from relatives. The next task was organizational structure. Tom recalled from his course that the world was dominated by unequal power relationships for which there were no objective basis, and he did not want to be accused of fostering inequality. So it was agreed that everyone in the company would be equal. Of course, they had to have official titles like CEO, COO, and CFO to placate investors and regulatory agencies, but this did not bother Tom because he would define these positions so that they were all equal. He remembered Dr. Spifkin’s words: “definitions are whatever we want them to be.” The team got together to develop their first software program. Despite their experience, the five principals had very different opinions about what attributes the product should have. This posed a problem, because everyone was supposed to be equal. Suddenly Tom recalled Dr. Spifkin’s words, “everyone creates their own reality.” So, the solution was simple. Make five versions of the product to match the five realities. Heck, how was he to know which would be best, anyway? How was anyone to know anything? Truth, he recalled Dr. Spifkin stating, was not discovered or validated; it was created. By trying to impose logical order on things, Dr. Spifkin had said, you only stifle creativity. The titular CFO said that multiple products might put a strain on the company’s resources, especially manpower. So it was agreed by all to hire 25 more programmers. Tom reminded himself that words control reality, so, if the applicants could speak about programming using all the “in” words, he hired them. There was evidence that some were not too skilled in actual programming, but he dismissed that as irrelevant.

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The programmers worked at a hectic pace for several months. Cash ran short but relatives bailed them out after receiving a letter with very impressive sounding words in it. Finally, the company had five versions of the product. Tom was shocked to learn that they were written in five different and incompatible computer languages and codes. But he reassured himself that this was to be expected; he had been taught that the multiple realities each group creates are often contradictory. Now they had to market the five products. They desperately needed more cash, and there was no room for delay. But the programs had not been debugged, so how would they advertise them? Tom decided that they would say, “The programs are ready to install.” This would be all right, he insisted, because “ready to install” could have a lot of different meanings, such as “ready to install but not ready to run.” They would advertise “full customer service” even though they did not yet have a service department. No matter. “Full customer service” could be defined in many different ways. What about the fact that the products were incompatible? No problem. They would call the products, “diverse and flexible” – just as reality was. Their market was growing rapidly and customers initially snapped up their products. There was some grumbling about the incompatible codes but most customers got the product they wanted. De-bugging caused some embarrassment and ill-feelings but after some 100-hour weeks by the staff, most programs were made to “work” reasonably well, although many programmers and disgruntled customers were not sure just what the word “work” actually meant. But what to do next? They were in a very competitive, fast-moving field. Their products would probably be obsolete in 6–12 months. Everyone was equal, so the arguments went on for weeks. There were now so many conflicting groups within the company: male vs. female, white vs. black, American-born vs. foreign-born, young vs. old, less experienced vs. more experienced, less able vs. more able, Christian vs. Muslim. And there were so many incompatible suggestions: scrap all but the best product; scrap all but the best two; make five more variants of each of the five; enter the mainframe market; stick to PCs; sell only domestically; sell abroad; put the products on the net; sell only through dealers; raise prices; lower prices; sell service contracts; contract out for service; make hardware; stick to software. Tom was getting worried. He had already counted at least 37 different, clashing realities and more were being created everyday. There were so many choices, yet there was no means by which to choose, because there was no method by which one could know. To comfort himself he remembered that there was no objective reality, only language and appearances – yet somehow there were real customers out there who had to be satisfied. Tom had tried to

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encourage creativity by letting people do what they wanted, but he had only achieved chaos. It was finally decided that each group should pursue the products and markets of its choice. This seemed like the most philosophically sound procedure. The employees were excited, because they were again empowered to make their own realities. They worked long and hard and hired many more employees to help them, although there began to be grumblings within each group because each member had his own version of reality. Internal conflict steadily mounted. Tom grew more and more uneasy as customers and investors became confused about what the company was doing and as customer service further deteriorated. He worried that this would harm the company financially but dismissed it all as “quibbling about words” and felt relief when he recalled Dr. Spifkin’s remark that “causality is a Western prejudice.” Still, cash flow was becoming a “real” problem due to decreasing sales combined with increased manpower costs. Some of the new products were dogs, even though they were made by people who had spoken so articulately about programming at the time of hiring. Tom could not understand it. Soon cash became so scarce that they could not meet the payroll. The banks did not seem too enthusiastic about Tom’s suggestion to redefine what was meant by a “positive cash balance.” Tom decided that they had to do some major selling, fast. His marketing people, however, said this would be impossible because the company was getting a bad reputation. Many of the products did not work and customer service was poor. This did not faze Tom. “It’s all a matter of language,” he said. They would advertise and sell new products that were in the pipeline but not yet ready. The marketing manager, who had not attended Ivy University, objected, “It’s fraud to sell a product you don’t have.” Tom repeated Dr. Spifkin’s words, “Ethics are not something objective or absolute. They are just a matter of our subjective opinion.” Tom decided to go ahead with his plan. Sales were strong at first, but then things started to go wrong. Customers demanded delivery, but there were no products to deliver. Many demanded refunds. Others threatened to sue for fraud. Employees began to lose confidence in the company and started looking for other jobs. Some took company secrets with them. The ones from Ivy University had no qualms about this. Said one, “I created my own reality, and I am taking it with me.” But Tom sputtered, “The employment contract?” “Just a bunch of words,” replied one, “and words can mean anything you want.” The marketing manager resigned. There was cash missing and the CFO could not be found, but he did leave an email message, “As you said, it’s all relative, old buddy.” Tom started laying people off, but they all threatened to sue. “After all, we are all equal,” they said. Two weeks later the company declared

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bankruptcy. The life savings of ten relatives of the company’s founders had been wiped out. Most ex-employees had a very hard time getting hired; nobody trusted them. *** Pale and gaunt, Tom returned to the campus of Ivy University and went to see Dr. Spifkin. “I can’t understand it. I applied every principle that you taught me,” he moaned. “But I’ve ruined my best friends and relatives, failed at my career, and destroyed my reputation. What does it all mean?” “Well,” replied Dr. Spifkin, “it all depends on what you mean by ‘mean.’ ” After another 10 minutes of fruitless semantics, Tom walked out and climbed the stairs to the top of the building. He looked down from the roof. A light drizzle and an evening fog made the streets below look dark and indistinct. Car headlights gave off a fuzzy glow against the wet pavement. Pedestrians looked like fleeting shadows in a cave. All these were only the visible signs, thought Tom, of a world forever hidden from man’s view and man’s knowledge. They’re not real, he told himself. I’m not real. My business was not real. The pavement is not real. It’s all just names. But names did not eliminate his profound inner emptiness and despair. That was real. He leaned over the edge of the roof parapet, and said, “What the hell! Nothing means anything anyway,” and jumped. *** The above, of course, is not a flattering picture. Defenders of postmodernism may claim that we have caricatured their philosophy in our fictional story. We have not. Rather we have been far too generous; the story is liberally sprinkled with elements of reason and reality. If we had applied the theory totally and consistently, Tom’s business could never even have gotten off the ground. Some might argue that postmodernism is not meant as a guide to living but only as a guide to discourse. Discourse about what and to what end? We reject the idea of separating words from reality and philosophy from life. The reason that some might think that the story is a caricature is that the tenets of postmodernism are usually not taken seriously – as a philosophy to live by – but are rather offered simply as an “intellectual” word game. We, however, take ideas and philosophy seriously. We shall show that postmodernism has nothing positive to offer; its result, should people attempt to live by it, as Tom did, will be only destruction. To understand in theoretical terms why this is true, we will explain the essential meaning of postmodernism. We will see why the theory is arbitrary in every essential aspect and amounts to a wholesale attack on this world and man’s mind. We will then present an alternative philosophy – Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism – for those who wish to

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resist postmodernism’s nihilism. Objectivism offers a comprehensive defense of objective reality and objective knowledge and a philosophy that facilitates living successfully on earth. In presenting objectivism we identify the proper relationship between words and reality. We also show how objectivism can help foster success in business.

THE ESSENCE OF POSTMODERNISM We do not accept the claim of some postmodernists that the philosophy is so diverse and variegated that it cannot be defined (a very postmodern claim in itself). If the term “postmodernism” has no coherent, intelligible definition, then the term is meaningless and should not be used at all. If postmodernism is not something particular, then it is nothing. We hold that “postmodernism” has a specific meaning, despite differences among various factions. We are concerned here only with its essential tenets. Fundamentally, as we shall see, postmodernism is the explicit, philosophical rejection of reality, reason, and objectivity. According to postmodernism, the concept of an objective reality – the idea that reality exists and is what it is independent from any human mind – is invalid. Some postmodernists allow that an objective reality may exist, but dismiss it as unimportant: “Some, including myself, do not deny the possible existence of something worth the label ‘objective reality,’ but are more inclined to emphasize that social reality is not external to human consciousness and language use” (Alvesson, 1996, p. 459). A closely related postmodern viewpoint is that, although an objective reality may exist, by our very nature it is impossible for us to know it. Other postmodernists dismiss objective reality outright: “Feminist analysis [a branch of postmodernism] begins with the principle that objective reality is a myth” (Ann Scales quoted in Farber & Sherry, 1997, p. 23). Philosophically, the above differences are irrelevant. If reality exists but cannot be known, then, for all practical purposes, objective reality can be dispensed with entirely. Do not make the mistake of thinking, as some do, that not all facts fall under the scope of postmodernism’s attack, that it wishes simply to criticize existing social or economic relations. Even scientifically established facts and science itself are under attack. “Rules for science that claim to show the ultimate or superior way to objectivity and rationality,” writes Alvesson, “has [sic] so far not proven to be uncontested or reliable in the long run . . . . Data are never pure, free from theory, language and an interpretive bias, they are always constructed in terms of a particular framework, prestructured personal and cultural understanding, vocabulary and perspective” (Alvesson, 1996, p. 460). Other postmodernists reject science even more blatantly: “our critique of the objective standpoint as male is a critique of

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science as a specifically male approach to knowledge. With it, we reject male criteria for verification” (Catharine MacKinnon quoted in Farber & Sherry, 1997, p. 26). If objective reality and objective facts are a myth that must be abandoned, what is to replace them? According to postmodernism, “reality” is a human, subjective construction. Typically postmodernism does not endorse individual subjectivism (although such would not be logically inconsistent with its tenets given that each individual grows up in a different sub-culture). It claims that “facts” are social creations that change as society changes. “Reality” is a collective creation, a group product. Here is this view applied to leadership studies: “It is important to realize that leaders, subordinates as well as measurements of various qualities, feelings and outcomes are subjective and social constructions and not simple reflections of objective reality” (Alvesson, 1996, p. 464). Since “reality” is socially constructed and varies as different groups attempt to create their own “realities,” postmodernism embraces multiple, often contradictory and unintelligible, “realities.” “[T]he postmodern is a view of the world where individuals are inundated with multiple voices that create a cacophony of sound and an inability to make complete sense of reality. The discovery of ultimate Truths is abandoned as impossible and mistaken” (Tierney, 1996, p. 373). “From a Postmodern perspective . . . the idea . . . that reality is understandable is rejected in favor of a multivocality where disintegration and instability is the norm” (Tierney, 1996, p. 374). On the postmodernist approach, then, identity – the idea that existents in reality have an independent, definite, firm, knowable nature – is an illusion and causality is discarded, often as a male or white or arbitrary Western prejudice. In attacking objective reality and extolling the group as the creator of “reality,” postmodernism denigrates the importance of the individual. According to postmodernism, man is not an autonomous agent who possesses free will – i.e. a reasoning mind capable of reaching truth by adhering to reality. “The idea of the autonomous human being that is capable of independent thought and action is replaced by the portrait of an individual hemmed in by social and cultural constraints.” (Tierney, 1996, p. 375) Man is a mere fragment of a – usually physiological – collective. His ideas, values, interests and actions – all are determined not by his rational thought and his own choices but by his relationship to and membership in a collective: by the fact that he happens to be white or black, male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, born in North America or born in Africa. “[W]hen Postmodern arguments are extended we find it possible to replace an individualistic worldview – in which individual minds are critical to human functioning – with a relational reality” (Kenneth Gergen quoted in Tierney, 1996, p. 375). Postmodernism, in other words, embraces collective (group) determinism. By what means does a group socially construct “reality”? According to postmodernism, the usual means is: language. The group that is able to control

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language – to impose its meaning and definitions on the concepts we use – creates reality. “As Deetz (1996, p. 192) puts it, ‘conceptions are always contests for meaning . . .. Language does not name objects in the world; it is core to the process of constituting objects . . ..’ ” Language and concepts, on this view, have no referents in reality (there is, after all, no independent reality for concepts to refer to), no firm meanings, no objective rules or logic for their proper use and misuse. Concepts mean simply whatever a group decides they mean. Gergen (2001, p. 805) sums it up this way, “there is no ultimate means of justifying one form of rationality, description, or explanation over another. If such justification were to be offered, they would also prove to be exercises in linguistic convention.” Because concepts and logic, according to postmodernism, are not our means of discovering and identifying the nature of reality but rather our means of creating “reality,” the individual’s faculty of reason is impotent. “From this perspective, the pursuit of truth becomes deeply problematic as a goal of social science, because what counts as truth is not fixed, but derives in part from social conventions that can differ among contexts and language games” (Kilduff & Mehra, 1997, p. 463). “Postmodernists eschew the search for clarity or persuasion through rational logic because absolutes no longer exist” (Tierney, 1996, p. 374). Reason, to the extent that postmodernism retains the term, does not name some objective, specific cognitive faculty of man, his means of knowledge and discoverer of truth. “Reason” is simply a social construct used to dominate others and which changes as the dominant group changes. According to postmodernism, historically the group that was able to impose its interpretation of “reason” on others thereby came to hold tremendous power over them, capable of dismissing any dissenters as “irrational.” As one postmodernist puts it, “like ‘fairness,’ ‘merit,’ and ‘free speech,’ Reason is a political entity” (Stanley Fish quoted in Farber & Sherry, 1997, p. 25). Writes a commentator on postmodernism: “The characteristics associated with the knower – objectivity, reason, universality, intellect – are associated with men.” (Susan H. Williams quoted in Farber & Sherry, 1997, p. 28). Writes still another scholar: “what Michael Foucault devastatingly labeled ‘the monologue of reason’ has been, for many contemporary intellectuals, displaced by an emphasis on the socially contingent and power-driven nature of conceptions of reality and the ubiquity of often incommensurable perspectives. No longer can those with even radically different views be facilely denounced as irrational” (Sanford Levinson quoted in Farber & Sherry, 1997, p. 29). “Reality,” then, is socially constructed by those who are able to shape and define the meaning of concepts and language. The Postmodernist view of the world is, in essence, that of group warfare. This, plus its implicit Marxist premises, explains postmodernism’s obsession with power. For it, every issue is one of cultural and political power: a struggle to see which group can impose its whims (its “social

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creation of reality”) on others. In any difference or dispute between two groups, there is no resort to what the facts are or to what is true, since what count as “facts” and “truth” for one group may not count as “facts” and “truth” for the other group. There is only a power struggle to see which group can control our concepts and language. Thus some Postmodernists claim that what counts as “reality,” “reason,” “objectivity,” “knowledge,” etc., has been created by males to subjugate females. Others claim that what has been called “reality,” “reason,” “objectivity,” “knowledge,” etc., has been created by the West to subjugate the non-Western world. In such an approach, there is no distinction between reason and force. (Observe the perverse rewriting of history implicit in the Postmodern approach; in fact, true subjugation – through brute force – occurs only when men abandon reason as the means of settling disputes.) Because in metaphysics and epistemology postmodernism rejects reality and reason, it necessarily rejects all objective standards, including all objective moral standards. An objective standard states that, by the inexorable nature of reality, as discovered by the faculty of reason, X is required for Y. For instance, if an entrepreneur is trying to build a bridge for his railway, the standard is that the bridge be constructed so that it is capable of sustaining the loads it is meant to carry without collapsing. A bridge that meets the standard is good or valuable; one that does not is bad or without value. The standard fundamentally is set by reality: if one wants trains to be able to cross the river, the bridge cannot be built from leaves or water but must be build from suitable materials, such as wood or steel, properly arranged. But the standard is also set by man’s reason: one must discover a whole host of knowledge, including the facts that materials and methods of construction differ, that some can withstand enormous loads while others cannot, etc., in order to know what is required to build the bridge. Because the standard is based in reality and reason, it is objective. And note that the penalty for not adopting an objective standard when building the bridge is also set fundamentally by reality: the bridge will collapse on the first run, sending the train plummeting into the river and bankrupting the entrepreneur’s business. Similarly, if the entrepreneur when building his bridge hires only the most knowledgeable construction engineers (vs., say, hiring one white engineer, one black, one female, one disabled, etc.), his action is an expression of an objective standard. By the nature of reality, it takes actual knowledge and skills – not various skin colors or gender – to erect a bridge; the entrepreneur has grasped this fact by his reason, and so chooses to hire only the most knowledgeable and skilled engineers he can find, regardless of their membership in various demographic categories. If he hires incompetent engineers, by the nature of reality disaster again will ensue.

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Objective standards, in other words, rest on the fundamental fact that reality is what it is and does not accommodate itself to anyone’s thoughts, desires, whims – that in order to act successfully man must obey reality, discovering by a process of reason what reality’s nature and requirements are. Postmodernism, however, rejects all this. Reality, for it, is not a firm place with a definite nature. Reality is not something we must adapt to – it is something that adapts to us. We create “reality,” constructing it out of our language games. Reason, as we have seen, is absent in such a world; “reason” is only the attempt by one group to impose its linguistic whims on others. If reason and reality are out, anything goes – and must go. The hostility that postmodernists project toward objective standards – be they employment or grammatical or economic or moral standards – stems from the fact that any objective standard must be based on reality and reason, both of which postmodernism wishes to annihilate. “Standards” are acceptable only so long as they make no claim to be reality-based. As Gergen (2001, p. 807) puts the point in regard to moral standards, “The advantage of postmodern constructionism is that it does not seek to lodge these commitments [to values] in some form of foundation [i.e. in reality], a secure base from which others may be viewed as transcendentally wrong or evil.” This is the actual meaning behind postmodernism’s championing of “diversity.” When postmodernists campaign in the name of diversity that grade school students should read not just Shakespeare but also stories that contain sentences such as “She sweetest, goodest safe,” they do not do so because they think the latter is in reality as good as Shakespeare. When they campaign in the name of diversity to have people hired not on merit and ability but because they are “disabled,” they do not do so because they think the disabled person will in reality be as good at his job. When they campaign in the name of diversity to have Indian mysticism taught alongside Western science, they do not do so because they think the former will enable us to build better computers and send rockets into outer space. Their goal in all these cases, rather, is to smash the objective standards themselves. Postmodernism adheres to an unwavering egalitarianism. All standards, moral or otherwise, must be discarded; everything is the “equal” of everything else. In the normative realm – the realm of determining what is better and worse, be it in terms of engineering or economics or morality – anything goes. Making everything “equally valuable,” of course, in the end destroys the very concept of value. In essence, therefore, postmodernism amounts to nihilism. Postmodernists bicker among themselves about whether their philosophy is a new paradigm or just a method for attacking old paradigms (i.e. reason). But the distinction is irrelevant. Either way, it is not a positive philosophical theory but the destruction of philosophy – and so of man’s life. In rejecting reality, reason and all objective standards postmodernism deliberately rejects the essence of the Enlightenment.

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The “modern” in postmodernism refers to the Enlightenment and all the glories that it brought the world: reason, science, technology, freedom, capitalism, wealth. *** There is no honest revolt against reality or reason. There is no interpretation of fact that can lead one to the conclusion that facts and reality do not exist; there is no reasoning process that can lead one to the conclusion that reason is invalid. Reality is the sum of that which exists. It is meaningless to posit multiple “realities,” alternative realities, etc. Either that which is posited exists, in which case it is part of reality, or it does not exist. To exist is to be something specific – to have a definite nature or identity. To claim that the subject – or a group of subjects – creates reality through his perceptions and thoughts is to claim that reality is malleable to his whims, that reality “exists” – but as nothing in particular. It is to claim that something exists, but that this “something” is nothing – in other words, that this something does not exist. This is an absurdity that lies at the heart of postmodernism’s – and any Kantian inspired – metaphysics. Moreover, the idea that reality is created by the mind or consciousness is self-refuting. This very idea is offered as something true of reality, as the correct identification of the nature of a fact of reality – a fact that exists regardless of what anyone thinks about it. In other words, this fact is not something socially created – which contradicts the very idea being advanced. Nor can one escape the self-contradiction by claiming that the idea that reality is socially constructed is true only for those who accept the idea. For this implies that reality is not socially created – that it exists and is what it is independent of any consciousness – for those who accept this alternative idea. And this in turn implies that reality both is and is not socially created. Of course, postmodernists claim that the laws of logic themselves are an arbitrary social construction, but, if so, then their claims are both true and not true at the same time and in the same respect. This reduces their philosophy to gibberish. Similarly, the claim that reason is invalid is senseless. By what means does a postmodernist know that reason is invalid? Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates our sensory-perceptual observations into concepts, organizing and applying concepts by the method of logic. Any attempt to attack reason by means of reason (a method Kant “perfected”) – to claim that observation, conceptual thought and logic have convinced one that observation, conceptual thought and logic are invalid – is doomed to incoherence. The usual purpose someone has in attacking reason is to attempt to substitute his feelings for knowledge – whether he calls his feelings “intuition,” “instinct,” “mystical insight,” or “faith” (Kant, 1965, p. 29). (Recall, from the chapter by Ghate, that Kant denied knowledge in order to make room for faith.)

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The proper response to postmodernism, then, is not to attempt to argue and debate with postmodernists, but simply to accurately identify what they “stand” for: nothing. But showing that postmodernism is a dead end is not enough. Postmodernists might reply, “OK, we are spouting nonsense, but – given the apparent destruction of reason – what is the alternative?” This is what we will now offer.

OBJECTIVISM AS THE PROPER ALTERNATIVE TO POSTMODERNISM Is it possible to defend reality, reason and objectivity against the assault of postmodernists? We believe so. We offer Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism as the antidote. (We must note here that what follows is a highly condensed presentation of objectivism; for a full presentation and proof of the philosophy, see Peikoff, 1991; Rand, 1961, 1964, 1982, 1990.) We also indicate some of the implications of objectivism for management.

Metaphysics Rand begins by explicitly naming the base of her philosophy: the axioms of existence (what is, is; existence exists), consciousness (one is aware that something exists, consciousness is conscious) and identity (that which exists has a specific nature, A is A). Causality is a corollary of the axiom of identity: if every thing has a specific nature, then it can act only in accordance with that nature. A philosophical axiom is a fundamental, undeniable truth on which all subsequent knowledge rests. It is self-evident – i.e. implicit in any instance of perception – and cannot be coherently denied: any “denial” must accept the axiom in the very act of trying to deny it. Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two – existence and consciousness – are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might achieve at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of the solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it. To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of nonexistence; it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes [this is the third axiom]. Centuries ago, the man who was – no matter what his errors – the greatest of your philosophers [Aristotle], has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself (Rand, 1961, p. 125).

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Together these three axioms add up to a corollary principle, which Rand calls the primacy of existence. The primacy of existence states that existence comes first: what exists, exists and is what it is independent of any consciousness. Consciousness, by contrast, is a metaphysical dependent: in order for it to be conscious of something, it requires that something first exist. In order for you to be conscious of the book on the table, for instance, the book (and table) must first exist. “If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms . . . . If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, then what you possess is not consciousness” (Rand, 1961, p. 124). Metaphysically, therefore, consciousness is passive (although epistemologically, it is active – see below): its function is to grasp that something exists and to grasp the nature, the identity, of that which exists. Consciousness has no power to create or alter that which exists (which is not to deny that man has the power to re-arrange what exists – see below). The opposite of the primacy of existence is what Rand calls the primacy of consciousness. On this view, consciousness comes first: its task is not to perceive existence but to create it. Ever since Kant (though the stage was set by Descartes), the primacy of consciousness has been dominant in philosophy. Whether it is Kant’s internal forms of sensibility and conceptual categories creating space, time, existence, and causality, Hegel’s cosmic mind developing itself through progressive contradictions, the Pragmatists’ feelings and actions molding the world, or the Postmodernists’ social construction of reality, the common root is the idea that the function of consciousness is not to identify but to create and alter reality. But to accept the primacy of consciousness is to reject the axioms of existence, consciousness and identity, and so to lapse into self-contradiction. A consciousness cannot be the creator of existence because it first requires that existence exist: a “consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms” (Rand, 1961, p. 124). Nor can the primacy of consciousness be saved by claiming, as so many have tried, that existence exists but consciousness determines its identity. This is to claim that there exists a thing, which is no thing in particular – i.e. there exists something, which is nothing. Note that objectivism recognizes that there are man-made facts as distinguished from metaphysically given facts (Rand, 1982, pp. 23–34). Metaphysically given facts flow from the inexorable nature – the identity – of reality: they are, and they had to be. Man-made facts flow (in part) from man’s volition: they are, but they did not have to be (i.e. a different choice was possible). The existence of the sun, for instance, is a metaphysically given fact; the existence of the Empire State Building and the existence of the Constitution of the United States are man-made facts. The creative power that man’s faculty of volition gives him, however, is strictly limited: the existence and identity of the elements of reality are outside his

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power to affect. Man’s only creative power is the ability to rearrange the elements of reality in accordance with their identities. To do so successfully (i.e. in a manner that will further his existence) requires knowledge. Man can attempt, for instance, to build a skyscraper by piling up dirt and leaves, but it will crash to the ground. He can also, however, study the principles of physics, learn how to make steel and concrete, and then erect soaring towers. Man can attempt to organize a society by following “divine revelation” – and then see his society collapse into the chaos of the Dark Ages. But he can also study man’s nature, the nature and functions of government, and actual past governments, and then write a viable Constitution.

Epistemology All knowledge (including knowledge of the axioms) begins with the evidence of the senses. To claim that the senses are invalid is a contradiction. On what basis could one claim the senses were invalid except on the basis of sensory evidence? The senses give us automatic knowledge of reality. So-called perceptual “errors,” such as illusions, are simply the way in which the brain integrates the whole perceptual field, e.g. the railroad tracks look like they meet off in the distance because the eyes respond to input regarding distance. We can see that the tracks do not really meet by walking down the tracks. As noted in the previous chapter, Kant’s fundamental error was the premise that having a specific means of consciousness (i.e. sensory systems and a rational faculty) automatically disqualifies one from knowing reality. But the truth is the reverse. One can know reality only through a specific means of awareness, which determines the specific way in which one is aware of reality. At the perceptual level, this means one must distinguish between the object and form of perception. We become aware of the wavelength of light, for example, through the experience of color (hue). There is no such thing as awareness of reality by no means (e.g. absent a brain and sense receptors). Having a means of awareness does not undermine the validity of our knowledge, as Kant implied. Nor does it imply that we perceive reality “as it appears to us.” We do not perceive appearances; we perceive reality by specific means. Man’s distinctive form of awareness, however, is not perceptual. He shares that level with the lower animals. Man has the power of reason. Reason functions by means of concepts. The question on which the validity of reason depends is: Do concepts give us knowledge of reality? Ever since Kant (although Plato made the same error), the dominant view in philosophy has been that they do not: concepts have no connection to reality, they are subjective products of the human mind whose inescapable distortions create a “reality” of their own.

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Kant’s view has dominated philosophy because no one until Ayn Rand had been able to identify the connection of concepts to sensory perception (and so to reality). No one had been able to identify how we are able validly to form a mental unit that integrates things which, though similar, are also different from each other in every observable, measurable aspect (e.g. every table is of a different width, length, height, weight, etc.). Rand’s crucial discovery in this regard is that of measurement omission (see Rand, 1990 for details). One observes, for instance, that certain man-made objects consisting of a flat, level surface with supports and that support other, small objects (tables) are similar to each other and different from related objects (e.g. chairs). One integrates the different tables into a single mental unit by omitting the particular measurements of each table on the implicit principle that a table may be of any width, length, height, weight (within certain ranges) so long as it is of some specific width, length, etc. (within those ranges). One then retains the concept by a sensory-perceptual symbol, a word. Words, therefore, are not detached from reality but stand for concepts that are themselves based on the facts of reality. The concept table stands for an unlimited potential number of actual tables, including tables not yet made. Valid higher-level concepts are formed through integrating lower-level concepts using the same principle of measurement omission. For example, tables, chairs, sofas, desks, and lamps can be integrated into a more abstract concept, furniture, by integrating the facts that these are all movable articles in a home that make it fit for living and working, but omitting the measurements of the various types of moving articles. Definitions are the final step in concept formation. They have two functions: to tie the concept to its referents in reality and to differentiate the concept from other concepts. A definition, which must be formed in accordance with objective principles in order to be valid, is not synonymous with the concept. A definition simply identifies the fundamental attributes of the concretes subsumed by the concept (e.g. “man is the rational animal” is a valid definition of man because reason is man’s fundamental attribute). The definition of man ties the concept to its proper referents while connecting it to but keeping it distinct from one’s other related knowledge. Thus the two parts of a valid definition, genus and differentia. The genus “animal” connects the concept of man with the rest of our vast knowledge about the animal kingdom. The differentia “rational” distinguishes the referents of the concept of man in a fundamental way from all the other members of the animal kingdom. The enormous cognitive benefit of concepts is that of economy: an unlimited number of entities (actions, relationships, etc.) can be held in mind and dealt with by means of a single mental unit, thereby drastically increasing the range and power of man’s mind beyond that attainable at the perceptual level.

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Observe that for objectivism concepts are not “out there,” intrinsic properties of objects or of reality, to be discovered by some mysterious process of intuition. Nor are they subjective constructs arbitrarily invented inside one’s head. They are mental integrations of what is out there. They are the form in which a conceptual consciousness grasps reality. They are, if formed by the correct method, objective. Contrary to the claims of some postmodernists, for example, the concepts of male and female are not arbitrary but objective. Those who doubt this should start by looking at pictures of males and females – or in the mirror. The mind attains objectivity by connecting every concept to perceptual data and therefore to the facts of reality. The method by which it does this is logic. Logic, for objectivism, is not primarily deductive but inductive: deriving all of one’s conclusions ultimately from sensory-perception and integrating this knowledge into a noncontradictory whole. Thus, objectivism rejects two dominant modern approaches to philosophy: rationalism (reason, especially deduction, divorced from sensory-perceptual observation) and empiricism (sensory-perceptual observation divorced from reason, i.e. from conceptual processing and integration). For objectivism knowledge results from logic applied to experience. Postmodernism stresses the fact that different individuals and groups have different “contexts,” i.e. different ideas. For the postsmodernist this immediately disqualifies the conclusions of any individual from being objective. There are two reasons for this. First, according to postmodernism any context is necessarily arbitrary, i.e. divorced from reality, since concepts are necessarily arbitrary. Objectivism, by contrast, shows that concepts, if formed by the correct method, are based in reality. Furthermore, objectivism shows that context-holding – which means requiring that everything one knows be integrated without contradiction with everything else one knows – is a crucial part of logic and so of expanding knowledge; it is not the disqualifier of knowledge. Second, for postmodernism an individual’s cultural context, whether true or false, good, or bad, determines his ideas; that is, the individual is helpless to avoid cultural determinism. Objectivism, by contrast, holds that the conceptual level of awareness is volitional. “[T]o think is an act of choice . . . . Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs, or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort” (Rand, 1961, p. 120). Man has the sovereign power to choose the ideas that move him. Volition is a corollary of the axiom of (human) consciousness. The “perceptual self-evidency” here is that of introspection. One can observe directly that one has the power to focus one’s mind at the conceptual level (e.g. aim for understanding, integration) or to let it drift at or drop to the sensory-perceptual level.

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A good illustration of volition (and one that works very well with students) is reading a book: one can just look at the marks on the page or try to focus one’s mind so as to understand what the words mean. No matter what one’s culture or environment (assuming a normal brain state and freedom from physical coercion), one has the power to choose to think or to evade the effort (and then, if one chooses to think, the power to make secondary choices based on that primary choice; see Peikoff, 1991, pp. 55–72). Note that volition does not violate the law of causality; rather it is a form of that law – one applicable to a conceptual consciousness. The cause of the choice to think in each given case is: the individual man. It is a causal primary not necessitated by prior events. Nor does volition undermine science. In actuality, it is a precondition of all science and of all knowledge. If men were not free to focus on the facts, evaluate them, and reach conclusions based on logic and evidence, then all claims of knowledge would reduce to nonsense (as they do in postmodernism), viz. “I was forced by my genes and conditioning to emit the follows word sounds . . .”. Volition does not mean omniscience. All knowledge has to be acquired and men can err in reaching conclusions. It is precisely because human consciousness is volitional and conceptual – and therefore fallible – that man needs the science of epistemology, the science that identifies the fundamental means of acquiring and validating knowledge.

Ethics The existence of a volitional, living organism is a precondition of the science of ethics. Telling an individual what he should do is pointless if he has no choice of how to act. But Ayn Rand does not take the need for a science of ethics for granted (for objectivism’s ethics see Peikoff, 1991; Rand, 1964). She begins by asking the fundamental question: why does man need a code of ethics? The answer, she holds, rests precisely in the fact that man is a certain kind of living organism. A living organism’s life is conditional: its continued existence depends upon it reaching certain goals that are set by its specific nature (a gazelle, for instance, must obtain grass to live, a lion must obtain gazelles or the like to live). The organism’s life, in other words, is the standard that determines what goals it must reach and what it must avoid, what is a value and disvalue to it: the grass (as food) is a value to the gazelle, but not to the lion. “It is only the concept of ‘Life,’ ” Rand states, in a crucial identification, “that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible” (Rand, 1964, p. 18). For animals other than man, the standard of value is built in: within the range of their power; they act automatically to pursue the goals needed to further their lives. The same is not true for man. He can act as his own destroyer.

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He must choose to hold his life as his standard of value. And even if he makes this choice, he must discover how – which values, goals, and actions are necessary – to sustain his life. By the nature of reality and man’s nature as a living organism, ethics is needed to teach man how to live successfully. The only objective standard of value, Rand shows, is man’s life, which means each individual’s life. Thus does Rand refute Hume’s view that you cannot get an “ought” from an “is.” Man’s nature, what he is, determines what he ought to do – if he chooses to live. Life is the ultimate standard in ethics. If a man chooses not to live (ignoring here people with painful, incurable illnesses who might rationally want to end the suffering), then he has rejected reality (including his nature) and there is nothing more to say (Rand, 1982, pp. 95–101). Since the purpose of morality is to teach a man how to live, the individual is the proper beneficiary of his moral action. Thus Rand advocates egoism as against altruism. Altruism means “other-ism,” the sacrifice of oneself to other men. A moral code that tells an individual to sacrifice himself to others tells him to disregard his life, to renounce his own values, to value his own destruction – which is a contradiction in terms. (An egoist might properly risk his life for someone or something he values if his life would have no meaning to him without that value; see Rand, 1964, pp. 49–56.) Because reason is man’s method of forming and validating concepts, that is, his means of gaining knowledge, and because knowledge enables man to achieve the values necessary to live, reason is man’s basic means of survival. Thus objectivism advocates rational egoism. The standard of value of the objectivist ethics – the standard by which one judges what is good or evil – is man’s life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man. Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil (Rand, 1964, p. 25).

The cardinal virtue in objectivism – the fundamental method by which man obtains his values and lives – is rationality. “The virtue of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to actions” (Rand, 1964, p. 28). Other virtues, all of which are implicit in the virtue of rationality, are: honesty (the refusal to fake reality), integrity (loyalty to one’s rational judgment in action; see also Becker, 1998), independence (taking responsibility for one’s own thinking and for sustaining one’s existence), productiveness (creating the material objects required to fulfill one’s needs), justice (rationality applied to judgments of and actions toward other men), and pride (moral ambitiousness). All the virtues pertain to the proper relationship between consciousness and existence, mind and reality.

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Note that in objectivism the individual is the unit of moral value. This stems most fundamentally from the objectivist metaphysics. Only the individual exists as a real, independent entity. This is validated through sense perception. A group or collective is not an entity but an abstraction, a collection of individuals. Thus there can be no moral principles that pertain to a group separate from moral principles that apply to each individual member. Objectivism also totally rejects the “morality” of hedonism, the mindless indulgence of one’s whims or emotions. Since emotions stem from one’s implicit value judgments (Peikoff, 1991), the doctrine of hedonism tells people, in effect: value whatever you already happen to value. This is an empty doctrine, because it does not tell people what to value. And man cannot sustain his life long-range if he engages in mindless action. For similar reasons, objectivism rejects pragmatism: do whatever seems to “work” in the short run. There is no standard in pragmatism by which to define what “works” other than emotions. For objectivism morality is not doing whatever one happens to feel like doing, it is identifying and then doing what is actually in one’s long-range interest as a human being. Adhering to the dictates of reason is in one’s self-interest; rejecting reason is not. The antirational is the antilife. Objectivism also rejects utilitarianism: the greatest good for the greatest number. “Utilitarianism is a union of hedonism and Christianity. The first teaches man to love pleasure; the second, to love his neighbor. The union consists of teaching man to love his neighbor’s pleasure” (Peikoff, 1982, p. 122). This doctrine is clearly based on altruism and collectivism; the minority must be sacrificed to the whims of the majority. But a majority does not gain moral stature by dint of its numbers. Utilitarianism is a recipe for amorality and cannibalism, not for the survival and well being of the individual. Finally, in objectivism there is no dichotomy between the (truly) practical and the moral. The purpose of morality is not to sacrifice your life in order to serve God or society, but to live successfully and happily, long range, on earth. Consider, by way of example, one of the virtues inherent in rationality. Honesty means the refusal to fake reality. The justification of honesty is not that it benefits society but that it benefits the individual. The first consequence of trying to fake reality is to sabotage one’s own mind. Instead of using one’s rational faculty to perceive that which exists, the dishonest person uses it to deny or evade that which exists. This will make him, in principle, unable to deal with existence. The second consequence is that dishonesty will lead him to take actions in defiance of reality. The third consequence is that the results of his actions, in the end, will undermine his life and well being. Consider something as simple as a person who is planning on spending money. If he refuses to consider the amount of money he actually has to spend – focusing only on what he wants to buy – he will buy things he cannot

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afford and end up deeply in debt or bankrupt. If he pays with a bad check, he could even end up in jail. Honesty – regardless of his feelings – is in an individual’s rational self-interest (Locke & Woiceshyn, 1995). Objectivists are practical but they are not pragmatists. They believe in moral absolutes – because reality itself is absolute. It is what it is and cannot be changed by one’s whims – or one’s words.

Politics Socially, a man’s survival requires that he have the freedom to follow his reason and to benefit from his actions. This means that in a proper society the initiation of physical force must be prohibited (fraud is a form of force): to coerce a man is to negate his rational judgment and thus his means of survival. Politically, freedom to act on one’s own judgment is secured by upholding the rights of the individual: the right to life, liberty (earned) property, and the pursuit of happiness. Far from being a Western prejudice, the concept of individual rights is derived from the nature of man and identifies the precondition of his survival in a political society. The concept of rights rests most directly on the concepts of reason and egoism. In a social context rights protect man’s freedom to use his rational faculty in his own self-interest. Individual rights are incompatible with all forms of statism, including Nazism, Communism, socialism, militarism, monarchy, theocracy, oligarchy, tribalism, the welfare state, and democracy (in the Greek sense of unlimited majority rule). The proper function of government amounts to only one thing: to protect individual rights, using force only in retaliation against those who have initiated its use against others. Economically, the system based on individual rights is: capitalism. Capitalism is the social system in which all property is privately owned and men deal with one another only through voluntary trade. Anticapitalist forms of government, such as socialism or communism or fascism, destroy the mind’s ability to function and replace it with government coercion. It is no accident but a perfect expression of the law of causality that the primary consequences of statism in all its forms are stagnation, mass poverty and death. Postmodernists typically attack capitalism and harbor sympathies for socialism although, because of their relativist premises, they lack Marx’s moral fervor and moral confidence (however misguided). Postmodernists are more likely simply to make snide comments to the effect: How can anyone justify a hierarchy of authority or vast individual differences in wealth? The implication of course is that the “social arrangements” under capitalism are arbitrary, based on little more than the lust for power of Western, white males. Objectivism, by contrast, views the

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capitalist system as objective and moral – a logical consequence of enacting the principles of freedom and justice. In a free society, those who are more productive will usually be able to earn more money that those who are less productive. They attain positions with more authority and responsibility than others in business firms because of their greater ability and drive. The productive do not get rich under capitalism by stealing from the poor; they get rich by creating wealth that did not exist before. They make more money, in short, because they earn it. Capitalism is the true system of “social justice.” As to the “exploitation” of the poor, we will quote Ayn Rand (1992, pp. 978–980): [W]hen you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you. When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product . . . . In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the “competition” between the strong and the weak of the intellect.

Crucially, objectivism holds that economic and political power are fundamentally different – actually opposites. Political power is the power of physical coercion, the power of the gun. Either one obeys the government, regardless of one’s judgment, or one goes to jail (or worse). Economic power is the power of voluntary trade. Company X, for instance, can offer the customer a certain product at a certain price; but the customer is free to buy it or not to buy it as he judges best. Even a company that ends up dominating a market can do so only by offering a better product or price or service than its competitors, a product customers choose to buy. And the company can only maintain its dominance by continuing to offer more than its competitors. Precisely because it is achieved through voluntary agreements and not physical force, market dominance disappears very

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rapidly – as IBM, Xerox, GM, Ford, Kodak, and others discovered – when a company stagnates. *** It is clear that objectivism is diametrically opposed to postmodernism in every particular and in every branch of philosophy from metaphysics, to epistemology, to ethics, to politics. The question one should ask is: which philosophy corresponds to reality and so better enables man to live productively, successfully, happily on earth? And with respect to management, which philosophy better enables man to understand, create, and manage successful enterprises?

CONCLUSION Philosophy is not an academic word game but a necessity of survival. The postmodernists, who turn philosophy into mindless linguistic manipulations, have no right to expect that any rational person will pay them the slightest heed. Man needs a comprehensive view of the nature of reality and of his life in order to function and live successfully in the world (Rand, 1982). Philosophy’s task is precisely to provide man with answers to his most fundamental questions: What is the nature of reality? Does it obey causal laws? How do I know (i.e. acquire and validate knowledge)? How should I act? What is right and wrong? How should men live together? Because everyone needs answers to these questions, every person has a philosophy of sorts – i.e. some answers to the fundamental questions listed above – which influences the entirety of their thought and action. One’s choice is only whether one’s philosophy is held implicitly: as a haphazard collection of half-formed ideas, random and contradictory thoughts mixed with splotches of “common sense,” but largely outside of one’s conscious awareness or control – or whether one works to make one’s philosophy explicit: a set of fundamental principles consciously held and rationally integrated and validated (Rand, 1982, pp. 1–11). Even the postmodernist has an implicit philosophy, one that must contradict his espoused ideas – or else he would not even be able to safely cross the street, much less survive long range. As we have already made clear, in our estimation objectivism is the correct philosophy for living on earth. By way of application, consider some of the many ways in which the philosophy of objectivism would help in business and in developing theories that apply to business – as against the nihilism of postmodernism.

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Reality Business success requires the most rigorous adherence to facts (that is, facts logically integrated with other facts and rationally evaluated). Any attempt to evade reality or to engage in the pretense that one’s words or whims control it – be it a business theoretician trying to build a valid theory by looking only at supporting evidence and ignoring all contrary facts, or a businessman trying to make his company appear profitable by cooking the books – is doomed to failure, precisely because reality is not “socially created.” More bad decisions, in business and in life, are caused by the desire to escape the absolutism of reality than any other single cause. Objectivism teaches man a profound respect for reality. It teaches him that to succeed he must bear firmly in mind Bacon’s eloquent principle: “Reality, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” Postmodernism, by contrast, teaches man that reality is not an absolute, that his whims supercede facts.

Causality The inability or unwillingness to think long range, to project and anticipate not just the short-term but also the long-term effects of one’s actions and policies, has caused the failure of many businesses (e.g. Enron). Objectivism teaches man that causality is neither a primitive superstition nor a linguistic construct but an inescapable axiom. Causality pervades the world; all actions have causes and consequences. Further, objectivism teaches a man how to grasp causal connections and project cause-and-effect relationships long range: by means of objective concepts and logically validated principles. For instance, it teaches him why, in principle, honesty leads to success and dishonesty to failure (Locke & Woiceshyn, 1995; see below as well). If the overused term “vision” has any meaning in business management, it is the power to see in terms of principles what will work (sell) in the future, that is, to see the potential of some technology, product, or market. Postmodernism, in contrast, teaches man that causality is an illusion and principles are a prejudice.

Knowledge and (Un)certainty Knowledge, it has correctly been observed, is a crucial asset to a person or a business. Objectivism teaches man the means and requirements of gaining knowledge: observation of facts, concept formation, reason, logic. It teaches him

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that he must have an active mind, continuously working to expand his knowledge, to integrate his observations and experiences into principles (Locke, 2002), to integrate his principles into a noncontradictory sum. Knowledge, it shows him, is not social. Knowledge, whether it be a small insight or a crucial discovery, has to be discovered by an individual mind before it can be shared, e.g. written down or transmitted to others. (This is a metaphysically given fact; there is no such thing as a group mind.) The normal result of rational thought, objectivism teaches, is not omniscience but contextual certainty. Postmodernism, by contrast, tells man that reason is impotent and certainty impossible. Or – what may appear different but actually is fundamentally the same – that any old “method” will produce “knowledge,” be it eastern mysticism, channeling with spirits, or manipulating words.

Knowledge and “Intuition” Some managers have succeeded because they played an “intuition,” a hunch or a gut feeling; many have failed for the same reason. If “intuition,” often called “tacit knowledge,” has any meaning, it refers to conclusions stored in the subconscious. Virtually all our mental content is stored in that manner, since the conscious mind can only retain about seven separate items in focal awareness. It is not the case, as is so often claimed, however, that “tacit knowledge” cannot be communicated. It can be if the individual chooses to introspect and conceptualize. (Some people are better at this than others.) Much of what is considered “tacit knowledge” has been preceded by hours, weeks, months or even years of deliberate study. However, “tacit knowledge” should not be considered true simply because it is in the subconscious. To be considered knowledge, it must be validated. Objectivism teaches man that the mere fact that he has an idea in his mind does not prove that it is true. He must determine that it corresponds to reality. The only way to ensure that acting on an “intuition,” hunch or gut feeling will not lead to disaster is first to identify the ideas and considerations generating the “intuition,” and then to evaluate their truth. Which means: to not act on “intuition” or emotion. Postmodernism, however, teaches man to revel in his unscrutinized “intuitions” and gut feelings, telling him that these are the products of his gender, race, etc. – and so are the creators of reality.

Egoism A new fad in leadership is “servant” leadership – the leader as selfless servant of his subordinates. The accepted axiom of team membership is that the members should

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“check their egos at the door.” We disagree on both counts. A person with no ego is a person with no mind and no values. Both leaders and followers should be rationally egoistic (which does not mean they are pompous, dictatorial, or dishonest). For the leader this means that he passionately loves his work and wants to succeed (honestly) and does whatever is necessary to do so (2000b). This means that reality always comes first and that ego never supercedes reality. Being rationally egoistic would mean, for example, hiring subordinates with exceptional ability because they will help him succeed. Rather than asking followers to submerge their egos, the leader should strive to harness their egos (through providing challenging work and fair rewards) so that their self-interest is tied to the company’s success. Leaders should neither sacrifice themselves to their subordinates nor their subordinates to themselves. Rather they should operate by trade to mutual advantage.

Virtue Some would consider “business ethics” to be an oxymoron, but our view is that making (that is, honestly earning) money is a spiritual achievement – that is, something that requires the fullest use of one’s virtues, especially rationality (Locke, 2000b). We do not view the possession of wealth as proof of virtue (it depends on how the wealth was obtained), but we do view virtue as a necessary means to the creation of (as opposed to the taking or stealing of) wealth. (The process cannot be reversed; money does not endow virtue to a man who has none.) Consider several of the objectivist virtues. Honesty is the refusal to fake reality. To fake reality is to court destruction, regardless of whether one is faking it to oneself (evading) or faking it to others (lying; Locke & Woiceshyn, 1995). Trust, which is widely recognized as critical to organizational success, is a consequence of consistent honesty, of consistent refusal to pretend that the unreal is real, whether it be between management and labor, management and stockholders, employees and customers, or team members. (There is also a competence aspect to trust which we will not discuss here, but see Locke, 2000a.) Integrity is loyalty to one’s rational convictions in action (see also Becker, 1998). To act against one’s ideas is to split consciousness from reality and make one’s thinking irrelevant to what one does. It is obvious that businessmen who do not act in accordance with their expressed ideas are not trusted. Employees and customers do not show loyalty to those who are not loyal to their word. Justice is rationality applied to other men, that is, judging them objectively and rewarding and punishing them as they deserve. Injustice is a major cause of job dissatisfaction and of turnover (Locke, 2000a). It is especially damaging to an

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organization when their best people are unjustly treated. Not only are the best people most readily hired away by competitors, but they are also most critical to organizational success. It is almost a managerial axiom that people – which means knowledge, skill and creative ability – are a firm’s most critical resource. Successful organizations, such as Microsoft and General Electric, succeed to a large extent by selecting the best people and then treating them justly, rewarding them for their efforts and accomplishments. Independence is the commitment to do one’s own thinking and be responsible for one’s own life. There is little doubt, however, that this is an age of groupism (Locke, 2001). There are legitimate reasons for using teams in the workplace (e.g. the potential for greater total knowledge, the need for communication and coordination). However, teams can easily slide into the traps of social loafing, groupthink and conformity. To prevent this, one must recognize that a team is not an entity but a collection of individuals; it can be no better than the quality of its members. Team members should have individual responsibilities and be held individually accountable for their portion of the work and contributions. (Certain people, those who are too bright, driven, and independent to work with others, should not be put on teams.) Turning to the political context, the honest, independent businessman should seek freedom from government coercion but should not seek special favors from the government at the expense of the taxpayers or other businessmen. Diversity Diversity, reflecting the influence of postmodernism, is the watchword of today’s corporations and universities. Usually diversity is taken to mean racial, gender, or sexual diversity. These characteristics have nothing to do with the objective worth of an employee or the success of an organization. This kind of focus is based on and promotes racism and collectivism. To proceed objectively, one in essence would hire people only on merit. One’s focus would be: Is this the most qualified person for the position? In practice this would mean selecting on the basis of: ability and knowledge, moral character, and motivation – without regard to race, gender, creed, color, country of national origin, etc. Diversity training should be replaced by individuality training. Of course “diversity” in ideas and expertise may be a legitimate aspect in hiring and the formation of teams, but fundamentally this has nothing in common with the diversity movement. A diversity of things per se is neither good not bad: it depends upon what is being diversified and why; one’s goal in having diverse ideas and expertise within the organization is objective: the success of the business. ***

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It is not the case that organizations are guaranteed to succeed as a result of practicing a rational philosophy (although one very successful company, BB&T Corporation, an East coast, regional banking company, explicitly practices objectivist virtues). Virtuous companies and employees, for instance, may lack the knowledge and creative ability of other firms. Uncontrollable forces such as the state of the economy or government regulations can have pernicious effects even on well-run companies. Nevertheless, companies that take reality, reason and objectivity seriously will have an inestimable advantage over those that do not. Any company that seriously attempts to practice the tenets of postmodernism, as Tom Wilson’s company did, is doomed to fail. The same goes for business theorists who try to build theories on a postmodernist base. Reality is – and those who try to wipe it out cannot succeed. Perhaps one will now better appreciate the significance of the base of objectivism: existence exists.

POSTSCRIPT: POSTMODERNISM AND OBJECTIVISM APPLIED TO CURRENT EVENTS The events of September 11, 2001 provide an excellent opportunity to illustrate the differences between postmodernism and objectivism “in action.” The standard postmodern reaction (offered by Professor Stanley Fish and others) to these horrific events goes something like this: From the point of view of our cultural traditions and assumptions, the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, the attack on the Pentagon, the crash of the plane in Pennsylvania and the many resulting deaths, were horrendous and evil and thus to be morally condemned by us. But from the point of view of the Muslim terrorists and their many followers and admirers, these were moral and heroic acts since, to them, it is the United States and its citizens that are evil. Since each side must evaluate the events within the context of its own cultural values, and since there are no absolute or objective values, neither side is in fact right or wrong. According to the multiculturalist view, cultures differ from one another but one cannot say that any one is better than any other. And there is nothing more to be said. The postmodern analysis stops there. We in America choose freedom over force, reason over mysticism, life over death – but these choices, postmodernism contends, are just as arbitrary as their opposites. Now let us analyze these events objectively. First, observe that all the terrorists came from Muslim countries. These countries are all dictatorships, dominated directly or indirectly by religion. In these countries the concept of individual rights is virtually unknown – if not rejected outright. There is little or no freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or free elections. Reason is explicitly subordinated

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to religious dogma. Proper behavior in this world requires following religeous strictures and preparations for the “afterlife.” The terrorists said explicitly that they worshipped death. The Koran states in several places that it is a duty of Muslims to kill infidels and the fundamentalists take this literally. People in these countries who advocate freedom of religion or secularism are threatened or killed. Second, the United States was not the cause of these political conditions. Religious dogmatism is not new to these countries but has been an essential element of their cultures for at least 1,000 years. Radical elements in these countries who want to overthrow their own governments do not want to do so in order to spread freedom but rather in order to establish fundamentalist theocracies. Third, these countries are mostly poverty stricken and militarily impotent (compared with Western countries). This poverty and impotence is most directly a result of their rejection of reason. Ironically, there was a period in the Muslim world, especially the 8th and 9th centuries, when the Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, were widely read and respected, but by the 12th century reason was rejected in favor of religion and reason found its home in the west. As a result, the Muslim world never went through an Enlightenment. It does not support reason, rights, technology or freedom, either in politics or in business. Capitalism is absent; the government dominates its economies. Fourth, what little wealth these countries possess (much of which is used to buy arms) is due largely to income from oil. All of the oil in these countries was discovered and developed by Western countries, which then allowed the oil facilities to be seized from them by force. This could be considered the most generous (and perverse) act of Western foreign aid in the history of the world. The oil income, however, is attributed to the will of Allah. Fifth, Israel, a tiny but prosperous nation surrounded by Arab countries, is not a military threat to any of these countries. But, instead of choosing to learn from Israel, the Arab nations have chosen repeatedly to attack it. (Nor can it be validly claimed that the Arab countries are genuinely concerned with Palestinian rights, since they reject rights in their own countries.) These are some of the essential facts regarding the Muslim countries. Now contrast this with the U.S. America is the country of the Enlightenment. It was built on the foundations of reason and secularism, individual rights, political, religious and economic freedom, and capitalism. Objectivism has fully established, as we indicated, that these values are objectively correct, i.e. pro-life. In consequence of its pursuing objective values, the U.S. is the most productive and prosperous country in the world. This prosperity has allowed it to build the world’s strongest military. But, despite our ability to permanently seize or destroy any Muslim country at will, we have never attacked any such country except in self-defense. Given these facts, how are we to interpret the meaning of the terrorists’ attacks? Observe their choice of the main target. The World Trade Center

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symbolized two things: first, capitalism on a global scale (international trade); and second, material success and wealth. At the deepest level it was a pro-man symbol: pro-freedom, pro-reason, and pro-life on this earth. As such it was a repudiation of everything the terrorists stood for and a reminder of their own inability to deal with existence. And this is why they had to destroy it and why they hate us. Given the evidence and an objective philosophical analysis, the terrorist attack on America was, in fact, objectively evil. In essence, it was an assault by death-worshippers on life-worshippers. If the Muslim world is to progress out of its own Dark Ages, it will have to embrace reason – with everything which that implies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT We are grateful to Dr. Gary Hull for his helpful comments on this chapter.

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