The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies

Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott, Michelle Greenwood, Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott, Michelle Greenwood, Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott, Michelle Greenwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134466085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies provides a wide-ranging overview of the significance of philosophy in organizations. The volume brings together a veritable "who's-who" of scholars that are acclaimed international experts in their specialist subject within organizational studies and philosophy.

The contributions to this collection are grouped into three distinct sections:

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• Foundations - exploring philosophical building blocks with which organizational researchers need to become familiar.

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• Theories - representing some of the dominant traditions in organizational studies, and how they are dealt with philosophically.

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• Topics – examining the issues, themes and topics relevant to understanding how philosophy infuses organization studies.

Primarily aimed at students and academics associated with business schools and organizational research, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies is a valuable reference source for anyone engaged in this field.

Part I
Foundations

1
Ontology

Philosophical discussions and implications for organization studies

Ismaël Al-Amoudi and Joe O’Mahoney

Introduction: what is ontology and why does it matter for organization studies?

The word ‘ontology’ refers to the study of being. It is derived from the Greek words ‘onto’ (being) and ‘logos’ (science, discourse). This literal definition is, however, too wide to be of use to substantive enquiries. Indeed, philosophers realized over two thousand years ago that ‘being’ is at once the most universal and the emptiest of concepts. Everything one can think of can also be said to ‘be’ something in some way, be they material objects, animals, people, feelings, ideas, activities, social roles or mathematical objects. All of these have in common that they are, they have some, or participate in, being. Moreover, it is difficult, many would argue impossible, to think of an entity¹ that has no being whatsoever. Even atheists recognize that God is real as an idea and absences can be argued to be real. Think, for instance, of the effects that the absence of water or air have for fellow human beings. Even absurd or inexistent entities such as four-sided triangles and unicorns can be said to be real qua absurdities or fictional objects.

In the twentieth century, however, philosophers have proposed more restrictive definitions of ontology, often leading to fruitful developments in philosophy. Thus, while all the examples cited above can be said to be, their modes of being are arguably distinguishable. Stars, ducks, people, fear, liberty, writing, lecturers, triangles, draughts and unicorns can usefully be differentiated from one another and it can be said of them that ‘they are different kinds of things’. Moreover, the (discursive) operations through which these objects are distinguished are also worthy of attention, especially for those (epistemologically relativist) commentators who argue that the categories we use to make sense of the world are artificial social constructs that are formulated in the context of social relations of power. It is also interesting to ask therefore: through what processes, and through what power relations, are we allowed – and even obliged – to recognize, and sometimes create, differences between entities?

Discussions on ontology among philosophers² led in turn to novel ways of approaching the human and social sciences, including organizational studies. As we shall argue below, ontological clarification is not a sterile academic exercise as it has profound implications on how researchers approach the phenomena they purport to study. Ontology also tends to structure which research questions are worth asking; which methods of investigation can be trusted; and what the practical implications of the activity of researchers are likely to be.

The present entry on ontology has no pretension to exhaustivity or even sophistication. Its principle purpose is rather to introduce some of the philosophical approaches that have been particularly influential on the study of organizations, and to take stock of their influence. The first section introduces some of the philosophical contributions that have influenced ontological thinking in organization studies. Particular attention is drawn to how each contribution differs from the positivist vision of the world which still permeates much of sociology and most of management and organization studies. The second section examines how the debates identified in the field of philosophy are reflected and extended in the field of organization studies. It studies the usage, usefulness and inherent limitations of ontological thinking for organization studies. The concluding section examines a few possible developments for ontology in organization studies which hint at promising avenues opened by ontological reflection.

Key philosophical contributions

The systematic questioning of being’s differentiation, im/permanence, in/coherence and in/finitude can be traced, in the West, back to pre-Socratic philosophy over 2,400 years ago. The term ‘ontology’ presents us with a fundamental ambiguity as it refers both to the study of the nature of reality and to the study of an author’s or a community’s specific conception of reality. This ambiguity has led to a distinction within the literature, to which we refer throughout this piece, between committed ontology (aka philosophic ontology) and uncommitted ontology (aka scientific ontology). Committed ontology seeks to articulate a general conception of ontology in which to anchor current or future theoretical and empirical research programmes. Uncommitted ontology focuses instead on the elucidation of the ontological presuppositions or assumptions of a particular author, theory or community. While committed ontology is concerned with the existence of those entities it discerns, uncommitted ontology remains agnostic about their existence.

Rather than attempting an exhaustive summary of ontological writings over the past couple of millennia, we begin by detailing the positivist ontology which has historically dominated natural and social science, and subsequently attend to a number of alternative philosophical positions which still inform contemporary approaches to organization studies.

Positivism’s implicit ontology

In the philosophy of the social sciences, the expression ‘positivism’ is associated with Auguste Comte whose vision of nature, knowledge and history was informed by two principle ideas. First, that the human mind is destined to progress and improve through successive historical stages. Second, that the process of scientific development is linear, from mathematics, to astronomy, to physics, to chemistry, to biology and, finally, to the social sciences. In this chronological, systematic and hierarchical organization, the social sciences occupy a place characterized both by their greater complexity and by their meta-theoretical continuity with the natural sciences. One same ontology is assumed to hold for the natural and for the social sciences alike. Moreover, this ontology is not theorized as one plausible construct among others. Rather, positivism (in the Comtean guise) assumes that alternative ontologies are the mark of, at best, unscientific thinking and, at worst, culturally retarded visions of the world.

What are the ontological features characteristic of, or implicit in, positivism? First, positivism assumes that reality is made of physical things that are discrete and additive. Think, for instance, of Newtonian physics in which the gravitational force exerted by/on a group of objects can be strictly decomposed in terms of the force exerted by/on each of the objects. Second, for positivism’s ontology, the emergence of novel properties in virtue of the interrelation of elements is bound to either remain a mystery or be explained in terms of interactions (rather than internal relations) between discrete elements. One noteworthy consequence of the ontological principles of discreteness and additivity is that the identity of any entity is independent of the relations in which it stands. For positivism, an object does not become something else by virtue of being related to another object. Third, the objects of positivism are assumed to exist independently of people’s perception. The proverbial Newtonian apple is subject to the same laws independently of how people look at it. Fourth, being is characterized by permanence rather than by impermanence, and stillness is assumed to be primary to movement. The proverbial apple may fall from the tree, but this fall must itself be explained by an assumedly external factor such as the breaking of a branch. Moreover, a satisfactory explanation/description of the fall must invoke a universal and eternal law that applies to all physical bodies alike. This leads us to our fifth characterization of positivism’s ontology: entities are assumed to be governed by universal laws that are expressed in terms of event regularities. For instance: ‘whenever an apple falls at t₀, its velocity in t₁ is g.(t₁–t₀)’.

The five ontological characteristics of positivism above imply that proper science is about uncovering event regularities through observation and verification or, in the case of Popperianism, through observation, hypothesis formation and falsification. Proper knowledge of the world is best expressed through strict, unambiguous, definitions that allow for mathematical computation and prediction. Whether positivism’s ontology is best qualified as committed or uncommitted ontology depends on the author. While Comte was certainly committed to the truth of positivism’s ontological presuppositions, others such as Quine were arguably agnostic about them.

Interpretation and the specificity of the human sciences

An alternative approach to knowledge, however, developed in parallel to the positivist approach to the human and social sciences. This broad approach, commonly termed interpretivist or hermeneutic, can be traced from Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century to Dilthey and Weber in the early twentieth century to Heidegger and Gadamer in the mid-twentieth century. At root in this hermeneutic tradition is the idea that the social and human world is meaningful. Yet, the meaning of what people say and of what they do is not immediately accessible to an external observer and requires an effort of interpretation. What is the ontological import of hermeneutics for the human and social sciences?

The first implication is that positivism is fundamentally insufficient for a systematic study of people and societies. Practices of external observation, discovery of general laws and prediction-making must be complemented or even replaced by interpretations of what people say and do. While the necessity of interpretation is primarily an epistemological implication, it also bears significant ontological implications. Indeed, it implies that the world is also made of meanings, of values (moral or aesthetic), of emotions and of representations that escape the positivist apprehension. How does the subjection of the social sciences to a hermeneutic moment destabilize the ontological features that we attributed above to positivism?

First, the world comprises not only discrete and additive physical things but also symbols and human artefacts (think of works of art) that can’t be reduced to their physical thingness without losing their characteristic nature. Indeed, something significant is lost whenever a painting is treated as just a big rectangular chunk of wood and cloth covered with oil and various chemical components.

Second, the texts, practices and institutions produced by people possess a meaning that is usually irreducible to their constitutive elements. An example is provided by Weber’s reflection on the two meanings of ‘understanding’ as observational meaning (aktuelles Verstehen) as opposed to explanatory understanding (erklarendes Verstehen). The action of a wo/man cutting a tree can be interpreted (observational understanding) as ‘cutting a tree’ by simply looking at the immediate context of the action. However, an explanatory understanding of the wo/man’s action as building a house for herself (as opposed to working for a wage or engaging in a recreational activity) must articulate the specific act of chopping into a wider practice (e.g. housebuilding; wage-earning; leisure, etc.).

Third, positivism’s assumption that the objects to which it refers exist independently of people’s perception is either defeated or problematized. It is defeated if the expression ‘people’s perceptions’ is understood to mean ‘some person’s perceptions’. Indeed, interpreting a person’s actions supposes that said person’s perceptions bear significantly on the actions s/he performs. A more sophisticated defence of the perception–independency characteristic would interpret ‘people’s perceptions’ in terms of the observer’s perceptions at the time of observing. But even if we maintain that ‘the meanings held by participants exist independently of the meanings held by social scientists at any given time’, we do not escape a necessary problematization of the researcher/researched relationship. First, because research happens in the context of a relation between researcher and researched. Second, as Gadamer would argue, the researcher brings her own prejudices to research. These prejudices are not biases that could be removed through refined analysis but are, rather, constitutive conditions of the research activity.³ For instance, praiseworthy research on gender inequalities presupposes an assumption by the researcher that there is a distinction between men and women and that this distinction is potentially relevant for understanding inequalities and inequities.

More could be said, however, about the ontological problems prompted by the relation between researcher and researched. In particular, the implied division of the world into ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ of enquiry indicates that positivism and hermeneutics suffer from the ambiguous ontological status of wo/man as both the (transcendental) subject of knowledge and as the empirical object of study. Positivism either denies subjectivity or attributes subjectivity of a certain kind exclusively to the researcher. Either way, it denies the researched’s subjectivity. Interpretivism is more subtle as it recognizes the subjectivity of both researcher and researched. Yet, two ontological problems arise. The first issue is addressed by Giddens’s discussion of social science’s ‘double hermeneutics’. In Giddens’s view, natural scientists perform a simple hermeneutics⁴ on natural objects that hold no reflexive powers. The situation is different, however, in the social sciences whose objects of enquiry are also subjects. The latter are therefore capable of acquiring and employing those very concepts and ways of looking used by social researchers. Thus, they perform a ‘double hermeneutic’ consisting in re-interpreting the researcher’s initial interpretations. The unfortunate consequence, for those attached to a detached (i.e. positivist) conception of knowledge, is that those theories used to describe and explain the practices of agents are in turn (and we may add in time) adopted by agents for their subsequent practices.

It may be argued, however, that interpretivism can adapt to the problems raised by the double hermeneutics by recognizing the temporality separating the researcher’s initial interpretation from the subsequent interpretations performed by the researched. Interpretivism stumbles, however, on the ontological question of whether the researcher’s initial interpretation can be said to be causally effective on the researched. This leads us to the second ontological problem arising from wo/man’s ambiguous status as both object and subject: does the category of causality apply to thoughts and knowledge?

Indeed, both positivism and interpretivism assume a Humean conception of causality as event regularities, which creates a dilemma. On one hand, if Humean causality applies to thoughts, then each of our own thoughts would have already been determined by some separate anterior event. Wo/man’s freedom and creativity is thus negated. On the other hand, if thoughts occur in a realm independent of causality, a number of difficulties arise. For instance, it becomes difficult to explain how a person’s thoughts can influence, and be influenced by, other people’s thoughts or by the material relations in which they engage.⁵

In the remainder of this section, we examine three philosophical traditions, Heideggerian ontology, poststructuralism and critical realism, that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: philosophy in organization studies – life, knowledge and disruption
• PART I Foundations
• PART II Theories
• PART III Special Topics
• Index