Philosophy and Management Studies

A Research Overview

Raza Mir, Michelle Greenwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351030687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Irrespective of whether one thinks of philosophy explicitly, each organizational researcher is a philosopher. A philosophical position is predicated on a variety of approaches relating to ontology, epistemology, methodology, ethics, and political positions. Depending on where one stands with regard to these philosophical building blocks, their orientation may be characterized as positivist, realist, critical-realist, and constructivist, with pragmatist and political considerations weighing in as well. Also, management theories all inhabit the same spectrum of philosophical positions that enrich them and add to their relevance to the world of firms and organizations. This book provides a broad-based commentary on the terrain of philosophy as it pertains to management studies, especially for the relatively unfamiliar organizational theorist.

This book serves as a succinct overview of the field of management philosophy as well as a roadmap for those readers who wish to explore the terrain further. The book argues that all knowledge inquiry invokes philosophy and philosophical thinking, and that the artificial separation between philosophy and social science is fallacious. Just as philosophy is everywhere, so is power, and for better or worse they go hand in hand. Hence, philosophical positions are political positions. The authors do not shy from addressing the politics of their own research practice or the subjects of their inquiry.

Philosophy and Management Studies targets a new generation of management researchers, whose interest in philosophy vastly exceeds their resources to engage with it, partly because of their unfamiliarity with its often mystifying and outsider-unfriendly conventions. It seeks to bridge the chasm between interest in philosophy in organizational studies and knowledge about it. It is not for the trained philosopher or the expert, but for a relative newcomer.

1Everyone is a philosopher

Introduction

Philosophy is everywhere and

…everyone is a philosopher, though in [their] own way and unconsciously, since even in the slightest manifestation of any intellectual activity whatever, in “language”, there is contained a specific conception of the world.

(Antonio Gramsci, 1971: 323)

Interest in philosophy has been an on-going feature of management research and pedagogy. Philosophy-themed books in the field of management continue to be bestsellers, while papers in peer-reviewed journals on philosophical issues continue to be heavily cited. Most books on organizational philosophy however tend to be long and dense, and are intimidating to beginners. We too have produced such a volume in the past. Indeed, this book owes its existence to the earlier publication of our co-edited volume, the Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies (Mir, Willmott, & Greenwood, 2016). Like earlier volumes on organizational philosophy, ours was heavy tome. With the greatest of difficulties, we kept its size down to 350,000 words, hectoring our 60+ contributors to cut down their insights, often to 6,000 words a chapter.

In this book, we have chosen to do the opposite, and hew in the direction of brevity. We wish to distil our understanding of management philosophy in a relatively short volume, sacrificing depth for breadth, but hopefully serving as a succinct overview of the field of management philosophy as well as a roadmap for those readers who wish to explore the terrain further.

Why do management researchers need philosophy?

The first question that an introductory text on management philosophy needs to answer is, do management researchers need (to study) philosophy? The answer in our mind is a resounding yes, for three reasons.

First, whether we like it or not, we inhabit a philosophical position whenever we conduct or engage with research. When we use return-on-equity as a proxy for organizational performance (Bierly & Chakrabarti, 1996), make a case that a Likert scale, which is an interval scale, can be deployed as a ratio scale in statistical analyses (Churchill, 1979), use demographics as a basis to understand leadership behavior (Hambrick & Mason, 1984), or make a case that managerial strategy focuses on deskilling workers as a mode of control (Rowlinson & Hassard, 1994), a philosophical position underlies our contentions and our decisions, which would be worthwhile for us to make transparent.

Our field seems a bit shy to embrace a philosophical orientation. It was not always this way, as we have recalled earlier, The Journal of the Academy of Management, the first scholarly journal of our field featured in each of its first three volumes at least one article that overtly dealt with philosophy (Mir, Willmott, & Greenwood, 2016: 1). Perhaps the problem lies in a sense of defensiveness that emerged a few decades later. One recalls that in the 1990s, there were leaders in the Academy of Management, who panicked that we were missing the boat and at risk of disregarding a trend that might have led to the emergence of something akin to Nobel Prize in Management. For such theorists, an engagement with needless abstraction was a recipe for irrelevance. Instead, they felt that the field needed to focus on the application of disciplinarily accepted and agreed-upon assumptions, each theorist building upon the work of past stalwarts into a daisy-chain of applicable achievement, without the encumbrance of “values that emphasize representativeness, inclusiveness, and theoretical and methodological diversity” (Pfeffer, 1993: 599). Such values were to be avoided because they produced naught but negative “consequences for the field’s ability to make scientific progress, which almost requires some level of consensus, as well as for its likely ability to compete successfully with adjacent social sciences such as economics in the contest for resources” (ibid: 599). The scholars who wished to impose such consensus on the field decried needless paradigm-infused chatter that it ‘fragmented’ the discipline with ideas that “share(d) an anti-management quality, painting managers in an increasingly negative light” (Donaldson, 1995: 1).

Such calls for paradigmatic unity were vigorously contested. Ironically, the stated demands for a tightly knit approach to organizational research such as those articulated by Pfeffer and Donaldson had the exact opposite effect, spurring a debate that underscored the importance of paradigmatic diversity in the field (Perrow, 1994; Sutton & Staw, 1995; Weick, 1995). For an entire decade and more, we debated what constituted theory and how bad theory made good research impossible (Ghoshal, 2005). If the discussion has abated somewhat, it is perhaps because of sheer fatigue on all sides. But in the end, one consensus has emerged; philosophy has a huge role to play in settling debates about truth claims, about the predictive validity of various theories, and whether our field has any relevance in an era of increasing inequality and oligopolistic corporations running roughshod over archaic systems of governance. At times, it appears that all that stands between management theory and irrelevance is philosophy.

Our second point is that the articulation of a philosophical position often helps us explain our research in ways that readers and subsequent researchers will be able to understand, follow, extend, critique, and refute (Mir & Watson, 2001). It helps us move past unfalsifiable tautologies and untestable generalizations into the realm of actionable and contestable. When theorists make truth claims about organizational actions, it is important to evaluate their implicit assumptions. The debate that follows is often very productive for both sides.

Consider, for example, an influential theory such as transaction cost economics. This theory became hegemonic in the field of management, in particular for its contention that contracts were the primary economic institutions of capitalism (Williamson, 1985). Purveyors of the theory sought to cast its conclusion in ‘value-free’ terms, implying that the decision between using outside contractors for economic activity (markets) and internalizing such activities within the boundaries of organizations (hierarchies) was only dictated by efficiency considerations like ‘asset specificity’ and ‘bounded rationality,’ and that a firm could only be understood as a nexus of contracts, without the need of other values such as cooperative spirit or power politics.

Economist critics of the theory found the transaction cost hypotheses to be reductive and castigated it as the latest ploy by organizational elites to justify anti-competitive expansion by firms without the encumbrance of social and government oversight (Kaufman, Zacharias, & Karson, 1995). Firms could be seen, they argued, as vehicles to create monopoly power, and to band the power of the capitalist tightly, while reducing the power of labor to negotiate collectively.

The debate however became a lot richer when it moved from the economic to the philosophical plane, when its partisans and interlocutors began to articulate and defend their philosophical positions. Some critics of the transaction cost theory accused its adherents of hiding their implicit assumptions (Ghoshal & Moran, 1996), suggesting that once their assumptions were made explicit, people would understand that it was empty of any insight. The purveyors of the theory were forced to settle the matter in the philosophical realm as well (Williamson, 1996), arguing that they were not amoral automatons, and that even though they did not deploy morality as a construct in their models, the outcome of these economic activity was not incompatible with social welfare. Whatever be the outcome, the debate itself enriched our understanding, and helped those of us at the sidelines make up our minds. Philosophy enlightens, even in the dry world of economics.

Finally, the study of philosophy in and of itself allows us to understand organizations better, link them to broader social, economic, political, and cultural institutions, and advances our understanding of working life. In its best version, it allows us to decenter the status quo, expose elitist ideologies, honor the contributions of those whose labor produces social value, and contest the modes of accumulation that destroy the planet and immiserize the working poor. When multinational corporations seek to privatize public property in the name of efficiencies, the first thing they do is to co-opt potential adversaries (like national governments) through illiberal inducements. It then becomes important and indeed incumbent upon theorists to produce an alternative philosophy that delegitimizes these practices and honors those who contest their own dispossession through acts of resistance (Banerjee, 2000).

Likewise, a philosophical orientation is needed to delegitimize research that hides ideology within its platitudes. Many times, researchers may use normative language to define a problem, thus rendering the problem statement unfalsifiable. For example, one could say, “If all employees in a firm work selflessly, performance will improve.” Clearly, such a statement is not empirically researchable. A surprising number of research projects in our field do get away with such approaches, often through the creation of spurious proxies for unfalsifiable terminology (perhaps, in this case, through the representation of some construct as a stand-in for ‘selflessness’). One very important element of falsifiability also includes the articulation of fundamental assumptions that underpin the research. Research that does not clarify its assumptions also runs the risk of becoming ideological, or a vehicle to universalize the interests of a small subgroup in the organizational realm (say, top managers) as the interest of the whole.

What is philosophy?

The second question we need to deal with is, what is philosophy? The answer to this question can be as complex as we choose to make it. Definitions are in themselves artifacts of organizational process and are ripe with implicit assumptions and accompanying ideologies. Who gets to define and how s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Everyone is a philosopher
• 2 Interrogating concepts
• 3 Philosophy from below
• 4 The road ahead for management and organizational philosophy
• Index