This book looks at life in organizations—the being in organizations. Most of us take this for granted, that to be in an organization is just something we do, as we work and live our everyday lives within them occupied with our assignments. We are engaged in many organizations during our lives; some of them are more important than others to us, and some are difficult to be in and to work in. No matter what, all of them will entail creating experiences that are important to our understanding of them, to the understanding of ourselves and to the life we live in them, as well as of the experiences of the actual creation of those organizations. It is this discussion of this being and creation of organizations that is the focus of this book, as organizations are nothing in themselves. Organizations can only exist as contexts, ideas and manifestations of human beings and their lived lives.
From a phenomenological perspective, we will discuss this life and being in organizations through some of the thoughts and central themes which are essential in developing a perspective of human beings in organizations. This will include reflections on existence and life in organizations, as the focus is on being in organizations and understanding the process of the human beings defining and acting in the everyday life of organizations. To understand organizations is to understand the essence of them and what it is that is the foundation—the human being, and the becoming of the organization as a social phenomenon. The focus of this is the discussion of the subject and how the subjects interactions and understandings constitute the organization as social, and how to understand this becoming of the organizational Lifeworld. The organizational world of life is what we daily live, experience, talk about and take for granted in all our activities, and what we see as natural in so many ways. At the same time, humans’ approach to the world is naive, as in our natural attitude we are ignorant of the conditions for our organizational existence and the possibilities that are in this existence. In our daily experiences, humans naturally and naively take for granted the whole of reality, as a substance existing in itself and unconscious of itself, and thus also of the role that the subject itself plays in the experience of the world. On the other hand, this world of human beings and organizations is at the same time full of contradictions and the process of the world is dialectical. The organizational world appears as complex and something that exists in itself and outside the subject.
The discussion of being in organization takes as its point of departure an existential phenomenological reflection on organization and management, and from this examines some of the important questions and themes: the question of how to understand organizations and management, how to understand the human being in organizations, the questions of how to understand the development of organizations and how the organization becomes a social arena, and in all of this how to understand the human being as a moral being and the question of ethics in organizations. All of these themes and questions of organizations must in some way be a part of the discussions and development in any organization. They are also something that must be stressed upon, and have an influence on political discourses and a collective consciousness in society.
There is a current need to discuss alternatives to mainstream theories and the positivistic and rationalistic traditions that have been dominating the science of business and economics. This need arises from the question of seeing human beings as human beings, and not figures or functions in a perspective on organizations. Organizational life, we must suppose, is more than that. Situations and problems are always from a position and from a perspective, and as Freidrich Nietzsche (1882) once stated, “There are no facts, only interpretations”. If this is true, the question arises: What are interpretations and what does this mean for understanding organizations and human beings in them? There is no doubt that the differences between positivism or rationalism and phenomenology are much more than a debate about the facts of organizations. It is a fundamental ontological discussion of what organizational reality is and what is life in organizations.
The discussion of the human being and existence is a reflection of how being and becoming is an aspect of consciousness, and of the dialectical process of thinking and acting in everyday life. An important issue in being is the dialectics of everyday life, and understanding the movements and changes in the being of organizations.
The discussion of organizational being is also a critique of mainstream organization theory, both in relation to the ontology of organizations as founded in subject-subjects and as constituted in everyday life, and in the light of a critical discourse on organizations. In some ways, this attempt to think alternatively from the perspective of organizations partly stems from Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) discussion of the social construction of reality in connection to the construction of society and the processes involved. Their perspective was very much inspired by phenomenology and especially Alfred Schutz’s thinking. It can also be seen in Weick’s (1969) discussion of the social psychology of organizing and of enactment, and his critique of system theory in thinking organizations. His perspective is a processual understanding of organizing and as such inspired as well of phenomenology, both in relation to Berger and Luckmann and of Schutz. The alternative can also be seen in Silverman’s (1970) discussion of an action frame of organizations, as he focuses upon people’s actions in organizational settings and not on structures.
Much of this and other work from the mid-1960s and 1970s was critical to positivism and rationalism, and took as its point of departure the traditions of phenomenology, hermeneutics and critical theory. From this era, a discussion in social science and business economics continued as a new perspective, with a focus on social construction, trying to understand organizations from a perspective other than rationalism or functionalism. But much of this discussion omitted the philosophical roots of phenomenology and a philosophical investigation into ontological ideas, content and arguments. The discussion will go back to this and a phenomenological reflection on being, as well as the original ontological ideas of the human being and the becoming of the social. There is a need to see science as grounded in philosophy, as any understanding stems from a perspective of ontology and epistemology, and methodology is only the consequence of that perspective.
The tradition in our perspective is the original discussion of broader phenomenology, and will discuss aspects of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Schutz, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Mead, Buber, Sartre, Løgstrup and others linked to an ontological discussion of understanding being and Lifeworld, and social becoming. Central to this is understanding the human being as a bodily being, as well as cognition, consciousness and acting in the world. To understand, act and think in the world there is a need for a perspective that involves the ontological reasons and arguments of the human being as subject to the becoming of the human being as social. Organizational life as a social involvement of all the aspects of others and the idea that humans are human with others sees the human being as ethical and moral, as without these attributes there could not be any social becoming.
The human being does not act alone in the world. We are situated, confronted with the other, and in this our actions have consequences for the organization and for ourselves. Organizations are, at the same time, both stable and volatile. On one hand we talk about organizations as something concrete, as something in itself. On the other hand actions and interactions have consequences, that is, they are interpreted in the attempt to make sense of the organization and events, and create something that is both in common and also creates common sense for people and people’s understanding of each other. Thus the organization is both individual and at the same time a social phenomenon.
Our discussion of and interest in philosophy and the philosophy of science and reflections of the human being in organizations goes far back in time.
Michael, with his background in organizational sociology and philosophy of science, has been working on a critique of mainstream science in business economics and economics for many years. Some of his major works have been in cooperation with Dr. Woodrow W. Clark II, especially on the book Qualitative Economics – The Science of Economics (2019), as well as his discussion of being an entrepreneur (2018), and parts of those discussions can be seen in this book.
Kim has been focused for years on the existence of human beings and the whole discussion of a theory of cognition. He has also been focused on developing a phenomenology of being and the social in various discussions (2016, 2017 and 2017).
The Logic and Building of the Book
Chapter 2. The Individuality of Experience in Organizational Life: Reality is always seen, interpreted, understood and taken for granted from a certain point of belief and tradition. The origin of this and of all experiences of reality is the human being. This chapter discusses this along with a phenomenological ontology of an understanding of the human being, and the tradition and arguments for the world as a social and individual phenomenon. It highlights some of the important concepts of human beings used later as central to the discussion of humans and organizations, for example consciousness, intentionality, understanding, self-awareness and critique. The focus is on building an ontology and epistemology of understanding the essences of being and being together in organizations. It is a discussion of cognition and understanding of humanity and humanity’s being in the world. Reality does not in itself have meaning. The meaning is connected to the thinking and acting human being. In turn, that thinking is a condition for existence and being. It is a condition for anything we can name a social context as the organization.
Chapter 3. The I and the Becoming of Social Being: One of the primary challenges inherent in the aspiration to describe humans as a general concept is that initially it assumes that the writer can somehow attach him/herself from the unique experiences and emotions of being a specific human being. Different elements can theoretically be assumed: the a priori elements of experiencing something, the process of experiencing something, the result of experiencing something. These three distinctions rely on the assumptions that everything has something prior to it that enables the existence of it, that everything has a time and place, and lastly that everything humans can experience exists. Our perception captures the result of things coming into our experience, but not the process. Moreover, this notion of things happening to us, which is commonly defined as something we do, an action we perform, will be highly relevant later. For now the question remains: What is a human being and how can such a thing be described with any sense of validity? What about the sentences I am writing now? Are they happening to me? Or are they performed and planned by me? It all depends on the definition of “me”. The beginning to an answer is obviously that “me” or humans has to be defined as something which can both be happening and performing. In other words, we can carry out actions which are not consciously intended but rather unconsciously occurring and we are obviously able to carry out actions which have been intended prior to their execution. Furthermore, it is necessary to include both consciousness and unconsciousness in the definition of “me”. In other words, I am more than I think.
At the same time, humans or organizational members can be misinterpreted as solely the product of social interactions, of cultural development or, as some state, tabula rasa. Given the argumentation so far, it is clear that the individual is to a large extent the product of social interaction—we learn from our current contexts. The individual constitutes society as genuinely as society constitutes the individual. Society can only exist when we have minds and selves, since all its most characteristic features presuppose the possession of minds and selves by its individual members, but its members would not possess minds and selves if these had not arisen within or emerged out of the human social process (see Mead 1962). So the questions are how do people meet and how do they construct and share meanings and a common understanding of each other and the organizational reality?
Chapter 4. Organizational Dialectics and the Becoming of the Organization: In history of philosophy, the question of how to understand development and changes in ...