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Introduction
Are Organizations Good to Think with? Thinking Things Through and Thinking Through Things
Stephen Linstead and Alison Linstead
The heritage profession has become hip.
(Philosophy Online)
No doubt about it, philosophy is the new Rock and Roll.
(Banville 2001)
As we write this, it is some twenty-five years since Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan (1979) left the field in no doubt that philosophy is relevant and important to the analysis of organizations. Although theirs was a narrower focus than they would have taken had applied philosophy been their objective, by concentrating on the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of theory and method it not only presented itself in an interpretively convenient matrix, but became a towering citation index success. So there is really no excuse for what has been the relative neglect of philosophy, especially in its other branches, in organization studies until comparatively recently. In its turn, until recently philosophy has tended formally to treat anything to do with management with disdain, as part of the messy but necessary business of earning a living, and the study of organization has been damned by association (Laurie and Cherry 2001:4).
But, of course, philosophy has always been there or thereabouts. Philosophy itself creates, brings people, things and concepts together, and organizes (Linstead and Mullarkey 2003; Linstead and Thanem forthcoming). For Socrates, philosophy was a form of āmidwiferyā that helps to bring new things into being, as opposed to a form of āpanderingā that makes merely cosmetic changes to what is. Knowing the difference ought to be of critical importance to those involved in organization and management, whether entrepreneurs or with delegated responsibility for hiring potentially expensive consultancy with public money. Socratesā identification with a feminine activity of midwifery might also give us cause for reassessment in a world of organizations that remain dominated numerically, affectively and epistemologically by men, male psychologies and masculine rationalities (Wajcman 1998). While we could make a case for the connections between philosophy and formal organization going back to Platoās philosopher-kings, in the last century, in the period when the foundational texts of modern management were being crafted, Oliver Sheldon (1924) produced The Philosophy of Management, which, in contrast to the functional dominance of simple economic rationalism in the management writings, examined the purposes and responsibilities of modern industrial management. More recently, the emphasis on business ethics has seen a revival of interest in Aristotelian moral philosophy through the work of Alasdair MacIntyre (1981, 1989), and Richard Sennettās sociological philosophy has seen similar attention given to Aristotleās philosophy of character (Sennett 1999). Charles Handy (1989) has been borrowing snippets from philosophy for several years and styles himself a āsocial philosopherā, which may perhaps be overstating the case but does indicate that he wishes to claim some more substantial foundation for his āguruā status than simple fashion. In 1990, another general treatment of philosophy in organizations appeared (Hassard and Pym 1990), and almost everyone from the pre-Socratics to the postmoderns has made an appearance of sorts in the management and organization literature since then. Whole books have been devoted to postmodernism and organizations (Boje et al. 1996; Hassard and Parker 1993; Linstead 2004) and one notable collection to Foucault alone (McKinlay and Starkey 1998). At the level of concepts, the term deconstruction is now part of the everyday language of managers, and the Aristotelian concept of phronesis has been recently reintroduced into management education (Clegg and Ross-Smith 2003) as well as social research that intends to make a practical difference (Flyvberg 2001). In the arena of strategy, while debate on the relative merits and contemporary relevance of Confucius (e.g. Rudnicki 1998), Sun Tzu (e.g. McNeilly 2000; Sunzi and Michaelson 2001) and Machiavelliās (e.g. Jay 1987/1996; McAlpine 1998) advice to leaders has rubbed shoulders in airport lounges with speculation on how Aristotle might have managed General Motors (Morris 1997), considerable impact has also been made by the rediscovery of the process philosophy of Bergson, Whitehead and Dewey, and this has combined with part of the work of Deleuze to generate interest in foresight and becoming in relation to immanent strategy (e.g. Chia 2004; Mackay and McKiernan 2004). Socratic Consulting as a method has an increasing group of subscribers, especially in the Netherlands, and it is even possible for executives with enough time and money to join an exclusive group spending a week sitting under a tree on the Greek island of Skyros at the feet of a consultant philosopher examining in mock-Socratic fashion their working lives.1
The chapters of this book have at their core contributions made to the meeting of the European Group for Organization Studies Standing Working Group on the Philosophy of Management at Lyon in July 2001. They shared a mutual objective: to explore philosophical issues of relevance to organization studies. Not with any particular objective of improving management or organizational efficiency, or of necessarily making organization studies more scientific, but recognizing that, to borrow from Socrates, the disciplinary field that leaves its own assumptions, suppositions and conditions of its self-consciousness as a discipline unexamined is impoverished to the imperilment of its claims to understanding. There was no particular commitment to analytical or continental approaches, functionalism or postmodernism, and there is evidence of all in the book. The only criterion was that positions be explicated with care and respect for other positions; we were not interested in soapboxes, panegyrics, simplistic or polemical critiques or in set-piece ādebatesā between positions, only that arguments be explicated with attention to detail and some reflexivity. There was no preference for rationalism or anti-rationalism, only relevance. We did, however, feel that organization studies had demonstrated a preference for rationalistic styles of inquiry that privileged āgetting on topā of a subject (classic hypothetical-deductive methodologies in particular display this) over āgetting among or amidā a subject (which ethnographic or inductive methodologies do), and we hoped to achieve a better balance (see Connor, this volume, Chapter 10). Additionally, thought styles that privilege getting on top of things also tend to demonstrate their obsession with controlling their subject matter by prediction, by āthinking things throughā. In his important work The Savage Mind, Claude LĆ©vi-Strauss argued that primitive peoplesā thought processes were not inferior to those of civilized modern peoples, just different and more concrete. Instead of thinking things through, they had a tendency to think through things. This improvization with ready-made objects in the world he called bricolage (Linstead and Grafton Small 1990). Recent usages of this term in organization studies (e.g. Kamoche et al. 2002) have translated it as improvizationāa form of which it certainly isāand thereby overlook its material qualities as a form of concrete rather than abstract reason. People use goods to think with. For LĆ©vi-Strauss, the civilized mind is distinguished not by the fact that it does not employ such reason, but by the fact that it characteristically seeks to deny that it does. In this volume we have been pleased to include two contributions (Connor and Grafton Small, Chapters 10 and 11) that not only demonstrate how such thinking is alive and well within the postmodern world, but embody it in their style of writing.
In addressing our question of whether organizations are good to think with, or alternatively whether an organization could be considered a good to think with, traditionally philosophy as a discipline has responded negatively, or at least by ignoring the question. The contributions to this book, we believe, offer evidence to suggest that the answer to both questions should be emphatically positive and that philosophy should develop organization and management as a field while in turn it should be drawn upon much more explicitly and reflectively by scholars in the field of management and organization studies. We present the evidence in three areas that we consider to be characteristic of the field: problems associated with representation of the āobjectā of organization [representing organization]; issues of knowledge construction, sociability and subjectivity [knowing organization]; and issues of emergence, complexity and change [the becoming of organization]. Each of the first two parts of the book begins with more positivistic approaches, while the third follows a different trajectory by drawing out some immanent and neglected aspects of previous approaches and analyses and turning them into agendas for the futureāfrom the pre-modern to the virtual, the supernatural to the post-human. We will now introduce each of the chapters in turn.
For Marja-Liisa Kakkuri-Knuuttila and Eero Vaara, in Chapter 2, causation is one of the questions that still seems to divide social scientists and organization researchers. In brief, those in the naturalist camp tend to focus on causal explanations of different phenomena while those in the interpretive or constructive camp seem to reject the idea of causation altogether. In this chapter, the authors argue that this division, while understandable, is not necessary and rests partly on a problematic notion of causation developed during the so-called linguistic turn in social sciences. To uncover some of these problematic assumptions, they take a critical look at one of the most influential pieces of work paving the way for interpretive research in social sciences in general and culturally oriented organization studies in particular: The Idea of a Social Science by Peter Winch (1958). The main target of their criticism is the crude distinctionāshared within the hermeneutical and phenomenological traditionāthat natural sciences only deal with external relations while social studies deal with internal relations. According to this view, causationāwhich, following the Humean conception, has to deal with external relationsāhas no relevance in social studies focusing on internal relations.
In their analysis, they point to the inherent problems of a simplistic adherence to the Humean notion of causation. They suggest an alternative notion of causation which draws mainly from age-old Aristotelian ideas. Their alternative is based on the notion of power in the sense of capacity, which allows causation in singular instances. They argue that the ancient Stagiriteās ontological distinctions yield an alternative that satisfies the Winchian and the interpretive scholarās demand for a contextualist and non-deterministic conception of causation. With this ontology, human skills and social causation in general can be grasped with the help of the same categories as the realm of nature, though requiring subtler distinctions. Their reflective exercise hence implies that in spite of important differences in goals and methodologies, traditional and interpretive research need not be seen as incompatible perspectives.
Anne Wallemacq and Jean-Marie Jacques in Chapter 3 address the question of how to represent language. The question, first of all pragmatic, is asked on the occasion of a project, carried out by the authors, of developing EVOQĀ©, a cognitive cartography program (Wallemacq and Jacques 2001). The particularity of this software program is that it tries less to grasp the articulation of concepts within a reasoning process than to isolate the seman-tic fields the speaker is situated in and copes with. The semantic field is the whole set of associations/opposites that orbit around the words. In the field of organization studies, the elicitation of these semantic fields is very illuminating since it makes apparent the perceptual system specific to an individual or a group. As a matter of fact, these semantic fields are carried on by language. It may be language as we mean classically, but it may also be the specific language spoken by an organization or a group. In this case, by ālanguageā (which they call code, on ethnomethodologistsā heels), not only do they mean new words, technical words or borrowed words that are specific to an organization, but also the specific use made of common words in this particular context, as well as their wake of associations.
Of phenomenological and post-structuralist inspiration, the software relies on a conception of language that does not match classical modes of representation in boxes and nodes or in branches and nodes. From a pragmatic angle, the question of knowing how to represent language has become eminently theoretical. It is a matter of finding a space for representation whose properties (echo) correspond to the conception of language borne by these currents of thought. In doing this, the authors have gone over āto the other side of the mirrorā, in an architecture of thought no longer functioning in terms of branches and nodes, or in terms of causes and effects.
For Hugo Letiche and Joachim Maier in Chapter 4, meanings, events and organizations āslideā, or move about. Structurally pre-defined, seemingly rigid action (the āgameā) does not necessarily lead to stasis. How do we understand this combination of the gameās closed structure and its ability to change itself? Glissement is a way to describe interaction between the logic of the game and the events of change and activity. Glissement can be understood as an aspect of identity (Robbe-Grillet), as a characteristic of gaming, as a subversive logic (Deleuze) and as an ebb and flow of signification/identity (Lacan). In this chapter, these definitions are first explored, then the film The Matrix is examined in terms of glissement. Because the film can be understood as a description of organization, as an animated computer game and as a study of the hyper-real culture of simulacra, it provides material for the conceptual exploration they seek. In the end, the authors oppose the matrixās gaming with their own play; these two senses of glissement are fairly irreconcilable.
Iain Munro in Chapter 5 addresses the question, what role does myth play in modern organization? If one takes the project of modernity seriously, then one would conclude that myths can be entertaining and possess a certain aesthetic value, but they have little role to play in a society properly governed by reason. But this, Munro argues, may be a little too simplistic an interpretation, as was perhaps most powerfully demonstrated in Nietzscheās analysis of morality. He observed that the Enlightenment philosophers attempted to replace dogmatic religious myths with a morality that had a rigorous foundation in reason, only to prove the very same beliefs they held in the first place (such as the prohibition against suicide and the strictures against following oneās animal inclinations). For Nietzsche, in order to understand the world and wo/man, myth seems to be in some sense necessary. In the last century, Freud attempted to show that the human psyche is arranged according to a mythic structure, that of the Oedipus complex. He also took pains to point out that this was not a metaphysical argument, but was derived from scientific observation of many cases.
It is Munroās contention that crucial to the conditions of organization is the use of myth. Myth operates on many different levels. For example, myths may be positively encouraged within an organization to help create an organizational identity. This can be used to engineer an organizational culture by appeal to a history and lineage. But myths also operate in a more global fashion. For example, Adorno and Horkheimer highlight the mythic qualities of modernity and the rhetoric of the Enlightenment with respect to the myth of Odysseus. Also, Deleuze and Guattari have shown how the myth of Oedipus is not just a psychoanalytic device, but is central to the capitalist concept of desir...
