God-Conscious Organization and the Islamic Social Economy
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God-Conscious Organization and the Islamic Social Economy

Masudul Alam Choudhury

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eBook - ePub

God-Conscious Organization and the Islamic Social Economy

Masudul Alam Choudhury

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About This Book

Can there be God-conscious organizational behaviour in the real world of today's capitalist corporations and the alternatives? In this overview of God-consciousness as a moral-awareness model of preference formation, functions, structures, and programs of organization within the purview of institutions and society, the authors explain and compare the major ethical issues of organizational behaviour and structure in Islamic economic theory and application. By analysing the nature of inclusive organizations and institutions, and the ethical preferences in Islamic choice framework, the authors from Saudi Arabia, Australia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Canada, Indonesia and the UK, can highlight individual aspects to show whether capitalist organizational behaviour is sustainable. They describe how The Tawhidi epistemological framework governing conscious moral decision-making by institutions and organization, are used to establish the meaning and potential application of the concept of sustainability, and whether organizational moral objectives achieve their goals of life-fulfilment development, Poverty alleviation and the equitable distribution of wealth and resources.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781317126362
Chapter 1
Contrasting Epistemologies of Organizational Behaviour
Abstract
This volume continues the objective of many other works by the principal author. The most recent of these in this regard are Choudhury (2013a) and Choudhury and Silvia (2006), which establish the epistemological basis of a phenomenological model of the social economy. While this scholarly pursuit has addressed diverse areas of inquiry in the fields of economics, finance, science, and society, this chapter provides a new field of inquiry in these areas. This time it is in the field of organizational behaviour.
Epistemological inquiry on any theme being foundational in the area of a theory of knowledge and its logical and technical characterization, it explores fresh grounds of extended inquiry that may not be traditional. This research output follows this trajectory. It extends the epistemological inquiry of the social economy to the field of relevance of the divine law in scientific inquiry concerning the study of the specific area of organizational behaviour. But because of the vast domain of research inquiry that is thus opened up, the field of organizational behaviour is shown to be embedded in a theory of institutionalism or social contract. As such, the social interaction between the social economy, the embedded organizational perspective in the theory of institutionalism within the context of divine law and the world-system means this study covers new ground on the theme of God-conscious organization and the social economy.
Introduction
In this introductory but substantive chapter on methodology, the main focus is to lay down the objective and nature of this book. As such, this chapter will define the principal concepts that will prevail throughout the volume. An extensive review will be given of the comparative literature in organizational behaviour, institutions and institutionalism.
The chapter will establish the formalism that will be invoked to study the theme of God-conscious organization and the social economy, given its nature of social embedding. The meaning of social embedding is that of inter-causal relationships between economy, society, and the scientific construct. Such embedding brings out what we will formalize as the interactive, integrative and evolutionary (IIE) learning nature of the unified domains covering the general theory and its specific cases within the world-systems under study. Indeed, the meaning of sociality embodies the IIE properties.
In our case, such a nature of the evolutionary learning domain comprises God-consciousness as the epistemology underlying the embedding nature of the social economy. Thereby, the issues and properties of evolutionary learning in organizations embedded in institutionalism or the episteme of social contract form the ethical bonding. This substantive meaning emerges from the generalized systemic understanding of the divine law and the world-system. The emergent formalism forms the generalized methodological worldview. The topic of God-conscious organization in the systemic embedding of the social economy forms the particular study within the generalized formalism.
Objective
The objective here is to focus on the conceptual and quantitative contributions of the book in the area of the widened epistemology of God-consciousness and the embedded nature of organization within the social economy. Within such a methodology, the methodical approach will be as follows.
A series of topics is included to bring out the widened epistemological nature of embedded organizational behaviour. A detailed section will argue that the mainstream study of the topic has failed to encompass such an epistemological worldview. Topics covered in the following chapters will comprise the epistemological groundwork; its analytical phenomenological treatment carried over from this chapter; a comparative study of the theme of God-consciousness in relation to organizational behaviour and the social economy; and applications to selected themes of the social economy. From these themes, a policy-theoretic and applied perspective will emerge.
The full content of the book will make its theme stand out as a methodological worldview that expands the horizon of organizational behaviour qua institutionalism to human attributes of social consciousness. Such a foundational study is understood in reference to God-consciousness as an analytical framework of the new organizational worldview embedded in the social economy. Factual cases of such widened perspectives of organization, institution and, thereby, the study covering the epistemological framework are exemplified by the case of the Islamic economic and financial issues on the topic of wellbeing.
Such a critical approach comprises our new inquiry on the Islamic socio-scientific front. To establish this fact, mainstream knowledge on the given theme is critically investigated. Thus, by the contrasting examination, the analytical dimensions of the Islamic epistemological inquiry on the theme are formalized. Thereby, organizational and institutional structure and policy-theoretic investigation ensue. The academic scenario of the study of global political economy cannot and ought not to ignore this dimension of fresh epistemological inquiry. It has been missed out for a long time now under the materialistic rubric of objectivity and analytical formalism.
Significance of the study
Great works on epistemology and economics and the social questions these raise have for a long time now disappeared from the intellectual scene. A whimper of the past great contributions remains. The moral context of the epistemological inquiry can be found in the words of Keynes (1963, p. 269):
The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognized for what it is a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.
Furthermore, Keynes (1963, p. 371) wrote:
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the extraction of usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.
These wise reflections bring us to the conscious realization that there lies a greater horizon beyond sheer economic and financial greed for establishing a good society with a greater purpose. However, this moral understanding is not to ignore the economic, financial, and social activities; rather, it is to embellish these activities with the moral and ethical purpose that social order wishes to include.
The significance of this work is one which is given scant coverage these days, and when it is done, the methodology remains unable to investigate with analytical depth the critical socio-scientific challenge that the subject of morality and ethics unravels in the epistemological study.
Indeed, God speaks through the divine law. The divine law is then formalized and applied to all intellectual premises. The result enables the analytical moral possibility in social action. We will argue that such a comprehensive epistemological inclusion in social organizational study does not exist other than in and by the divine law. Thus, God-consciousness becomes primal in our study to embody the impact of morals and ethics on mundane socio-scientific matters. These comprise the theme of organizational behaviour, institutions and institutionalism comprising particular cases of the generalized system worldview. Institutionalism in turn is the epistemology of social contract taken up in the context of the divine law in our specific study. Thereby, corresponding types of formalism, policies and the social economy emerge in intellection. This book will project such issues within an analytical framework. The result is to offer a significant epistemic originality of its own to academia and the practitioner.
Explanations of selected terms
Organization within institutionalism
An organization is an entity made up of collective activities that together aim at attaining specified objectives by means of the corresponding mind-set and its instruments. Yet while defining the objective and the ways and means of attaining it by the totality of its specific organizational behaviour uses an approach and mind-set that are unique. However, this approach may be changed in order to meet its objective.
Herbert Simon and Oliver E. Williamson on the concept of organizational behavioural
Herbert Simon (1957, 1960) gave his theory of satisficing organizational behaviour. Oliver E. Williamson contributed his theory of the minimization of transaction cost in an organization within its institutional membership. The theory of satisficing organizational behaviour combined with that of transaction cost presents the nature of organizational behaviour.
While satisficing behaviour presents an evolutionary epistemology by inter-variable cause and effect, the objective of minimizing transaction cost is related to satisficing behaviour within a bounded set of costs. This kind of inclusion is made to attain a minimum transaction cost relationship between the satisficing variables. Thereby, organizational behaviour becomes contained in an optimized situation of bounded inter-variable learning relations. This results in a circularity of relations by cause and effect between the postulate of bounded rationality and the optimizing set of variables in cost-minimization. The consequence of the opposing forces of optimization and satisficing causes the organizational objective function to be treated as a maxim for organizational guidance. The replacement of optimization by simulation caused by bounded rationality causes perturbations or randomness in the selection of strategies and policies. Yet the bounded nature of economic rationality prevents sustained evolutionary learning from continuing.
Thus, in the optimal wellbeing function with the bounded rationality of inter-variable relations, innovation and learning end. Now, only by means of an external injection of technological change, a new state of innovation can be made to restart a new bounded rationality and cost-minimization experience. The life of the organization now becomes one of exogenous effects of a set of endogenously inter-causal relations between the variables. The space of interaction between satisficing behaviour and the minimal transaction cost condition is marked by the sporadic domains of bounded rationality and exogenous effects ad infinitum. 1
Two results arise from the Simon–Williamson methodical conflict. First, if the objective of the minimization of transaction costs prevails, then market failures are overcome and satisficing is not required at such a terminal point of cost-minimization. The whole learning process with the postulate of bounded rationality devolves into an optimum point of organizational utility function. Second, if satisficing behaviour prevails, no optimum can be reached. The objective of organizational utility becomes uncertain. Now the bounded rationality set is not characterized by any predictive organizational behaviour. Evolutionary dynamics exists. Yet no predictable objective can be established. Similar concerns were raised by Williamson (1987, pp. 592–3): “The two behavioural assumptions on which transaction cost economics relies are bounded rationality and opportunism – where bounded rationality has reference to behavior that is ‘intendedly rational, but only limited so’ (Simon, 1961), p. xxiv), and opportunism refers to self-interest seeking with guile.” Opportunism in our case of organizational behaviour belongs to market failure, a theme of transaction cost minimization. Bounded rationality belongs to satisficing the nature of human behaviour.
The resulting conflict between the above two results in perturbation spaces of decision-making implies the following result of organizational decision-making (Williamson, 1987, p. 592): “implausible behavioral assumptions are not a matter of indifference, much less a merit, if studying human nature as we know it is to be taken seriously”. This is also the nature of uncharted dialectical evolution. We will discuss this topic below.
Endogenous relations of all types, including those generated by technology, innovation, and policy between themselves and with other variables, denote learning dynamics. Exogenous relations affecting the variables are externally induced. Learning dynamics cease to exist in exogenous relations.
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